Affiliate Marketing Basics

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing also known as associate marketing is an offline as well as an online way of marketing that has been a way of selling for years before the internet was here.

A salesperson in a store may be viewed as an affiliate or associate employee. Some companies even call their employees sales associates. This is different from a true affiliate internet marketer.

Basically an affiliate marketer or salesperson is a free lance operator. You work indirectly for a company not as a regular employee. You don't get a paycheck every week. You only get paid(commission) when you make a sale or whatever the company goal is.

You may wonder why would working on the internet would be different than selling in a store. The answer is millions of customers not just people wandering into a store. Also they probably found you by typing in a keyword search for something you have to sell. They are ready to buy if your product or service is what they are looking for. They come to your store in the sky.

Affiliate verses Regular Marketing

The difference between affiliate marketing and regular marketing is that you are selling someone else's product or service, much the same way a supermarket sells varieties of food products.

A company selling only it's product(s) would be a marketer or a wholesaler. Wholesaler's normally sell to retailers. In other words they are a business to business company. They do not sell to the general public.

Companies Need Affiliates

Every product or service needs someone to sell their goods. This is where affiliate marketing comes in. There are countless numbers of products that need sales people(affiliates)

You can get started in this business with very little money. There is however a good amount of learning which can be done along the way. Experience is still the best teacher except for maybe handling explosives

Affiliate Marketing Online

This is probably why you are here, to learn about making money on the internet. Do not fall for the rich overnight schemes, they are just as fake as offline schemes. If you had a money tree would you tell everybody where is was?

Why become an Affiliate Marketer

Affiliate Marketer Advantages

Affiliate Marketer Disadvantages

learning Affiliate marketing may seem confusing until you look at it like a regular brick and mortar store.

On the internet your store can be a web site, newsletter, e-mail or any other means to sell your product(s).

You also have access of millions of customers world wide, especially if you sell digital products( products that can be downloaded). There is no stock or delivery charges and you get paid almost immediately.

You can also sell physical products without the burden of keeping stock or having a store. You see examples of this on television. Your product comes from the warehouse.

Just about every aspect of online sales can be related to offline sales. One major difference in online marketing is the low cost of advertising and the enormous number of people you reach.

Affiliate Marketing Methods

The Ways to Market a Product or Service

Some You may be Familiar With

Main Internet Marketing Strategies

The main or most popular in my opinion is search engine marketing. This can be done with Pay per click(another form of an online marketing strategy) or with natural search traffic. They both bring people to a web page or an ad page.

In Pay per click it costs you every time someone clicks on your ad, you have seen these on the right side and on top of your browser page when you search for something on the Internet.

These ad's come up according to the keyword or keywords that you put into your browser search box, the more accurate your keywords are the more accurate the results will be

Another way to get paid is by someone clicking on an ad that Google places on your web site. This is called Adsense and you have to sign up with Google for this as with a their pay per click which is called Adwords.

Internet Marketing Strategies - Direct Marketing

Direct marketing has several meanings depending on what area of marketing you're into. It can mean this week's supermarket specials in your mailbox or an e-mail on your computer but what I am going to talk about is a Pay per click ad that takes a customer to the vendors web site and not yours first.

E-mail Marketing

E-mail marketing has gotten a bad name because of spam.

Marketers were buying lists from people who got them from who knows where.
It certainly wasn't from these people signing up with them.

The right way is to have people sign-up for your newsletter or E-mail from your website or other legitimate means

As you develop your business you will need a way to communicate with your customers and a newsletter about your site is the best way to get quality customers on your list.

You know these people are interested in what your site has to offer or they would not have signed up for your newsletter.

You must however continue to keep their interest or they will opt out of your e-mail list.

Keep your e-mails friendly and informative but not hard sales letters.

People don't really like sales pitches and delete them right away without reading them.

We do it all the time, the same thing with regular mail. Trash.