Don’t be intimidated by the term “affiliate marketing“.
The fact is, if you’ve ever recommended a movie to a friend, invited a co-worker to a great restaurant, or convinced a skeptical relative to buy a CD, you’ve got the basic skills needed to be an affiliate marketer.
The terms are interchangeable: referer, affiliate, associate. The end result is exactly the same – you find people online who are searching for a product or service and point them to your affiliate link. Once they have purchased through that affiliate link you receive a commission in the form of a percentage of the purchase price.
It doesn’t require a lot of upfront money or time (especially relative to other lines of work), and you don’t even need a website to get started!
So how does it work?
How Links Get Tracked With Cookies
Affiliates refer visitors to the website using a unique URL provided by the partner. When the visitor moves from your website to the partners website, a cookie is placed on the computer and you get credit when they make a purchase. For physical products, your commission can be as low as 4%, but for digital products (which have more competition and usually require you to introduce visitors to the product) the commissions can be as high as 100%.
That’s because the creator of the product hopes to sell other products to the customer down the line, this is called an up-sell you will also hear the term down-sell as well. And the customers that you send have a lot more value than customers that come from, let’s say, a general advertisement because those customers are already proven buyers and have a relationship with the vendor.
Plus, they recognize that they wouldn’t have gotten this customer at all if not for your hard work.
Becoming An Affiliate Is Not Difficult
There are three ways to sign up as an affiliate.
First, you can search for the products you wish to promote then enroll in that websites affiliate program, so of these will redirect you to an approved affiliate network where others will have their own affiliate platform. You then need to provide your information to the Vendor, and become an approved affiliate to promote their range of products or services.
Major websites like Amazon use this method. You can also find more exclusive affiliate programs where you are required to buy the product or service first before you can promote as an affiliate (this offers can be very profitable) or have an invitation from the product owner in order to promote, this is usually presented in the way of a Joint Venture offer from the product creator.
The Top Three Affiliate Networks We Suggest
- ClickBank
- JVZoo Affiliate Network
- ShareaSale (requires vendor approval, you will need to have a related website)
All the above affiliate networks are easy to join and you can be up and running in minutes.
Finally, many digital products only require an e-mail address and your name in order to get started. This is the fastest way to get started, especially if you don’t already own a website that has content publicly posted.
The skills you will learn here at Affiliate X Files will give you a big head start as an affiliate marketer, skills like promotion, copy writing, and money management, are the same skills million dollar a year business people on and offline use to promote and sell products online.
Once you’ve mastered these skills with affiliate marketing and put them into action, constant stress over money becomes a thing of the past.
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