Tom Antion: Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

When I'm speaking to brand new Internet marketers there is always some confusion about affiliate marketing. Undoubtedly the new person (this may be you) has heard you can make lots of money quickly with other people's products. That's true, but it's not as easy as it sounds. Before I get into that, let me briefly outline the two different types of affiliate marketing:

AFFILIATE MARKETING HAS TWO PARTS

1. You invest nothing and passively sell "other people's products" on your website. They ship the product, They handle the calls. They do the customer service. You simply encourage your website visitors, audience members and colleagues to click on your affiliate links and you get a check each month if those people buy something at the site you sent them to. No shopping cart, or merchant account required.

2. You invest a little in the tracking software and have other people around the world selling "your" products and services on their websites.

The problem with trying to start out with #1 is that if you are new, you most likely don't have anyone to tell about the affiliate vendor you are trying to promote. You probably don't have a database of people and you probably don't have any traffic to your website. So, who is going to buy the products you are trying to promote?

The problem with #2 is that you probably don't have any products and if you do, you probably don't know many competent affiliate promoters who would want to promote your product for the commission you would pay them.

So what do you do?

1. Get lots of traffic to your website and promote appropriate affiliate programs.
2. Write articles and put your affiliate links in the articles. Then submit them on your website and also submit them to free article directories.
3. Tell people about the product and then send them to your website to click on your affiliate link.
4. Keep developing your own information products that will bring you all the profit. When you do this, you have much less risk and you don't have to be as good a marketer to get money rolling in.

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