More than anything else, for the internet marketer looking to generate income with an online business, signing up to an affiliate program is one of his best options available. It’s also one of the biggest growth areas in online business right now and for new marketers a course offered by experienced affiliate marketer Anthony Kirlew could be a good move.
What does the term actually mean? Simply stated it’s a program where you earn commission by introducing visitors or buyers to another website.
There is a trend towards calling this form of marketing performance marketing. In other words if a visitor who you sent to the site views the page, signs up to a membership site or buys a product, you get paid for that performance.
There are several types of affiliate marketing and some do not require a visitor to buy anything for you to earn a commission. A visitor to the site may just need to sign up to a newsletter or sign up to a site such as a dating site.
A visitor may also just click on an ad and you can earn some commission on that. The most commonly known of this is Google’s Adsense. Most bloggers have taken part in this program. A few years ago when the web was not quite that populated with bloggers, these click through ads paid out fairly handsomely.
Nowadays this is no longer the case and you would need a blog with huge amounts of monthly traffic to earn a living with Adsense advertising on your blog. These ads are generally text ads but there are increasing numbers of graphic ads being offered as well.
Regardless of the effectiveness of click through advertising commission most bloggers do have some text link ads on their blogs. It is one of the easiest to set up and this is something technically challenged bloggers can do themselves.
The bulk of the revenue made in the affiliate marketing space is commission based. About eighty percent of earnings are made via the revenue sharing form of business. As a prime example one needs go no further than Amazon.
In fact Amazon has been credited with being the first serious online shop offering affiliate marketing opportunities. Although other smaller traders worked on this before Amazon, it is this huge online retailer who really got it going and in fact has patents on many of the processes involved.
Amazon does make it fairly easy for somebody to sign up as an affiliate. The process is straight forward and the advertising material that you may use on your blog is good. The only real problem is that Amazon pays a very small percentage on a sale. In other words the commission is low.
Amazon is therefore very much like Google Adsense where you can only make some money if your blog or site has high amounts of traffic, for high traffic read hundreds of thousands of visitors.
For the average blogger this kind of traffic is not a reality and neither Google nor Amazon’s affiliate programs are of much use to them when looking to make a living. However there are many other vendors - that is people or companies offering goods for sale - who offer a much higher commission structure and these are definitely worth signing up for.
The third affiliate program type is a cost per action program. Nineteen percent of affiliate revenue is earned through this form of commission payment. A cost per action program would be one where the affiliate gets paid for inducing a visitor to sign up for an opt in e-mail list for instance.
These are the three predominant affiliate programs currently on offer for Internet marketers. Deciding which one would suit you the best would depend on your interests and what kind of serious traffic your blog attracts. If you are new to this form of business you might want to attend a course being offered by an experienced Affiliate Marketer.
on Mar 16th, 2010 at 5:01 am
Sorry I am monopolising your blog this morning but two things which I believe do need to be mentioned:
1. This is not as easy as simply setting up a blog and slapping some banners up and expecting the money to roll into your account. You have to add value and generate the leads or sales through your site which is tricky when many internet browsers have become “ad blind”
2. Something which never gets mentioned is the fact that the real conversion rate of affiliate pay-per-action campaigns (specifically sale) is that the “real” conversion rate for many of these things is under 1%. In other words you need to generate between 100 and 150 click throughs to make a single sale. If you commission is say 3% then work out the value of what you would spend purchasing the product you are getting from the sale of products on the sellers site. I suspect you will find you are earning between R3 and R8 for every 125 - 150 clicks you are sending through…. Puts it into perspective about how difficult it is to make money doing affiliate marketing!
on Mar 16th, 2010 at 5:10 am
Thanks for your comments. They are appreciated!
I totally agree with you that it is very difficult to make a living as internet marketer and this is not only within the affiliate marketing sphere but also selling own products or offering a subscription service for instance.
I think people are blinded by the fact that getting into this business is so cheap. Just pull up a computer and plug into the internet.
Doesn’t quite work like that!
on Mar 16th, 2010 at 8:13 am
Indeed. If you approach it as a cheap and easy venture then you’re probably going to be treated as a cheap and nasty marketer.