What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is the future of online marketing. This is $3 billion dollar industry that regularly produces 6 and 7-figure income earners.
It is a performance-based marketing system where marketers (known as affiliates) can use their internet marketing skills to sell/advertise a company’s (merchant/brand/retailer) products/services for a commission.
For example, John is an internet marketer and Best Widgets is the leading retailer of widgets. John owns a blog about the different types of widgets and becomes an affiliate of Best Widgets. He posts a banner ad on his blog with this personalized affiliate link. His audience sees the ad, clicks on it and some of them buy widgets from Best Widgets. Every time someone clicks on his ad and buys a widget, John is making a 40% commission. Every time John earns $100, the affiliate manager for Best Widgets mails John a paycheck.
What types of people go into Affiliate Marketing? Anyone and everyone. There is a common cliché of “follow your passion and you will never work a day in your life.” Well, it is finally true with affiliate marketing. This is a way to monetize your passion or at least things you might have some interest in.
The 3 biggest evergreen (timeless) niches in affiliate marketing include health & fitness, dating & relationships and making money/business. Do you know or have ever been thinking about one of those topics over your lifetime? Exactly. The largest markets in affiliate marketing exactly match what humans want the most.
Even if you have a niche interest and passion, there is market for that and way to monetize your hobby. Ever buy anything or bought something that is sold on Amazon.com? Did you know Amazon has an affiliate program paying out commissions for every single product sold on Amazon? If you love a product and recommend it to other people to buy from Amazon, you will get paid a % commission every time they buy it.
It gets better, there are actually Affiliate Networks which pool together a bunch of different companies that offer an affiliate program and combine them into one site. This way, you only have to join one site as a member and can have access to be a part of all the affiliate programs in their network which could include products, services, online products and E-books/E-learning.
So what do you do and how do you get started? First, you will need a website. WordPress is an industry standard because of its SEO friendly setup, blogging capabilities and vast plug-in library for customization and marketing tools.
Now, it is time to get the word out about your website to the world. That is where internet marketing comes in. This could include Search Engine Optimization (SEO, getting your website to the first page of search engines like Google or Bing), paid ads (banners, pay-per-click ads, paid search engine marketing), E-mail marketing/newsletters, social media marketing, and content marketing.
How are you going to learn all this in a reasonable amount of time?
You could go on a scavenger hunt to search for bits and pieces of information in forums, YouTube videos, blog articles. You could get really basic information from an eBook. What about hour long pre-recorded webinars that sell you on $4000 products but now available for the low cost of $997? You could sit in a bookstore for days and read every internet book available to learn the white-hat fundamentals that were present at the time the book was published into print.
