Making money with affiliate marketing is one of the oldest and most popular home-based businesses. What makes affiliate marketing so attractive, and widely used, is the fact that you can make money online promoting and selling all kinds of products, in a very short amount of time, without having to spend time and effort on researching and developing a product of your own.
How Affiliate Marketing Works?
This is how affiliate marketing works; Someone develops a product or a services, and in order to sell more of his or her product, the product owner offers a commission to anyone who can sell the product. It is as simple as that!
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It works for both side; the developer gets to make more money selling more products, and the affiliate marketers gets to make money selling products, without having to create one. Basically, affiliate marketing allow you to make money selling other people’s products or services.
So, How Do You Promote Affiliate Products?
Thankfully, there are many ways to promote products online. You can use your own website or blog, emails, forums, as well as paid advertising methods such as PPC. The only thing you have to do to get paid is to drive the potential buyer to the merchant’s website. The merchants take care of everything after that. So, you don’t have to deal with processing, payments, shipping the merchandise, or any returns or complaints. You just get paid to send buyers to product’s sale page.
Let’s say you have a website about electronics. You go out, and find a few merchants who sell electronics, and place their links on your site. Every time a visitor of yours clicks on any of these links, he or she is redirected to the merchant’s site. Once there, if they buy something, you will earn yourself a nice commission.
Affiliate Marketing Programs
Affiliate marketing has grown so much in the last few years that almost all online and even offline businesses have some kind of affiliate program where they pay people to promote their stuff.
You can find an affiliate program that suits your need, by doing a search for the product you want to promote. Then, simply look for “affiliate program” or “partners” at the bottom or top menu of the sites selling that product, and apply to become their affiliate.
Now, going through one company at a time may become very time consuming, especially if you are planning to promote lots of different kinds of products. For that, you can go through what are known as “Affiliate Networks“. Affiliate networks are basically a marketplace where vendors and affiliates can find each other.
Two of the most well-known affiliate programs where you can find just about any product or service to promote are ClickBank and Commission Junction.
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Most websites and online businesses today have an affiliate program in one way or another. It’s in their best interest to do so. It gives them hundreds of extra websites that promote their products and services, bringing them thousands of potential costumers.
Affiliate marketing is also a great way for you, as a website or blog owner to take advantage of the space you have online, and the traffic that comes through, to make money. Although, you dont necessarily need a website to make money affiliate marketing.