Affiliate Marketing - An Introduction
What is affiliate marketing? Well, a marketing practice wherein business revenue is shared between the business and its affiliates is known as affiliate marketing. An affiliate serves as an agent who works towards bringing opportunities of revenue generation for a business and gets paid for his efforts. Affiliate marketing is a system in which a seller or merchant, in correspondence with his affiliate, also called publisher, generates business, and rewards the affiliate for his help. An affiliate plays a major role in attracting customers towards the business, for which he receives compensation from the seller. The business merchant, the publisher (the affiliate), the customer and the affiliate network are the core players in the affiliate marketing industry.
A little bit about the affiliate network; it is an intermediary between affiliates and affiliate programs. This network serves as a platform over which websites offering affiliate marketing programs access the customer base. It also helps websites, to easily participate in affiliate programs.
Affiliate Marketing Beginner's Guide
Affiliate marketing newbies should know that this marketing practice can be considered as a form of online marketing where the 'affiliate logic' is used to direct web traffic from one website to another. Affiliate marketing programs often make use of Internet marketing methods like pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, paid SEM and email marketing. There are thousands of websites that are ready to pay a commission to affiliates based on their efforts towards promoting business of the website's products and services. With continuous growth in this field, there is an increase in people turning towards affiliate marketing. Many have begun looking at affiliate marketing as a lucrative option for making money online.
If you are one of those affiliate marketing newbies, remember, affiliate marketing is about sharing of revenue between a business and you. Isn't that interesting? Imagine, you are actually sharing business revenue; you are earning a share of the revenue generated by a flourishing business; flourishing because of your efforts. Imagine, you are actually directing customers to a business; you are enhancing its customer base and getting paid in return.
What's the exact role of an affiliate? That's you, the affiliate. Simply put, if you are an affiliate, you act as a middleman (or woman) between a business and its customers. It's usually something like, you own a website, you use it to send customers to a company and you are rewarded for it. All you do is place a link that directs users to a company product or service, from your website. Users who click on this weblink are directed to the business product or service. If they avail the company service or buy their product, you earn! And that's because you were the one who caused the user to visit the company website, who was then attracted to buy their product or service. In short, you, as an affiliate, played that important role of bringing customers for a business and now you are eligible to earn your well-deserved share of revenue. And the good news for affiliate marketing newbies is that all you need, to be in this field is a computer with an Internet connection. And yes, you should be ready to work hard and wait to reap the fruit of your effort.
This is an affiliate marketing newbies guide and I assume you are a beginner to this form of marketing. By now, you know what affiliate marketing is and you also have an idea of affiliate marketing companies and the marketing programs they offer. Internet affiliate marketing, apart from a computer and a broadband connection, needs the marketer to have knowledge of search engine optimization and an understanding of web users. Well then. You have decided to venture into affiliate marketing and make the most of this money-making idea. You are aware of the basic SEO concepts like keywords, niches, hyperlinks, building a website and web traffic. You need to learn affiliate marketing before you actually make it a means to earn money. The following section will help you do that and also equip you with some affiliate marketing tips.
How to do Affiliate Marketing - Newbies Guide
Find a Niche: The first step is to find a profitable niche. Think of something you like; probably something related to your hobby or area of expertise. Then see if the subject you have thought of is popular among web users. Use a keyword tool to analyze the popularity and competition of the subject chosen. Find a trade off between the two and then check for the probability of the search term of fetching advertisements. An easy way to do this is to analyze the Google results for your search term by going through the right hand side section of the results page.
Build the Website: Before actually building the website, you will need to choose a suitable domain name for the same. The domain name is the website address. Select a domain name which goes with the website content, and is short and easy to remember. Even better if it contains the keyword you are targeting, as this will help boost your rankings. Register your domain name with a domain name registrar, which usually involves a fee of about $10 per year. Register with one of the website hosting services and upload your website once you have an hosting account. The process does not end here. After the website is uploaded, it should also get indexed. Once the search engines know about your website, you can work towards increasing your website traffic. One way to get your website indexed is to submit the site URL to search engines. Another commonly used way is to build backlinks to your website. You may also choose to buy an already indexed domain. Uploading your website online marks your presence on the web and getting the website indexed is like being recognized on the Internet.
Promote the Website: In promoting a website, some things have to be taken into consideration. Firstly, your website should be content rich; better if the content is updated frequently on a regular basis. The content on the website should target the right keywords. Blogging can be a good way of attracting visitors to your website. Blog about the product(s) you are advertising; again, use keywords to optimize your content. It's good to learn SEO basics, so that you know which keywords to use and how. Once you have submitted your website to search engines and once they index it, you can employ advertising programs like pay-per-click advertising, Google Adwords and others to place advertisements on your website.
See that the advertisements are well-worded and that they attract the right audience. See what percentage of the add-clicks convert to actual sales of the product you are advertising. Place the ads in such a way that they attract maximum users. Use various website promotion techniques to attract traffic and achieve maximum conversion of visitors to buyers. Yes, that's your objective as an affiliate marketer. Let's come to the last section of this affiliate marketing newbies guide; the section on tips for affiliate marketing newbies.
Affiliate Marketing Tips for Beginners
- One of the most important affiliate marketing tips is to find the right niche. When searching for a niche, select one that you have enough knowledge about and are interested in. As you would be writing on and promoting a product related to the niche selected, it doesn't make sense to choose something you are unfamiliar with or not interested in.
- Whichever product you choose to advertise, see that you are convinced with what you are doing. Promote the right kind of product and in the right way. It will help you gain user trust.
- Learn SEO. It's important to know how to optimize your website content as well as the website design. Optimization is the key to achieve higher rankings, thus increasing the probability of attracting more users.
- Try different affiliate marketing programs till you find the one that suits you best. Be careful while choosing them. Update your website content on a regular basis. That's another important affiliate marketing tip for beginners. Try to give your readers something new, something useful. Users like variety.
- Be focused, be innovative and do not be afraid of experimenting. Yes, experimenting with new products and new strategies is important.
- Be patient; affiliate marketing cannot bring you success overnight. With persistent efforts, you will be able to make a mark in the affiliate marketing industry.
By Manali Oak
Published: 7/13/2010
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment