I had previously written a couple of articles designated towards, or relating to making money with affiliate marketing programs. Yesterday I had an email from a reader who had never had any experience with affiliate marketing programs in the past and wanted to learn the basics and not so much the marketing tactics involved with affiliate programs. I'm going to be very to the point in this post to help you out in as little amount of time as possible.
There are several marketplaces that offer digital products/services to be submitted to their network of affiliates. These products are typically submitted by the creator and have an agreement with the third party marketplace that each referred sale would be paid a commission for successful promotion and sales conversion on the product to the user who referred that sale. One of the more popular affiliate marketplaces is ClickBank.com. They have a diverse range of digital products in a variety of different categories. Create an account with them by clicking here, ClickBank and have access to market their products instantly. That being said, there are millions of other products online that aren't part of an affiliate marketplace who affiliate their products directly. Look for an affiliate link on any potential product your thinking of marketing for registration and resource information.
How to Market Affiliate Programs
1. Market the product on major search engines via PPC (Pay per Click). It's quite easy, if you're planning on using Google AdWords for instance, sign up for an account and pay on your ad's frequency and position on sponsored links in Googles search queries. This method can achieve several hits, but you will really need to choose a product with a great marketing campaign to convert sales and yield a return on your investment. I would recommend starting out with lower gravity (less market saturation) ClickBank products and taking advantage of lower promotional fee's through Google and a better chance for a return on your investment.
2. Create a website. The website could be set up in several different formats. Some purchase an expensive domain, such as a four letter domain, these domains drive quite a bit of natural traffic. If the name is quite easy people will search your website directly by just typing it in to their address bar. Although the amount of targeted visitors could be on the lower end of the spectrum, many find this a beneficial way of cutting back on advertising costs with search engines and still yield a steady flow of traffic, naturally.
When it comes to adding products to your website, some choose to just fill it with text links and hope people click on them and some create a blog, add valuable content and build a loyal reader base and steady traffic. Neither way guarantees a sale, but obviously with the more traffic (targeted is best), the greater chance of a sales conversion. A website with purely links will require less maintenance, but you will still have to add a vast amount of content to attract visitors, unless you're planning on investing major money in to paid advertising through search engines, or other means online. Blogging is typically the best way to attract some initial traffic right out of the gate.
Placing Links To Your Website or Ad Campaign
If you'll be utilizing Google AdWords, the process is very simple. Once you've chosen the keywords you'd like to target in accordance with your campaign, they will then ask you to input a description of the website your directing your traffic to, as well as a destination URL. Google recently changed their policy on landing pages, the destination URL has to match the description URL. Prior to the change you could enter your website address in the display URL and the affiliate marketing address for the destination URL. This has been changed to help it's users understand which website they're being directed to before they click the link, as they do not want to mislead their users in any way.
Placing ad's on your website can be much more intricate. Text links will still be similar to submitting to search engines, as you'll just be inserting the URL and a description of the URL. In a blog format website, the application, whether it's WordPress, or Blogger all have a place to input links without using HTML code. They make it quite easy and literally anyone can do it.
If you're planning on placing a banner ad, you will need to put a little more effort in to it. You will want to firstly visit the products affiliate log in portion of the website of the product you're promoting. The good ones typically have a banner gallery, varying in sizing and shape to help you choose the right banner for your website. They will then typically provide you with the HTML code to be inserted in to your website. Be sure that you've entered your affiliate code in to the code if it's not entered automatically. Some require you to input your affiliate code manually. If you look closely at the HTML code you will see something like..
HTML CODE REMOVED TO MEET EZINE EDITORIAL GUIDELINES. YOU MAY CHECK MY WEBSITE TO SEE THE CODE EXAMPLE.
On these you will have to manually enter your affiliate ID in to the HTML code to be reimbursed on any sales that you've referred to the website. To do this, just simply erase "YOURID" and insert your registered user ID in to the space. It's crucial to remember this, as if you don't enter it, you'll be missing out on commission and spinning your wheels for nothing. Code will vary from product to product, but the affiliate ID will always stand out in the code with something like you've seen in the example, so just look carefully every time. If you do not enter your affiliate ID, your click trough's will still be forwarded to the affiliate product website, but you will not be paid on any sales.
Once you've obtained your HTML code and inserted your affiliate user ID, insert the HTML code in to the area you've designated to banners on your website. If you had a web designer build your site, you may want to send the code to them for input.
Affiliate marketing can be approached many different ways. These are the two most commonly used methods in my opinion. Choosing the right affiliate programs to meet your marketing initiatives is the most crucial part of successfully converting sales within your affiliate marketing tactics and should be taken in to careful consideration once you've had some experience with testing the waters.
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