Affiliate Marketing

What is affiliate marketing?

To answer this question we need to understand first what is an affiliate? Affiliate is someone (could be anyone with a computer and internet access) that helps the product owner increase sales. For every sale that the affiliate made, he gets a commission! It is very similar to a salesman that works for a big company that gets commissions for his sales. So basically the affiliates model is not new, it exist in the business world for a long time.

How high is the commission?

Well it depends. Usually when the price of the product is higher than the commission is higher, but commission can be affected by the management expenses. If the costs are high, the commission will be low. That is why the commissions on electronic products like eBooks, soft wares and tutorials are higher. The flowing expenses on these kind of products are very low. The owner have to spend money on hosting them and that’s is. These kind of products can be downloaded from anywhere in the world. Commissions on electronic products can get as high as 75%. So if a software cots $100 , then you can make $75 for every sale that you make.

Sounds nice but how can I join to one of these affiliates programs?

Well you have a few options. First, if you have something that you know about or just prefer to sale, go to google and type ‘keyword’ affiliates programs in the search. (keyword = the product that you want to sale). If you have no idea where to start I recommend you start in 2 places number one is a website called clickbank.com. And the other is cj.com (AKA commission junction). The difference between the two is that clickbank.com sales electronic products (video tutorials, ebooks, softwares, etc.) while CJ sales real products (guitars, toys, shoes, etc.) and electronic products. But for electronic products it is recommended you go to clickbank.com.

So once you find something that you want to try to sale, you fill up a form, in clickbank.com and CJ.com you sing up to the website once, and you get your nickname and everything. You don’t need to supply any bank account details if you dint want to, billing address is enough. So after you joined to one of these websites and filled out a form with you name, last name , email address etc, and billing address you are ready to start. You can choose how you want to be paid, if by PayPal , sent checks once every 2 weeks or wire transfers. Location is not a problem, these sites works with people all around the world. So you can sit in Asia, and get commissions from products you sell to people in America by mailed checks.

How would the affiliate sites will know that the sales that im making are really mine or not someone else’s?

you see, these sites generate a unique code once you apply. This code is you individual code. Affiliate sites like clickbank.com attaché this code to a link that you get from them. This is your affiliate link. As an affiliate, you need to send people through your affiliate link if you want to get paid. So for example if a visitor comes to your website and read about the product that you are recommending, but when he wants to get to the products website and he types the address in his browser, for example, and not going through your link, you will not get paid!

You need to make sure that visitors click on your affiliate link , in order for you to get paid. Now watch this, your visitors do not have to know that the link that takes them to the product site, is your affiliate link. It is best if they do not know about it at all. Some people do not like the fact that someone is getting paid, just because he made them buy something.