Affiliate marketing is a system in which businesses or individuals are offered incentives in the way of commissions to promote another people’s products or services. Said like that it sounds quite simple and really, it is pretty simple.
In practice though there is a whole lot of stuff going on that the average web browsing individual just isn’t aware of when it comes to setting up and maintaining an affiliate business.
The whole thing is really quite interesting as it functions like a machine. There are different parts in play constantly and when each part does its job properly, affiliate marketing works incredibly well and the affiliate can make a lot of money.
In the end, everyone from the merchant to the affiliate to the consumer is able to benefit.
The merchant and affiliate get to make money and the consumer is able to learn about new products and find the one’s that they want and need.
Is Affiliate Marketing Only About The Money?
Of course, affiliate marketing all comes down to money. That’s what any business is all about, when you really think about it.
What happens with affiliate marketing is that one business will offer money usually being the percentage of the purchase price, typically called a commission, to another business or individual every time someone makes a purchase after finding the product through that affiliates site or in some cases email.
In that way it’s like having hundreds or thousands of commissioned salespeople scavenging for clients all over the internet.
Are Banner Ads Beneficial To Your Affiliate Marketing Efforts
Sometimes affiliate marketing is done exclusively through text ads or banner ads. This is a very simple and obvious way to promote a product or service where the ad will be placed on an affiliate marketers website, and visitors to that site may or may not click the text or banner ad and make a purchase. This is probably the most visible form of affiliate marketing there is, and consumers are completely aware of what’s going on.
Are Building Content Pages The Way To Go With Affiliate Marketing
Some affiliates create what are known as content pages. These pages are full of information relating to a given product or service. The articles are there by design and are able to accomplish quite a number of things. First they make it so search engines will be more likely to find the website to begin with.
Secondly, they are there so people will read them, learn something, and then be encouraged to follow the then provided link and by a product, you know like a review of a product or service. In Some cases even a personal story of how they purchased the product and how wonderful it was at solving their problem.
However for those looking at getting involved in affiliate marketing for the long-term it is much more advisable to build a site that actually has real content and can really help the visitor to solve a problem.
Yes you are still going to sell affiliate products but they will be well researched and with quality content to match the product so that you can also start to build yourself a mailing list and trust amongst your visitors for future products and services you could be offering.
Are Affiliate Sites The Sole Authority On A Product They Are Promoting
In what is perhaps its purest form, affiliate marketing works by attracting websites that already exist and who have a solid user base and are related to the product in question. In many cases these days, an affiliate website is actually one created solely to be an affiliate. The people behind these sites aren’t necessarily always authorities on the product or service they are promoting.
This is why firstly some website visitors will stay away from sites that look like affiliates as the content they provide can not always be the best researched or most relevant on the web.
How Are Affiliate Links Tracked
In order for websites to track where a visitor came from, a cookie is installed on their computer. This concept sounds scary to a lot of people, but it really does no harm. What happens is that it enables the merchant site to know whether or not they need to pay a commission to another site after a transaction has been made.
Sometimes these cookies are active for no more than one session, but sometimes a computer will be remembered for months to come.
This was certainly a helpful read. I just have one suggestion – next time, whenever you write something like this, please mark the important info in bullet points. Your readers would love you for that…
Good information, thanks for posting that. I have bookmarked your site and will come back to see what else you have to say. Affiliate marketing is so challenging for me that the more information I have the better: there are so many strategies to learn and so many different ideas; Looking forward to coming back and learning some more to help make some money.
Hi David, and I hear what you are saying…
What you need to do is pick one thing and stick to it, do not get to caught up in all the different strategies that are all over the internet right now you will only get more confused and have a lot more down time trying to read it all to stay up with all the latest trends.
Find a topic you like, set up a website with a suitable domain name add some quality content about 10 pages to start and then use article marketing to get it listed well so you can start seeing some traffic. Once you do that add more content to the site or even start a second site but make sure whatever you do is manageable and is not going to keep you in front of your computer for 16 hours a day seven days a week.
So I guess the big question is, how do you create an affiliate site that doesn’t LOOK like an affiliate site? I want to set one up so I can make a little bit of extra money on the side but obviously, people can tell when a site full of ads is all about the money and not necessarily about the reliability of the goods or the company selling them, so how do you do your affiliate marketing ‘on the low’?
Hi and welcome Linda
I think you are already on the right track, you don’t like sites that are littered with banners and adsense so what you need to realize is that neither do your site visitors. You need to add quality content to the site which in effect is going to help that person solve there problem you can then use text links to recommended products and even have a banner that is relevant to that content.
You just have to be careful not to over do it and make sure you are recommending products that really work so you end up with returning customers rather than angry ones.