What is affiliate marketing?

New to affiliate marketing?

Discover how you can easily profit from other people's work with a minimum of hassle!

Affiliate marketing is growing at a crazy rate all around the web, and, even if you don't know it, you've already come across it, many times.

But do you know what it really is?

How it works?

And how you can profit from it, even if you don't know anything about internet marketing, and don't own a website or a blog?

How internet marketing works

It's no rocket science. And the concept didn't exactly come around only with internet.

Affiliate marketing is really just advertising for someone else's product(s).

That's really all there is to it: as an affiliate, you promote and sell a product for another person or company, and get paid commissions on every sale you make.

In a way, you could say a supermarket is an affiliate for the brands they sell products for.

Only the term 'Affiliate Marketing' really is used only on the internet.

So, how it really works is:

1. You find a niche (a market segment - a general topic if you will).
2. You find a person or company that sells products in this particular niche
3. You become an affiliate for that seller.
4. You send internet traffic to the offer(s).
5. You earn a percentage of the sales ($).

Sounds easy, right?

Well, as the first 4 steps can be done in less than an hour, or even in a few minutes if you've got enough skills and experience... step 5 is where most beginner affiliates fail.

Why?

Because they struggle to find traffic, more importantly quality traffic.

And even when they have some qualified leads (good potential buyers) crowded before them, they don't know how to talk to them correctly, how to interest them in the products they're promoting.

These are really the keys of success in any internet business: quality traffic and good conversion rates!

If you can have that, you'll be a king!

And that is when affiliate marketing will really rock for you: you will be able to set up an (potentially very profitable) online business in a few minutes once you know what you're doing.

Because nowadays, finding a potentially profitable niche on the web is no big deal really, neither is becoming an affiliate. What really requires a lot of time and work is creating a decent product.

And that is the part of the business set up you can cut out by becoming an affiliate!

Profiting from affiliate marketing

So, how should you go about profiting from affiliate marketing?

Well, I'd love to be able to give you just the keys to success in a couple sentences. I wish it was that easy...

But as I said above, a major part of your success will rely on: 

• Finding quality traffic.
• Your own marketing abilities to get that traffic to convert.

As a matter of fact, building your list is the first thing you should consider doing no matter what type of online business you want to get involved in.

I will not get too much in to this here and now, as it would require at least a 4,000 word post, an entire PDF guide or a 30 minute video just to highlight the basics. So I'll save that for later!

For now, I'll just give you a few tips on how to become an affiliate.

On a side note, if you want quality traffic that is 'virtually FREE' (not sure free actually exists!), you really should consider building an email list in an autoresponder!

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Finding affiliate offers

There are 2 main ways of becoming an affiliate:

1. Directly, by striking a partnership with a seller
2. Through an affiliate platform

• You can be engaged in a joint venture sale/launch, which usually converts more than most other types of sales.
• You can negotiate the commission rates with the seller.
• You can have a proper sales/launch funnel that is likely to convert better than your own marketing efforts, and will save you a lot of time and work.
• You can have an affiliate manager to assist you in your promotional efforts.

So if you're a newbie, chances are you will be turned down by any top of the list seller, as they generally only accept experienced affiliate with email lists containing many thousands contacts.

Being in a direct partnership with a top notch seller has only advantages:

While, for numerous reasons, I would recommend the first option (direct partnership), you might not be able to partner with a good seller at this time. Especially if you have no email list, no website and no blog.

So you would be better off roaming (an) affiliate platform(s) to find an offer (or many offers) that will suit the niche you aim at tackling.

Affiliate platforms

Whether you're a beginner affiliate or an experienced internet marketer, affiliate platforms are a place you will gain at stopping by.

Unlike joint venture events, affiliate platforms do not (or very rarely) filter aspirant affiliates by email list size or website/blog authority.

So it really is the right place to start to find your affiliate offers and begin making money with other people's products.

• Clickbank

• Avantage

• Linkshare

• Commission Junction

• Amazon associates

As to know which is the best affiliate platform, that would be a tough call.

You can just type "affiliate offers", or "affiliate platform" in your favorite search engine and have a look around the results.

Here are the ones I've been using for the last few years:

If you need a little help getting started with affiliate marketing, just download this PDF guide that will tell you all the important steps to start cashing out as an affiliate:

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