Starting Your Internet Affiliate Marketing Career
Precisely what Is affiliate marketing and Recommendations on how Do I Start?
Affiliate marketing is when a person or company’s products usually are sold by affiliates, who then receive commissions. It’s somewhat similar to door to door selling, except the customers come to you!
An affiliate sells a person else’s product (or, sometimes, captures lead for someone else) and receives a commission. Usually, the affiliate has a web site or blog, but sometimes could have an individual page about that affiliate network program.
Affiliate marketing follows a number of different models. Some affiliate marketers use advertising to drive people to their sites. Usually this is pay per click, or PPC advertising. (Next time you use Google’s search engine, look on the right of the results page. Those ads are pay per click ads. The advertisers do not pay for them to be shown; they pay a fee whenever the links are clicked, however).
But affiliate marketers also advertise in ezines, on websites, as well as local newspapers and other print publications, contingent upon what the product is (and what the neighborhood is like).
Some affiliate marketing experts advertise very little, or else not at all! This is whats called the “Bum” method. These marketers do their utmost to optimize their sites for search engines, so that they naturally get good rankings. But they use other methods too. Primarily, they write article and publish them to article directory sites. Right at the end of each and every article is usually a bio box, with a link returning to the affiliate site.
Articles are the main “advertising” approach to bum marketing, but it’s not the only method to get traffic. Bum marketers also benefit from forums, blogs (their own, in addition to commenting on other blogs to get attention, traffic, and occasionally search-optimizing backlinks), Squidoo pages, Hub pages, and many other methods to get free traffic. Your content is at the center of this model, but there are very few bum marketers who use articles and articles alone to drive traffic to their sites.
What do you have to do to sign up to be an affiliate? That will depend on who you’re signing up with. Usually you will want a website, or perhaps at least a single page. Based on what you’re selling, and who you’re selling for, your site or page might need to be dedicated to the niche that your affiliate product is in. (It won’t necessarily need to, but honestly it’s best for your own sales, if it does).
Now you know all you need to sign up as a marketer online. In my next article, I’ll tell you some things you need to know once you’re there.
Learn More about this topic and many others. Join Anthony’s free news letter and get your Free Report “Recession Survival Guide”.