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Affiliate
Marketing Articles home : Affiliate Marketing Basics
Affiliate Marketing Basics
by David Thomas
Affiliate marketing is the process of tracking leads and sales for the
purposes of rewarding individuals and companies for referring others to
their web sites that convert into leads and sales with commission payments.
Usually, this process involves the use of a specially-encoded tracking
hyperlink that identifies you as the referrer of the traffic.
There is one very easy way to get started with affiliate marketing. If
you've ever used the Google search engine, it's likely that you will have
seen some advertisements called "sponsored links." On Yahoo's search engine,
you get a column called "sponsor results." MSN's search engine calls them
"sponsored sites." In each case, from the heading, you can tell that people
pay for those links to be published on the search engine.
These search engines have each set up a nice easy way to relieve you of
some money from your credit card, for which they display these adverts for
you. You don't pay each time the ad is shown. You only pay if the reader
clicks on your ad, which will send the reader to the web site you have
specified. You decide on the text of an ad you would like to place, when the
ad should be displayed (for example, when somebody searches for
"Christmas"), and how much you would be prepared to pay if the person
searching clicks on your ad. The person doing the search is then sent to the
web site you specified, and you get charged an amount that may be as little
as one penny, but typically may be in the region of 5 to 15 cents or 3 to
10p. Google's service is called Google AdWords, and I believe it's the most
popular of these services.
Now, if you had a product to sell, you could easily make money this way,
as long as enough people buy your product after you've purchased your
advertising. If you don't have a product, you can still make money from the
commissions, again, as long as the amount you are paying for advertising
does not exceed the amount you are making with commissions.
How do you find affiliate programmes? There are many affiliate networks
and individual affiliate programmes out there. ClickBank is one of the most
popular affiliate networks, also providing credit-card processing services.
ClickBank mainly deals in electronic delivery products such as electronic
books and software, and, at the time of writing, commissions can run as high
as 70% for these products (ClickBank claims commissions can be 75%, but they
take a 7.5% + $1 cut, and the remaining money is shared between the vendor
and affiliate according to the vendor's chosen commission percentage).
Another affiliate network is ValueClick's Commission Junction, one of the
largest, which administers affiliate programmes for a lot of household brand
names such as eBay. There are many smaller affiliate networks, and there are
also affiliate programmes that are independent of any network, where the
merchant runs the tracking software.
What most of these affiliate networks and programmes have in common is
that you can sign up as an affiliate for free, and the networks or merchants
will send you money when your commission reaches a certain level; in some
cases this is done electronically, in other cases through the issue of
cheques. Some people treat affiliate marketing as a hobby; for others, it's
a lucrative full-time business. Earnings can literally be uncapped, and your
success depends on how dedicated you are to the business, and, to a certain
extent, luck.
About the Author
David Thomas is a software publisher who provides tools for Internet
marketers such as Keyword Transformer. Sign up for his free affiliate
marketing course which includes
Keyword Transformer
Personal Edition today!
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