Anybody interested in making a profit online from home should learn affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online and profit online from home. Affiliate marketing involves finding products, advertising them in any way you want to, and when somebody clicks on your advert and purchases the product, you get paid commission. This is far easier than the old fashioned method of door to door selling, or even telesales.
How To Learn Affiliate Marketing
One of the best ways to go about doing affiliate marketing is to build yourself a website around a particular theme. Then populate your site with good links to relevant high quality affiliate products.
To get started with affiliate marketing, you could also choose products and advertise them through pay per click or other advertising methods, and in this way you save yourself the trouble of building and hosting a website. If you choose this method, make sure that you check on the popularity and gravity of the products in question before you invest money trying to sell them.
If you are using Clickbank, you can visit CBtrends.com to view the stats on a particular product. The popularity graph should show a downward trend, and the gravity graph should show an upward trend for a product to deem itself worthwhile to sell. You can also check out the website in question on Alexa.com to see how long they have been around.
You can profit online from home by promoting tangible or electronic affiliate products. Tangible products are products which require shipping from a warehouse of some sort, and electronic products are either ebooks, or software which the customer can download onto his computer.
Pros and Cons of Affiliate Marketing
As with any business, there are various advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages of Affiliate Marketing:
- You won’t have to handle any stock, orders or returns and complaints.
- You don’t need a merchant account, as the customer will buy through the relevant site.
- You get to piggy back on established and proven products, providing you choose them wisely.
- You can focus your efforts on driving traffic, instead of processing orders.
Disadvantages of Affiliate Marketing:
- Your share of the profits will be lower, as you will basically be paid a referral fee.
- You won’t be able to set your own prices.
- If a customer clicks on a link on your site, he will be taken to another site, and might not return to your site to see your other offers.
- If your affiliate provider discontinues his product line, you will have to find a new one to promote.
Who Can I Sell Products For
Clickbank is a great place to start if you are looking to promote digital products, as they have been around since 1998 and as far as I know it is the largest market place for digital products on the net. Just be careful which products you choose to promote, as Clickbank does have a lot of products that don’t live up to their advertising.
Other popular online stores that you can use for your affiliate marketing are places like Amazon, Walmart and Comission Junction. In fact if you Google ‘affiliate sites’ you will find hundreds.
If you are designing a website for your products, keep the following in mind:
- Offer Good Quality Products.
- If you can pick your pricing, come in somewhere in the middle of your competition – not too expensive, and not the cheapest either.
- Remember a good website is not necessarily a pretty one. Make sure that it is user friendly, keeps your visitors interest, has helpful information on it and it will generate sales.
- Aim to try and send qualified traffic to your site, and your sales will be better.
If you want to learn affiliate marketing, you can check out this review. This is my top recommendation for anybody who would like to build a long term and sustainable business online.
