How Does Affiliate Marketing Work
The other day I had some family over and I was talking with them and someone brought up the question how does affiliate marketing work? You know, how does this whole internet marketing thing play out? What is involved with it? The answer is somewhat twofold. There is a lot of work on my end but it also depends upon the work of others as well.
The reason for this is simple. Being an affiliate is simply that. An affiliate is someone that sells the products of another person or another company and they end up making a commission on any sales that are tracked through their account. You can think of affiliate marketing almost as digital real estate. A real estate agent earns a commission when they sell a house. They earn maybe 5-10% percent. With affiliate marketing you typically see commission rates anywhere between 30-75%.
I have even heard of products that pay back a 200% commission rate. That is crazy stuff folks. That means if the product itself costs $100 – you are getting $200 per sale. The company or person doing this can only afford to do so because they must be making a lot of money on the back-end of their product with other promotions and offers but that is besides the point.
So in a nutshell, affiliate marketing works like this. You have a website and on that website you have a whole ton of useful articles and visitors come to your website by simply searching on the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. When they come to your website they read your articles and may end up buying a product.
Let’s say that someone was searching for ways to tune their guitar. Well if your website was all about guitar and you had an article that taught them how to tune that guitar; then at the end of that article, you have a link that goes off to another website. Well, that other website has a product that teaches people how to play the guitar, tune their instrument, play songs, and so on.
If that person ended up buying, you would get a commission because they went through your own personalized affiliate link. You get the credit for the sale and you would earn “$xx.xx” amount. So essentially, affiliate marketing is a groundwork for traffic brokering. You are driving traffic as a middle man through to a parent company or website and you earn money on all sales made through you.
Now affiliate marketing has a good deal of substance to it. It actually has a lot of substance to it. There are different ways to go about promoting products. You can have a blog, you can have your own website, you can go through pay per click marketing, you can do search engine optimization, you can advertise on other sites in your particular niche or industry and ask to advertise on their sites. More often than not, many website owners would be happy to receive a payment to place an ad for relevant material on their site if it is useful to their visitors.
You could grow a member base by using subscription software and get yourself a large list of subscribers which with whom you can communicate to and promote to them down the line. You could ask family and friends if they would be interested in one of the products you have to offer and simply let them know you get the commission. It could be a way to get you started and earn some pocket change too. There definately isn’t a shrotage of markets to promote too. You are only limited by the amount of time you have and the amount of work you put into your own business.
