Your Guide to Making Money With Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a term you will hear a lot when you start learning about marketing online. Most seasoned internet marketers and webmasters know how it works and how to be a successful affiliate. However as a new online marketer this term may be unfamiliar and as such you have little idea what they are talking about, let alone how to make money as an affiliate marketer.

What is affiliate marketing?

In a nutshell affiliate marketing is when you sell or get leads for another merchants product or service. When a merchant needs help to get sales he will find, especially for “hot” products, that he will have more than ample affiliates willing to help him sell it. All you have to do is sign up as an affiliate to be paid a commission or a flat rate rate per lead or sale. The rate of commission can vary greatly from a small percentage up to 100% of the selling price.

How to make money with affiliate marketing.

A decent income can be achieved in a number of ways. Some affiliates use a website, others a blog, newsletter, emails, ads etc. A lot of affiliates use a website or blog to promote products and/or services because they can easily collect email details for the further follow up of people interested in what they are promoting. It also allows them to add their personal unique content and to eventually become an expert in their chosen niche market. You will also notice that most successful affiliates use a domain name relevant to what they are selling.

After you have selected a suitable affiliate product to promote you will need to find some good keywords. Some merchants now provide lots of tools for their affiliates which include relevant keywords. So pick a relevant domain name based on one of those keywords and have it hosted by a good hosting company with minimal down time.

Next decide if you want a website or blog. A blog is easier to update and is more search engine friendly so my preference is to go for a blog. Some affiliates just use a simple squeeze page to collect email details on the way through to the merchants sales page. Add some content to your website or blog and embed your affiliate links in the text and pictures.

So now you have your blog all set up but very little will happen unless you promote it. You can get instant traffic using paid advertising such as PPC ( pay per click) or you can use the various free alternatives available. You can do some bum marketing or article writing, brag about your site on sites such as Twitter or Facebook or create other web 2.0 sites such as Squidoo, Blogger or HubPages to send traffic to your main site.

Optimising your site for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a great idea. Some blogs already have this built in to a certain extent. This is where your keywords come in handy because if you can optimize your site for some good keywords it will help get you to the top of the search engines ranking a lot faster. You can either learn how to do this yourself or hire an SEO expert.

As mentioned previously writing unique articles about the market you are promoting and submitting them to high ranking article directories will bring some targeted traffic to your website from the link you place in the resource box of your articles. They will also add back links to your site which will also help you rank higher in the search engine results for your targeted keywords.