For the regular readers of this site, this is going to be a more basic post covering the inner workings of affiliate marketing, and how money is made through the internet. Since all my posts so far have been about specific parts of the process of affiliate marketing, I thought I’d dedicate a post to the basics of affiliate marketing.
I’d recommend bookmarking this page to read it later.
Let’s get started with a clear definition of affiliate marketing:
Affiliate marketing is an internet based system where you (the affiliate) get paid for referring sales or leads to another business.
There are many different ways in which someone can earn money from being an affiliate marketer. A couple affiliate programs which you may have heard of are:
Clickbank: Is the Internet’s leading retailer of digital products. The website was founded in 1998, and has been a secure online retail outlet for upwards of 70,000 digital product vendors, and has an estimated 110,000 active affiliate marketers. The site makes a sale somewhere in the world every three seconds. The site processes 27,000 digital transactions per day, and serves over 200 countries. The picture to the right is a screenshot of their homepage, showing the revenue from product sales through their site. Notice how many commas are in that number.
Amazon Associates: Is the platform in which third-party site owners (affiliates) build effective sponsored affiliate links to Amazon products to earn referral commissions.
Adsense: Is the ad serving application run by Google Inc. in which website owners can enroll to enable text, image, and video advertisements on their websites. These advertisements are controlled by Google and generate revenue on a per-click or per-impression basis.
Through affiliate marketing revenue is earned by passing people through your site to affiliate products, whether that be a Clickbank product, Amazon product, or even the other end of an Adsense link.
Let’s say Jimmy has a site about ferret training (weird example….I know). He gets 50 people to his site a day from the search engines that read his articles about ferret training, and he links to e-book’s with additional information about ferret training. Inevitably a few of these people will want to learn more information about training their ferret, so they click through his affiliate link to learn more about ferret training.
The site reader is lead to a sales page selling the ferret training guide. Whether or not the person actually buys the product is determined by both how bad the person wants to learn more about ferret training, and how well the sales page is set up to convert the potential buyer into a sale.
When a sale is made, both the affiliate and the vendor of the e-book are paid percentages. Most products on Clickbank offer affiliates a 60-75% cut of the revenue from the sale, which is very generous compared to other affiliate programs like Amazon Associates, or the Ebay Partner Network.
Personally I have set up 6 sites in the past three weeks at the point of writing this post, and I have made a substantial amount of money through affiliate programs like Clickbank. The sites I set have set up lately have ranged from sites about anxiety and panic attacks, to losing arm fat.
If you are just starting out with affiliate marketing and are interested in getting your slice of the Internet income pie, then I’d do a few things. The first of those is follow my twitter in the upper right of the site so you can see when I post new articles about making money online. The second is to subscribe to the newsletter which I am in the process of writing at the moment. And the third is check out one of the information products below which provide incredible foundations for you if you are just getting involved with online marketing.
The first few affiliate marketing guides I obtained when I was a baby affiliate marketer were scams, and there are a lot of scam products out there. However both of the two products below I have used, and would say are two of the best resources to have when learning to make money online.
Google Sniper: This was created by George Brown, who is a super affiliate that makes over $400,000 a year from his “sniper sites”, which is his word for affiliate sites targeted at one specific niche. It is the cheaper of the two.
The 12 Minute Affiliate: This program was created by Mark Ling, an awesome guy from New Zealand who has made literally millions from internet marketing. He currently has 35 employees working for him constantly to help him continue to build affiliate sites. He is pretty much the king of affiliate marketing.
