Thousands,
if not millions, of online webmasters and marketers are turning to affiliate marketing to earn extra money from the web. Affiliate marketing offers the perfect way for the ordinary person to cash in on the billions of sales made online each year.
But is Affiliate Marketing right for you?
Is it something that you should investigate and pursue further if you truly want to monetize your site or content? As a way of an answer and to get you thinking about affiliate marketing; I would like to offer some of my own experiences as a full-time online affiliate marketer. I would also like to give you some marketing tips and a few pit-falls you should try to avoid.
Truth be told, I didn’t plan to become an affiliate marketer. It just happened, mostly by accident, as I was struggling to promote my first site on Internet marketing some 10 years ago now. My original plan was to re-sell some software products with hopes of making my fortune on this new thing called the Internet.
Well, to make a long story short, most things don’t quite turn out as we originally plan. Instead of selling my own products, I became much more interested in studying “how to market online” and examining “how marketing systems worked” than actually selling my own stuff. I was much more fascinated in the “nuts & bolts” or “marketing tools” behind these online marketing systems than earning a few pennies.
I was particularly captivated by a new search engine called Google. Yes, there are many marketers around who have been studying Google since it first started. And I believe it was Google and its Adsense Program in particular that sort of legitimized the “whole idea of making money online” for me. I turned my attention to other ways of monetizing my sites, especially with affiliate programs. And the rest as they say is history…
But enough about me, what about you?
Do you have a website? Are you interested in earning extra revenue from your site? Are you trying to earn a full-time income online? More importantly:
Is Affiliate Marketing Right for you?
First, you have to realize Affiliate Marketing is when you promote and sell affiliate products from your site or sites. Actually, selling is not quite the right word because you DON’T actually sell anything from your site. You merely refer or send customers/interested buyers to the affiliate sites you’re promoting via your affiliate links.
Believe me, sometimes this concept is very hard to explain to close family and friends. You don’t have anything to sell? How can you make money?
To repeat, with affiliate marketing you don’t sell anything directly online… you send clients and customers to online companies or merchants where they buy stuff and since they’re coming from your site’s affiliate links you get credit for the sale.
I don’t directly sell Dell Computers on my sites, I merely send prospective customers to Dell where they can buy Dell products and since they came from my affiliate links I get credit, plus a small commission in return if they buy something. Same goes for Amazon or hundreds of the other companies and products I promote with my sites.
