How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

How to make money with affiliate marketing is a simple process of promoting a product or service for commission. Affiliate marketing is one of the most successful and powerful business models ever created. However, affiliate marketing is not new. The concept has been around for a long time under different names. The internet is the ideal platform for starting your online affiliate marketing business. You can literally market any product or service to anyone in the world.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the most successful business model in the world today.

Quite simply, affiliate marketing is defined as promoting a product or service that results in the vendor (the product owner) generating a sale or revenue. The vendor provides a commission to the affiliate when the vendor sells the product or service.

Commissions can be based on:

• Sale amount
• Number of visits or clicks
• Number of sign-up registrations
• Number of downloads

The most common type of affiliate program is when the affiliate sends sales leads to the vendor’s website that result in a sale. The vendor pays a commission to the affiliate based on a percentage of the sale amount.

The actual mechanics of the process are handled by affiliate networks, such as ClickBank or Commission Junction, who track the sales leads from the affiliate.

The affiliate network is the third party that provides the sales order processing system to record the sale, collect the money, pay the vendor and pay the affiliate commission. The affiliate never has to worry about being paid commissions as it is handled by an independent third party – the affiliate network.

When you think about it, most businesses simply sell products or services created by other businesses. In fact, some of the most successful businesses sell someone else’s product. And even businesses that manufacture products use component parts from other businesses (think about computer and automotive manufacturing).

Examples of Affiliated Businesses

1. Travel agents don’t own aircraft, cruise ships or hotels. They make reservations for airlines, hotels and travel companies to earn affiliate commissions.
2. Mobile phone stores sell you a phone (purchased from a manufacturer) connected to a network (not their own). They earn a margin on the sale and recurring revenue on the network income.
3. Department stores buy products and resell to customers, they don’t manufacture anything. Usually they have arrangements with manufacturers to only pay when the product is sold or have the ability to return products that do not sell.
4. New car dealers sell cars on behalf of the manufacturer. The manufacturer usually provides low-cost finance, advertising subsidies and demonstration vehicles. The car dealer is simply an “order taker” for the manufacturer and earns a commission for each sale.
5. A real estate agent sells other people’s houses for commission.

It’s a matter of finding good products or services and marketing them to the right audience. Affiliate marketers simply find sales leads for a product or service and refer that lead to the vendor who makes the sale and pays a commission.

This business model is easy with the internet.

The affiliate does not have to buy inventory, store inventory, ship goods, invoice the customer, process payment, handle returns, process refunds, deal with customer complaints, or anything.

Affiliate marketing is a very simple, but powerful business model.

Benefits to the Affiliate

• Very low business start-up costs.
• Huge Range of Products & Services to Sell. You don’t need to create a product or service. There are already thousands of good products and services in existence to sell.
• No Licenses Fees. Affiliate programs are free to join.
• The affiliate can market the product worldwide on the internet.
• No Sales Experience required.
• No Employees. You can outsource many tasks, if required.
• No merchant account. The affiliate networks handle the sales processing and all the complexity and costs associated with the payment processing.
• No Inventory
• No Shipping
• No Order Processing
• No Customer Service. That’s the vendor’s job.
• 24 hour, 7 days a week business. Your online businesses are accessible by everyone in the world and you will make money while you sleep.
• Work from Home.
• Work from anywhere in the world. All you need is a notebook computer and an internet connection. Ever dreamed of living in the country or on an island – now you can.
• High Income Potential. With a job your salary or wage is fixed. It doesn’t matter if you try harder as your income will not change. With your own business the earning potential is unlimited.
• Low Risk. You don’t need to invest much money to start your business. Webhosting and domains are cheap. If your website fails to make any money, don’t renew the domain. If a product doesn’t sell, simply move onto the next product or service.
• Huge Growth Business. The internet is growing at a rapid pace. Every year more people are buying from the internet and now people in second world countries are coming online too.

How to Value a Small Business

Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

How much money can you make with affiliate marketing?

This is a question without an answer as it depends on you.

Individual results will vary greatly and in accordance to your input, determination, hard work and ability to follow directions. As your income is derived from your personal efforts no person or company can guarantee you will make money or be free from loss.

However, this system gives you the opportunity to make more money than you can from a fixed wage or salary job. There really is no limit.

Realistically, most people don’t make thousands of dollars in the first few years as is claimed in the marketing hype I constantly see all over the internet. It takes time to build up your business and drive traffic to your sites.

Most people have busy lives going to work and looking after their family. Many people complain that they simply don’t have time to fit in anything else. However, if you want to better yourself you must try. My advice is to take it slowly and take the time to learn more about affiliate marketing first.

What you need to do is build your first website to gain the experience. Once you are familiar with the basic mechanics of buying a domain, operating a hosting account, creating a website and configuring its parameters, you are well on your way to making some money online. After adding the first few posts it gets easy and you will build a better quality website. Don’t give up early but keep trying.

When you get your first sale you will be hooked. The first sale is a great motivator to make you work harder and begin building your business.

Affiliate Business Example

Let’s say you build an authority site on a niche topic and you add four new posts every week. After six months you may have 100 posts in your site. Let’s say that each post is based around a buying keyword that gets 100 visitors per month.

So each post generates 1 sale per month.

Your 100 posts will be generating 100 sales per month.

Let’s assume your average affiliate sales commission is $20.

That’s $2,000 per month.

If you want to make more money… simply build a larger site with more content or more sites!

The Best Affiliate Programs

There are many affiliate programs available to choose from on the internet. But to save you time and confusion I have listed the most popular and easiest programs. I would recommend you check out these affiliate programs first before looking at others, unless you already have some good products or services in mind that you want to promote.

ClickBank (clickbank.com)

ClickBank is one of the top affiliate networks for information based (digital) products. These products are easy to promote and the product is a download so the customer receives the product immediately. Many digital products pay a very high commission rate eg. 50% to 75% is common. Most products tend to be priced around $30 to $90 giving an affiliate commission of $15 to $60. This is one of the easiest sites to make money with affiliate marketing.

ClickBank is free to join and you don’t need a website or product. Once you set up an account you can browse the marketplace and select products that you want to sell.

ClickBank make commission payments every fortnight so you never have to wait long to be paid. They retain 10% of your sales for a 60-day period as a refunds provision. After 60 days they credit your account with the amount retained. The reason for this is Clickbank give all products a 60 day guarantee whereby the customer can ask for a refund if they are not happy with the product.

ClickBank assign “gravity” to each product which is calculated based on the number of affiliates who have sold the product in the last 8 weeks. The gravity is very useful to affiliate marketers because it is a good indicator as to whether a product is easy to sell and how many other affiliates are selling the product.

Amazon (amazon.com)

Amazon is one of the most respected shopping sites on the internet and has their own affiliate program. They specialize in physical products particularly household consumer goods. This is one of the easiest sites to make money with affiliate marketing.

Physical products have a lower commission rate than digital products. The typical commission rate for a physical product is around 3-6%. So you will need to make more sales or sell higher priced items than with digital products. However, most marketers find physical products are easier to sell.

Once you set up an account just browse the marketplace and select products that you want to sell.

Commission Junction (CJ.com)

CJ require you to already have a website in operation that is themed towards the product or service you want to sell. Once you have selected a vendor and product you wish to promote you will need to make an application to the vendor to join their affiliate program. Once your application is approved you will be given your affiliate link code and access to banners so you can advertise the product or service.

Share A Sale (shareasale.com)

Similar to CJ.com.

Finding Affiliate Programs

Offervault.com

The best way to find affiliate offers is to use offervault.com which is a free service that lists all affiliate offers on the internet. Just go to offervault.com and search for your niche.

Google Search

In Google, type:

The name of a niche or product and “affiliate” or “affiliate program”.

Eg. acne affiliate program

This will bring up all the available affiliate programs for that product or niche.

Independent Affiliate Programs

Most vendors use an affiliate network to run their affiliate program. This is the easiest and most convenient option for vendors. The affiliate network charges the vendor a joining fee and takes a small percentage fee (eg 2%) on every sale.

Large vendor businesses will develop their own affiliate program (eg Amazon) and avoid the costs of the affiliate networks. The best way to find these affiliate programs is to conduct a Google search.

Some affiliate marketers believe the independent affiliate programs are the best as there is less competition.

Conclusion

Make money with affiliate marketing products and services online may not appeal to you especially if you do not have a sales or marketing background. However, if you want to investigate starting an online business you should check out affiliate marketing.

Maybe you already have a website that generates traffic and you want to monetize the site. Checkout the huge range of products and services paying commissions to make money with affiliate marketing. This is the easiest way to earn extra dollars from your site.