by Andre Sanchez

Affiliate marketing is basically a way of making money by selling other people’s products in return for a cut of the sales price  In a nutshell, you advertise the product and then send prospects to the merchant’s sales page.  You then sit back and wait for the money.

Affiliate products can be of any type, and commissions vary from as low as 5% to as high as 75% of the sales price.  The most popular products are those with no recurring costs, such as electronically deliverable ebooks and software.  In such cases the usual commission is 50% of the sales price.  This is good deal considering the advantages to the affiliate marketer.

First, you do not need to have a product of your own.  You don’t need to spent time researching and writing an ebook, or developing a new piece of software.  Secondly you have a massive range of products to sell.  Clickbank specializes in electronically deliverable products, and you can take your pick from all of those in their database. 

You also don’t even have to sell the product.  You simply send prospects to the merchant’s sales page, although you will have best results if you carry out a degree of pre-selling, such as writing a review.  Nor do you have to worry about collecting money or dealing with complaints.  All of that is handled by the merchant.  So what is the downside of affiliate marketing, and why is everybody not doing it.

There are, in fact, very few negatives since you can’t really lose.  In order to run a successful affiliate marketing business, you will likely need a website.  Most people who make a lot of money this way have their own website.  There are a number of reasons for this, but the main one is that you can more easily pre-sell the product from your own web page. You get much better sales figures if you write a review, or in some way tell the visitor how good the product is and how it helped you.

Most affiliate marketers purchase the product they are selling in order to sound genuine when they are writing about it.  Another benefit of having a website is that you can use a different web page for each product you are selling, and also to advertise the product.  Pay per click advertising is a good way to let people know about the product, and if you design the advert properly, with a good choice of keywords and provide a URL that sends the visitor directly to the relevant page on your website, you can get a fairly high conversion rate of visitors to sales. 

This is because the visitor will be highly focused on your product, having clicked on your advert.  Since you pay for every click made, you should test different wordings in your advert to find out the best.  Google Adwords, the best known PPC program, allows you provide two or three different forms of your adverts, and they will display each in turn so that you can analyze the results.

There are several ways in which you can advertise, including ezine advertising, writing articles about the subject that the product covers and optimizing the page that your product is on so that you get some organic traffic from the search engines.  Some affiliate programs provide you with a free website just for the product.  While this could be useful to a newcomer to internet marketing, keep in mind that everybody using the program will probably have the same website, so you should check that you can customize it before entering into an agreement.

You should also make sure that you can easily contact your merchant.  You have to be sure that the merchant is reputable, and is not going to pass complaints on to you.  You are not responsible for problems that arise with the product.  There are several online companies that offer affiliate products from merchants that are registered with them, and these tend to be the safest to use. 

Examples are Clickbank and Commission Junction, both of which have a number of different products or merchants to offer.  When you deal with such companies, your  commission is paid by them rather than the merchant and you have some degree of security.  However, you will find that it is very rare for a merchant to default on a payment, and everything normally runs smoothly.

Affiliate marketing is an excellent way to enter the exciting world of internet marketing, and allows you learn about the business without the need for your own product or a lot of start-up capital.  You can theoretically start with nothing, but keep an eye on any PPC costs:  these can build up quickly unless you keep on top of your advertising.

And as to why does everybody not do it:  everybody does, at least most people involved in internet marketing have at some time or another.  Some are more successful that others, and those that fail, are generally those without a website.

What is Affiliate Marketing? was originally published  at http://www.affiliatemarketinglife.com