What exactly is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is the single fastest growth industry on the Internet. It’s also true that affiliate marketing is one of the fastest and most creative ways to make money and have a career on the Internet.
Simply put, affiliate marketing is selling products on a commission basis. You own a business that advertises and sells products for other companies. You may have a product of your own to begin with or not. The things that a successful affiliate marketer must have are:
Your website is the jumping off point of all your marketing efforts. So the first step in any successful affiliate marketing business is building a good, credible and professional looking website (well, this just really depends on who your audience is, because crappy looking sites can be good money makers as well). You must build a user-friendly website, which will attract your prospects and motivate them to click on the links to the products and services you are promoting and make a purchase. There are companies whose business is building websites that you can hire to build one for you.
Types of Affiliate Marketing
1. PPC – Pay-Per-Click is a highly promoted and used affiliate marketing method by affiliates with websites or small websites. This is also the easiest way for them to start making money. Under this method of affiliate marketing, the affiliate is paid a commission by the merchant when a visitor visits the merchant’s site through the affiliate’s reference, that is, whenever a visitor clicks and goes to the merchant’s site through the banner or text ads that the affiliate has put up.
A website owner would be given a simple code (html codes) to paste onto any webpage where the website owner wants a visitor to see the advertisements. The ads will be related to the webpage content. Pay per click is free to join but they have very strict policies especially against fraudulent clicks by owners of websites on which the advertisements are displayed.
2. PPP- Pay Per Play: Pay per Play (PPP) is the latest wave in internet advertising. When a person visits a webpage which hosts these ads, they will hear a single 5 second professional audio advertisement. The advertisement will be relevant to the content of the webpage.
How does this work? It works much like current Pay per Click programs, minus one critical element – there will be no click required by the visitors! 100% of visitors to the webpage will generate revenue for the webpage owner. That’s the Pay Per Play Advantage! Advertisers will bid to have their ad placed on a particular website. The winner’s ad will play when a visitor opens that webpage. In turn, the website owner will get paid for every visitor to his website. The more pages the website owner has with these ads, and the more traffic he has, the more income he will generate.
3. Pay-Per-Performance (PPP) - PPP affiliate marketing is the most popular among merchant and is also the most lucrative type for the affiliates. In this type of affiliate program, the merchant only pays the affiliate whenever his referral translates into an action – that is whenever the visitor he has referred actually buys something from the merchant’s site or when the visitor becomes a lead.
A further classification of Pay-per-performance affiliate marketing can be done into two types: pay-per-sales (PPS) and pay-per-lead (PPL). Both these are very popular:
a) Pay-Per-Sale (PPS) - In a pay-per-sale type of affiliate marketing, the affiliates get the commission from the merchants whenever the visitor he has referred to the merchant’s site actually buys something from the merchant’s site.
b) Pay-Per-Lead (PPL) - The pay-per-lead type of affiliate marketing is a slight variation of the PPS type and is often used by insurance and finance companies and other companies who rely on leads for their company to grow. In this type of affiliate marketing, the affiliate is paid whenever the visitor he referred to the merchant’s site fills up an application form or any similar form related to the business of the company.
4. Single tier – In a single-tier affiliate marketing program, the affiliates are only paid based on the direct sales or traffic he has referred to the merchant.
5. Two tier Affiliate marketing program – In two-tier affiliate marketing programs, the affiliate is not only paid for the direct traffic or sales that he refers to the merchant’s site, but also on every traffic or sales referred by various other affiliates who joined the affiliate program through his recommendation.
6. Multi tier Affiliate marketing program – In Multi-tier affiliate marketing , although the affiliate gets additional commission for a wider number of affiliates in different tiers in the affiliate network.
7. Residual income affiliate marketing – In residual income affiliate marketing, the affiliate gets paid not only once for every customer he has referred to the merchant’s site. Rather, the affiliate is also paid whenever the customer he has referred returns to the site and purchase another product. Compensation for such type of affiliate marketing is based on either sales percentage commission or fixed fee basis
So Where Do I Find Affiliate Marketing Programs?
Easy, here are a few ClickBank, Linkshare, Commission Junction and eJunkie. Also if you thinking of promoting a specfic product check the providers website. Normally there is a link at the bottom called “affiliates”, “partners” or something similar to those.
