What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is essentially promoting another person’s products and or services for a commission. In Affiliate Marketing you are given a unique link to the product or service you’re promoting, when somebody purchases said item through your link you are credited with the sale and given a percentage of the sale or a set price, also known as a commission. So in order to make money online, you need to promote said products. The usual way to do this is by placing advertisements on your website.
Relevance of products
Essentially, in order for your promotion attempts to be extremely effective you need your ads to be relevant to the visitors of your website. So for example if you have a website about surfing, then you’re going to be promoting surf boards or surfing products. Obviously, these are very basic strategy to understand and if you ignore it, you won’t be as profitable as you like.
Commission Junction
Commission Junction is the largest affiliate networks in the world, the majority of the world’s largest companies which have an online outlets use Commission Junction. Essentially the products stocked by the advertisers are both physical and digital, an example of a physical product would be a surf board and an example of a digital product would be a surfing movie which would not be shipped to the customer but rather downloadable to their computer. So basically, Commission junction advertisers provide you with banners and other tools to place on your website in order to promote products.
Click Bank
Click Bank only stocks digital items, which upon the customer purchasing the item they are given a link in which they can either download it or have access to what they’ve purchased. The difference between Click Bank and Commission Junction is that Click Bank doesn’t stock banner ads to help you promote the products, although some companies will provide some banner ads through their own methods to help you. However, being digital products there is no shipping, creation or labour costs generally associated with physical products, therefore the commissions can be substantially higher.
You may be worried about placing ads on your website, however the financial benefit generally out weighs any adverse affects caused by ads. Generally you’ll find that if the ads are relevant to your website, your visitors will not have an issue with them. Furthermore, you may even find yourself helping your visitors by introducing them to something they need. Not to mention, there is potentially a lot of money to be made online with affiliate marketing.
