What is Affiliate Marketing
Written by admin on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing.
Affiliate marketing is a system where you as an affiliate, send targeted traffic from your site to a merchant’s site. Once there, if the visitor buys the product you get paid a commission. This is possible as you are connected to the merchant’s site through a special affiliate link which is unique to you. All affiliate marketers for that merchant have unique links to the merchant’s site. All you have to do is drive as much targeted traffic as possible to the merchant’s site through your unique link.
The advantage of affiliate marketing is that once you have done the hard work of finding and researching your chosen product, and setting up your website and your campaign, you can continue to earn money from it with a minimum amount of daily effort, towards maintaining and updating your site. Your site continues to earn money for you, day in and day out.
With affiliate marketing, you need not have your own product. You simply promote other peoples products. You have no headaches as all the hard work is done by the merchant. He deals with the storage, shipping, after sales service. All you have to do is drive traffic to the merchant’s website. You have no other responsibilities. You can promote one or more products, and from one or more merchants. You are not tied to anyone.
The advantage to the merchant is that the more affiliates he has, the more exposure and cheap advertising he gets. He does not have to do much selling. Most of it is done by your site.
However, affiliate marketing is not a path to getting rich quickly. A lot of hard work, perseverance and determination is needed if you are to succeed. It can take quite some time before your business starts earning a good income.
One advantage that affiliate marketing has is that it can give you financial freedom. It is a business that can make your financial future secure if you can give it a few months of hard work. You have to set up your site and your traffic generation methods and you keep making money over and over again. This is passive income.
Another advantage is that it has the ability to give you multiple streams of income. If you were doing a regular job your income would be limited by the hours and your physical ability. With affiliate marketing you can set up as many websites as you can manage, and each would be independently making money for you. As long as you are ready to put in the initial amount of hard work in researching and setting up your websites, and some minimal amount of regular effort towards maintenance, you can earn money 24 hours a day.
