Affiliate marketing is one branch of the internet profit tree. It works when you generate targeted traffic to a particular website selling a product for which you get commission on each and every sale. You don’t own the product and your job is to come up with creative ways to connect a prospective customer to the product landing page.
Here’s an example of how affiliate marketing works:
An online entrepreneur decides to sell a popular “How Lose Weight After Pregnancy” information product. She goes onto the internet, and visits the ClickBank Marketplace and looks up the weight loss products. There, she is presented with a choice of maybe a dozen different products to sell and decides on one whose sales page and statistics prove it converts well.
She clicks “get hop link,” which incorporates her own unique ClickBank ID into the URL. She can then take the new URL and includes it somewhere in her sales funnel. When someone reads her sales material (an article, social media post, a pay per click ad, a YouTube video, etc, which pre-sells the product), and they click through to the sales page and buy it, she gets the affiliate commission – usually 50-80% of the price of the product.
Of course, she wasn’t limited to selling products from ClickBank. There are other top paying affiliate programs out there. Large websites like Amazon.com and Wal-Mart and others have affiliate programs, too.
Low Start Up Cost
If you want to start affiliate marketing you don’t have to spend loads of money to get started. The basics include a website domain, hosting, and some advertising (if you want to). But it’s not a necessity to get the ball rolling. The investment you’ll be making will be effort, not cash.
No Product Creation
When you start affiliate marketing, you don’t have to create any products. You’re the middleman. That means you go into a niche to bring together buyers and sellers. You’re the liaison between the two.
Become The Go-To Person
The key to becoming a successful affiliate is to build a list of email subscribers and become their go-to person whenever they need advice. Someone they can trust. Building a stronger rapport with your readers will increase conversions. If you take the time to review and maybe even put into practice some of the products and share your results, that will help you convert more sales.
Affiliate marketing is right for just about everybody. Even product creators adopt an affiliate strategy to complement the product development branch of their business. You don’t even need sales experience to become a great affiliate. Your job isn’t to sell the customer, but to connect them to the solution that they’re seeking.