Affiliate Marketing – An Ideal Online Venture for Internet Newbies
Affiliate Marketing – an ideal online venture for internet newbies
Affiliate marketing is a popular way of making money on the internet especially if you’re a newcomer to internet marketing. It’s basically a case of marketing (and hopefully making sales) on behalf of a third party vendor and being rewarded with a commission for doing so. This method of earning income online is so popular because it’s so easy to get started. Doing this at the most basic level, we don’t even need our own website but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to operate successfully with direct affiliate links to the vendor’s sales page.
Anyway, first off, let’s take a look at the plus points of becoming an affiliate marketer.
- we don’t need to come up with the idea for a product
- we don’t need to create or develop a product
- we don’t need to put together an effective sales page to market the product
- we don’t have to provide any customer support
- no major upfront outgoings or expenses
- we can market products from any interest area or areas of our choice
- we can quickly drop a product if it’s not successful and move onto something else.
It’s true, there’s serious money to be made for entrepreneurs who are able to both create and market their own products (and possibly also recruit their own affiliates) but as you can imagine, there’s a lot more investment required and a lot more at stake. Marketing and selling an affiliate product also gives us an opportunity to test the water so to speak. If we’re seriously considering developing a new product, we can choose to be an affiliate for a product in the same niche and see how it fares. If we have little success with an affiliate product it may be an indication that we shouldn’t spend too much time and effort developing a product in this market after all! Research and testing always pays dividends.
We’ve all come across the super affiliate marketers who make millions every year without ever marketing a product of their own. There’s no doubt it’s a lucrative form of marketing and most top internet marketers will have a finger in the affiliate marketing pie even if it isn’t their main source of income. The leading internet marketers who have large active subscriber lists can make hundreds of thousands of dollars by emailing out to their lists on the launch of the next great indispensable training course or piece of software. But there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have a bite of this pie.
Initially at least, we should stick with reputable affiliate programs where we know our sales will get tracked and our commissions get paid, such as clickbank and amazon. Clickbank only deal with digital products and this means that the vendors are able to offer far higher commissions than you would earn promoting physical products such as with Amazon. It’s not unusual for clickbank vendors to offer commissions of between 50 & 70% of the sale price whereas on amazon you may only attract about 5% commission
I’ll be looking at various aspects of affiliate marketing in future posts.
Until then.
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