What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a beautifully simple system whereby you are rewarded by companies to help them find and sell to new customers. Rewards are offered for a range of responses and can include commissions on product sales, payments for e-mail sign-ups, registering new members, or similar quantifiable activities: Basically, sending some form of qualified traffic to the company.

Payments for affiliates vary depending on what activity is being carried out and can range from a few pennies for relatively unqualified clicks to extraordinarily high commissions for selling high ticket items to customers that are hard to find.

Affiliation works so well as a business model because it allows content producers and trading companies to have a close partnership to their mutual benefit. It allows the trading company to only pay for results, limiting waste and thereby allowing them to better reward their converting affiliates.

Why Should I Consider Affiliate Marketing?

As opposed to more generalised advertising sales where you don’t usually have a direct relationship with the company, affiliate marketing allows you the flexibility to really target the products or services that are of interest to your visitors, increasing your ability to convert them into sales.

Unfortunately there’s work involved. If you’re used to putting up content and using AdSense as your sole income generator affiliate marketing could seem an onerous prospect. You have to find the right partner, find the right products, and implement specific code for the ad; all things that the AdSense program does for you. The difference is, in doing the work yourself, you get to choose what works best with your content, and if you choose wisely the rewards can be much greater.

To be a successful affiliate you’re going to have to dedicate some time to it so consider this carefully before you start. Many affiliates fail because they simply don’t take the time to get it right. On the positive side, you only need to get it right once to realise that the effort is well worth it.

What’s the Best Way to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing?

There are a number of things you can do to maximise your affiliate income. The first and one of the most important is to concentrate on subjects you know. The ideal content for a successful affiliate campaign is very specific, high quality content about a subject closely matched to the product you’re trying to sell.

You can approach it from another angle, selecting products that pay well and learning about them but if you choose to go this route remember, the more attractive the product is the more competition you’ll have and the harder it will be to stand out from the crowd.

If you already run a popular site about a subject dear to your heart you should try and find companies to affiliate with that your visitors would be interested in. For instance, if your site was all about cricket you’re naturally going to have a greater affinity with sporting goods shops. Writing more content about what makes the perfect cricket bat and where to buy one would work well because your visitors are already predisposed to have an interest in what you say.

How to Find Merchants I Can Affiliate With

There are two main ways to creating affiliate partnerships. One is to have a direct partnership agreement with the trading company; the other is to sign up to one or several of the affiliate marketing networks that exist.

While having a direct relationship with one targeted company can work very well for anyone started out in affiliate marketing I’d recommend choosing one of the popular affiliate networks. As an affiliate you sign up with a network and then have access to all the companies that use them to find new affiliates, usually individually requesting the companies you’d like to work with.

Working with a network gives you the opportunity to test different ideas and find out different implementation methods in a nice environment where you can consolidate payments and get good reporting statistics to help you as you learn.

Once you’re established as an affiliate you’ll most likely use a combination of networked and independent programs.

Who Are the Main Affiliate Networks?

There are lots of affiliate networks out there and you should do your homework to find out which one would be best for you to start with as they all have good and bad points. One major influencing factor could be the merchants they have (if there’s someone you really want to work with and they’re tied to that network). Other factors that could be important to you might be ease of use, or quality of reporting, reliability of payments, or even ad formats used.

A good place to start might be Commission Junction for no reason other than they’ve been around for a long time and they’re very large. Having had a look at them will give you a comparison point when looking at other networks that might prove useful.