Affiliate Marketing Explained

Affiliate Marketing Explained

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online. Weather you have your own product or not.

In basic terms affiliate marketing is becoming affiliated with another person or company and selling their product for them. After you have completed a sale for them your affiliate merchant (the company with the product) will pay you (the affiliate) a commission on each individual sale you make.

In order to explain affiliate marketing best, refer to the diagram below.

Affilliate Marketing Explained

Affiliate Marketing Explained

The merchant is the one with the product. The merchant can sell their product directly to the public and receive 100% of the profits. The merchant can also enlist the help of an affiliate and get them to market the product on their behalf.

You might ask why the merchant would want to do this and be cut out of so much of the profit. Well what if the merchant was to get 50 Affiliates to market their product for them. Their sales would be much higher right, and the Affiliates would be getting just reward for their efforts too. So it’s a win, win situation really.

And for internet beginners, affiliate marketing is the quickest and easiest method to start making money online.

Affiliates make money basically through commission on every sale they make, up to 75%.

There are several ways to go about promoting your affiliate efforts and I will spell them out on this blog over the coming weeks.

Advantages of Affiliate Marketing Explained

Zero Start-up Costs

A lot of people wonder how much money it takes to get started affiliate marketing. And the answer is zero. If you have a computer and access to the internet (if you’re reading this I assume you do) you are already set up and ready to go.

No Product, No Worries

You don’t need a product of your own to sell. This is definition of Affiliate marketing. You take someone’s already selling product and tell people about it. It’s that easy.

Further down the track when you are comfortable with marketing other peoples affiliate products you can develop your own product and get affiliates to market it for you.

No Website, No Worries

Now you might be thinking “I don’t know anything about building a website.” This is one of the things I love about affiliate marketing explained. You don’t even need a website. There are many free services that will get you on your way.

It is best to start with these and build your way up. As you go you will gain knowledge experience and then you can add the next method to your campaign. I will spell all of these methods out over the next few weeks in future posts. So don’t forget to subscribe to this blog through Google reader or via email and I will be spilling the beans regularly.

Some of the topics that I will be covering in the Affiliate marketing explained series include:

Finding Affiliate products to promote

• How to get paid
• Choosing the right affiliate product to market

Why you don’t need a website

What you can do with a website

• How to set up your first website

Free traffic sources including:

Article marketing.

Free Classified Sites

Squidoo

Social Networking Sites:

• Facebook
• Youtube
• Myspace
• Blog Catalog
• Digg
• StumbleUpon
• Twitter

Plus More

All of these methods are free and can be leveraged in one way or another to make money as an affiliate marketer. I will show you how.

Each blog post will concentrate on one method and build on from the last one.

So don’t forget to subscribe and keep informed.

Until next time..

To your success

Nicholas Quinlan