Affiliate marketing is often over-looked by internet marketers. Admittedly, it has been getting beaten-up quite a bit by a herd of “marketers” who claim that affiliate marketing just doesn’t work-tell that to the thousands of people who are making millions of dollars every single year (yes, I mean individually earning seven figures, not seven figures combined!) without their own product/service to sell!
That is what affiliate marketing is all about-selling products that other individuals have created and splitting the commissions. Good affiliate programs will allow you to use the promotional and sales materials that were originally created by the individual who created the product. This reduces the stress/time/money/and expertise required to be able to efficiently and effectively sell any given product/service by the average online marketer.
A great resource to review is ClickBank. At this site, you can create a completely free account, and then begin to search the tens and hundreds of thousands of products available for you to market and sell. Once you select one or two that you can identify with, and be passionate about, you can create your very own affiliate link and start to drive website traffic to your sales page. When people buy through your link, you get paid!
“How can I drive lots of traffic to my affiliate links?”, you may be asking… Well, there are a number of ways in which you can achieve this. Without generalizing and doing a major injustice to many of these traffic-generating techniques, I will focus on two very effective methods.
First, you want to visit as many social networking websites as you can and begin to create free accounts at each of them. MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook are a few of the more common examples. There are hundreds of social networking websites, and all it takes is a little searching to find the ones that you like best.
By creating these free accounts, and listing your affiliate links on each of them, your traffic to your websites will grow as your personal and professional networks of people grow. This can be extremely effective when you establish your own blog as well.
Secondly, you will want to begin to write informational articles, like this one, and submit them to a few of the top article directories. Once approved and published, the search engines will take note of your new content and expertise, and will allow those who are searching for your advice to find you. Just remember to build a link or two into your article to allow your reader to find relevant resources.
The more articles you write and submit, the more of an expert you will become. Both in reality, and in the minds of your readers/prospects. Just make sure that your content is original and relevant to your keywords and article titles, and you shouldn’t have any problems. You will be driving traffic and making sales like a pro in no-time flat!
When you put forth an honest effort to implement an affiliate-marketing strategy, remember that “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Your results will vary based on your skill-set as a writer, the product that you are marketing, the quality of the sales materials you are using, and how well you can drive new, hungry traffic to your links.
Keep in mind that there are a lot of techniques you can implement that have zero out of pocket expense to you as the marketer, and that will ultimately result in sales and commissions. I have outlined two of the most common methods for you above. Good luck with your affiliate marketing campaigns!
