What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Each product that you choose to sell has a unique link that is distinct and different. This link, called an affiliate link is especially designed to enable you to track not only your sales but also the visitors to your site or blog.

There are 3 main steps in the process of affiliate marketing :

1. Buyer visits the affiliate website or blog

2. After clicking on the affiliate link it re-directs the buyer to the seller’s website from where the product can be purchased

3. The affiliate receives commision after a sale has been made

The products you can choose to sell as an affiliate vary widely and can range from physical products such as household items and sports gear to informational EBooks that touch on an equally wide range of topics.

If you are interested in getting into affiliate marketing, you should check out  Clickbank.com With a choice of more than 10,000 informational products, Clickbank is easily the largest and most comprehensive affiliate marketing network for informational products. What’s more several of these offer commissions that could go up to 75%.

Clickbank.com

Signing up with Clickbank is totally free of cost. Just click the link above and it will take you straight to the site. It is worth taking the time to create an account and browsing around the site for a while. This will help you get familiar with the way the site works which will give you the edge in the long run. Once you become an established affiliate marketer you will find yourself using the site quite a lot.

So…An Affiliate Link

As previously mentioned, you will have a unique affiliate link for every product that you choose to promote. Let’s see how this works. I’d prefer to use Clickbank as an example so you can see exactly what benefits you stand to get. Have you signed up with them already? It may be better if you do so that you can go along with me and have a clearer understanding of how it works. Signing up is free so really you have everything to gain and nothing to lose.

After you sign in, you will see a ‘marketplace’ link at the top of your screen. Click this link and you come to another page where you can now search the marketplace. It will look something like what you can see below.

Let’s move on now by choosing an item that we wish to promote. Let’s say we wish to promote some kind of newborn baby product. You type ‘baby’ into the search box and then click the ‘Go’ box. Now you pick the specific baby product that you wish to promote. It could be, ‘Pick the gender of your baby’. Now, this will show up as the #1 result at the time of writing this.

If you click on the headline, ‘Pick the gender of your baby’, you will get re-directed to the product’s website so that you can get a first-hand look at the website and the product you are promoting. If you like what you see, you go ahead with your plans. You now click the ‘create hoplink’ link. This link is essentially a ‘how to create your affiliate’ link.

Do you see the ‘Clickbank Nickname’ box? What you need to do is type in the name of the clickbank I.D that you signed up with into this box. Did you wish to add tracking? If so, you go to the tracking section and enter your particulars there.

Note: Tracking is essentially used to enable you to see where your sales are coming from. When you have 2 or more sites, tracking helps you manage both by helping you see which site is making which sale. This can be an important factor to your ultimate bottom line.

Now that all that is done, you click ‘Create.’ Immediately a message pops up notifying you of your unique affiliate link as well as details of how much you have earned. This is what this looks like:

http://zzzzz.genderpick.hop.clickbank.net/

You just have to replace the ‘zzzzz’ with your account nickname. Remember, this is the link you are going to be using for selling this product as well as other products on Clickbank. You will see that there are many more affiliate networks and you will have to go through the same process with all of them in order to get your affiliate link for unique products.

If you take a closer look at the products listed you will see that your earning potential could be as high as $68 for any one of the products. This could add up to a significant amount in the end.

If you are looking to making money with affiliate marketing, here are some of the skills you are going to learn to master the arts of website building, blogging and how to use social networking sites. Most important of all, you will have to learn how to drive targeted consumers, also known as ‘traffic’ to your website. We will be talking some more about this later, so do check back in a few days.

The basic 3-Step Mode of Affiliate Marketing Comprises 3 Steps:

1. Developing a Website or blog

2. Post useful information and content and insert your affiliate links into the website

3. Drive traffic to your website

Conclusion:

The money to be made in affiliate marketing is absolutely huge ! I make money every single day and night .Now this page has been just a rough guide to how it works so dont panic and think that you should know everthing allready ! It takes time to learn and master every aspect of this amazing work at home business.

To help you learn more on affiliate marketing I recommend joining Wealthy Affiliate  .This program is what really got me started in internet marketing and if you dont learn then you cant find out just how good it feels to wake up in the morning and see that you have made money overnight .