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According to The World’s Glossary of Internet Terms, “Affiliate Marketing is defined as: “A business relationship with a merchant or other service provider who allows you to link to that business. When a visitor clicks on the link at your site and subsequently makes a purchase from the merchant, you receive a commission based on the amount of the sale, a referral fee or a pay-for-click fee.”
- This is a simple, straight-forward agreement between a merchant and an affiliate.
- Budding affiliate marketers run into a problem when they try to reverse the success process.
- Instead of starting at the beginning, they try to start at the end.
Making money is the end of the process.
The beginning of the process is education and there are several steps in between. Too many people, who are just getting started in affiliate marketing, fail to take the steps necessary to get to the end of the process and actually make money with affiliate marketing.
Step #1: Educate yourself
This is the key, opening the door of opportunity. It’s also the common thread connecting successful affiliate marketers. Education lays the foundation – the building blocks to success. Start by gathering the best information you can find about affiliate marketing and absorbing it.
Step #2: Turn that information into usable knowledge
Even the best information remains kind of worthless, however, until after you discover how to use it – how to make it serve your purpose.
Step #3: Apply the knowledge. Take action. Build your affiliate business
Will you make mistakes, even though you’ve invested all that time educating yourself? Yes, you most likely will make mistakes.
Step #4: Test and tweak, test and tweak
This one never ends. And it’s often the dividing line between succeeding and failing.
- Attention to small details often returns big rewards.
Following these steps will define you as a successful affiliate marketer.
Affiliate Marketing 101
Affiliate marketing programs are a great way to get income for your website, and a great introduction to e-commerce. The more people that drop by your website, the greater your chance will be at creating an excellent income.
Affiliate marketing programs are where a company offers to pay you a set amount for either a click through from your website, or a set amount for visitors signing up, or even a percentage of a purchase made by visitors as a result of being referred from your website.
- Even if visitors don’t make a purchase immediately, almost all programs offer cookie duration, normally consisting of 30 – 90 days.
- What this means, is that as long as the visitors have the cookie in their cache, you’ll still receive a profit from the sale.
The biggest amount of time in maintaining your site will be searching and implementing affiliations with various companies. Even though there’s a lot of money in affiliate marketing, you have to take the time to search for the best programs.
One thing that you may not be happy with, is the idea of other companies banners littering your website. If you use too many banners or links on any web page, it can confuse and help to irritate your visitors. More than one animated element on a web page can be very distracting as well.
Affiliate tracking can also be a problem
Once you have applied to become an affiliate for a company, they’ll usually supply you with a personalized link or code. It’s very important that you implement this code into your page correctly, or you may be sending visitors to the company without receiving any profit.
A majority of snippets in the code will contain a unique user ID, which the company uses to distinguish which site sent traffic.
3 Practical Tips for Affiliate Marketing Success
Affiliate marketing is a great way to enjoy an income stream. Done right, it can offer you a significant income supplement. Done wrong it can leave you wondering what happened. Let’s look at 3 practical tips for affiliate marketing success.
#1 Cloak Your Affiliate Links
You want to eliminate those long ugly affiliate links. You can do this with a link cloaker, which will create affiliate links that are short and more pleasant to look at. It will also increase your click through rate.
Let’s look at an example. Here’s an affiliate link for a shareasale.com affiliate program.
http://www.shareasale.com/t.cfm?A=223794&U=243855&M=17541&urllink= and samplelink.com/recommending/this-products/
With the use of a link cloaker it would look something like this:
- http://yourdomain.com/this-product or something similar.
#2 Write Numerous Reviews
Using written reviews is an excellent working strategy. It is one of the best tips floating around. With your review you will talk about the product on a page. One product to one page. You will tell the readers about the product you are reviewing both pros and cons to provide your readers with insight. You might also compare products.
You can get the most out of your reviews by creating a category strictly for reviews. Make sure it’s visible to your visitors. Use a rating plugin to rate the products you review. The starts indicate the quality of the product. The more visible your reviews the more likely your sales are to increase.
#3 Promote Only Products That Can Make You Money
There’s an endless array of products on the market that you could review, but stick to those that can actually make you a decent commission and forget those that don’t pay well. This doesn’t mean avoid low ticket items. A $10 item might have a 20% commission and a $100 item might have a 10% commission. It’s easier to sell cheap products. But what it does mean is you should avoid the $10 item that pays $1 commission or the $100 item that pays you a couple dollars.
Choose your affiliate products wisely.
- Your goal is to build a profitable income stream.
- Keep that in mind.
- You can also test products to see how well they do in the market place.
Sometimes those products you think will do well, don’t actually do well but you won’t know this unless you test. So test, test, test and test some more.
There you have it – 3 practical tips that can help you have a successful affiliate marketing program.