What is Affiliate Marketing?

• You recommend a product or service to people (via product promotion/recommendation).

• Some of those people purchase the product or service based on your recommendation.

• You get paid a commission for those purchases.
   

That’s simple, right?

​

Another way to state it:  A marketing arrangement by which an online retailer (the seller) pays a commission to an external website/blog (the affiliate) for traffic or sales generated from the affiliate referrals.

​

How does affiliate marketing work?

• You have a blog, website, email list or some other online presence where people visit and read your content.

• You sign as an affiliate/associate with the company that sells a product or service you’d like to recommend.

• You promote the company's products or services to your followers by writing a blog post about it (review), inserting an advertising banner on your website/blog, promoting it in your email newsletter or to your email list, or promote it on social media.  In your promotions, you include your affiliate link (which contains your unique affiliate ID) to the product or services you are promoting.

• When someone uses your affiliate link to check out the product or service and decide to purchase, you earn a commission.

• When your affiliate earnings reach the threshold set up by the seller of product or service, you receive a payout of your affiliate earnings.

​

How do you become an affiliate marketer?

• Choose a Niche. Before you even begin building your first site, you'll need to decide which niche you're going to target as an affiliate marketer.

• Research Affiliate Programs and decide which one (or more) you want to work with.

• Build a Site with a theme for the Niche and Products you have chosen.

• Produce Excellent Content related to the products or services you plan to promote.  Product Reviews tend to make good content.

• Build an Audience - In marketing and advertising, a target audience is a particular group of consumers within the predetermined target market, identified as the targets or recipients for a particular advertisement or message.  Learn what motivates your target audience and once you know what motivates them, it's time to formulate ways to help them achieve their goals, thus helping you to achieve your own goals. Having content that solves problems for your audience is the key to affiliate marketing.  You can do this on your own, but another way to find opportunities is to go to your target audience and have a conversation with them.

​

Advertisement

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Promote Affiliate Offers 

There are a number of ways to promote a product and we have shown some of them below:
 

• Social Media campaign (i.e.,  Advertising on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat).  Paid advertising.

• Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Optimize your website for Free Search Engine traffic related to your website keywords.

• Blogging - In the blogging market, search engine traffic is dominant. It dwarfs all the other traffic sources.  Create great content and get Free search engine traffic.

• Email Advertising - Weekly or monthly emails or newsletters.  Essentially Free advertising.

• Create helpful videos  (i.e., Product Review videos are very successful).  Essentially Free advertising.

• Ezine Advertising with Solo Ads - Ezines are electronic magazines that are about a specific topic like fishing, golfing, making cakes, making money online or advertising.  Place ezine advertising ads with Ezines that match your website niche.  Paid advertising category.

• Pay-per-click Advertising (i.e., Google Adwords) - you pay a few cents for each click on your affiliate link.  You want to make sure your site converts (makes sales) before spending your hard-earned money. How can you do that? You can run other forms of advertising before using Pay-per-click advertising.  Paid advertising category.

• Banner Advertising - They’re inexpensive, easy to use and run without much maintenance or monitoring.. You can place banners anywhere within a webpage or blog.  You can use banners for building a list of potential customers by linking the banner to your List-Building squeeze page to collect their name and address before sending them on to the product sales page.  Essentially Free advertising, but paid advertising may get you more sales.

​

How to Become an Amazon Associate

If you have a website or blog and want to monetize it, the Amazon Associates program is a good way to add affiliate money making opportunities. With this program, you can add links to any item on Amazon's site to your website and get commission when someone clicks the link or makes a purchase. While Amazon's commission structure is relatively low, the program offers many advantages and is very easy to use.

 

You can create an aStore, which is an individual site showing the Amazon products that you choose to sell.  I personally don't recommend an Amazon aStore as all indications are that Google does not give much credit in ranking an aStore website, therefore, you will get less free traffic.

 

You can let Amazon suggest products, based on your site content, through a link on your website/blog. You can also add individual products to your site for a customized look. While earning substantial income will take time, work and patience, it's worth checking out the program and learning how to become an Amazon Associate.

​

• Join - It's easy and free to join

• Advertise - Choose from over a million products to advertise to your customers

• Earn - Get up to 10% in advertising fees.

​

             Learn More about becoming an Amazon Affiliate/Associate.

​

​

​