Earn Money With An Affiliate Marketing Business

Affiliate Marketing

First: What is Internet Marketing?

Internet Marketing is Marketing that focuses on selling goods and services on the internet. This includes websites from large corporations down to individuals. 

Marketing is a complex activity that I can only summarize here:

1) Determine a target Audience or market

2) Branding

3) Determine customer need, build customer relationships, satisfy the customer and keep the customer

Each of these points is worthy of a book and will be discussed in later posts.

Specifically, what is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is the segment of Internet Marketing where the business focuses on selling someone else's product. Keep in mind that the affiliate marketer is the advertiser, not the seller!  The affiliate marketer (Affiliate) advertises the product or products of the vendor (Seller).  For example Amazon.com has an affiliate program: the seller is Amazon in that the buyer actually goes to Amazon's website to buy the product, and the advertiser (Affiliate) will receive a commission on the sale for referring that customer. 

The affiliate earns a commission from sales made by links supplied by an affiliate network or directly from the seller. I'll talk about Affiliate networks in a later post. The link could be to a generic page or to a specific product. The destination of the link is on the Seller’s website not the Affiliate’s.

There are two types of Affiliate marketers: Passive and Active. Passive Affiliate marketers use the affiliate links to sell products related to content but don't care how much money they make -- as any money is good money. Being passive is quickly getting a link, slap it on to a website and just wait -- forever. If a sale is made, it's money in the bank.

Then there is the Active Affiliate Marketer, which is the focus of this blog. The Active Marketer seeks to make a real business out of marketing other peoples products. Links are updated often, Analysis is done to improve potential for profits by watching trends, switching products, determining ad placement and other statistical analysis that I will reveal in later posts.

The Active Affiliate Marketer is
the new Sales-force of the
2000s and beyond!

Although the focus of this blog is on the Active Marketers, the Passive Marketers stand to learn a bit as well. And, who knows, may be converted to Active Marketers. This switch can make the difference of making $20 a year to making $200 or more a day.

Naturally, there is no guarantee on how much or how little you will make. How much you make will depend on too many factors and can be the subject of yet another post. (it seems I am saying a lot of that lately) To say you will make tons of money is not 100% truthful. Because, without a doubt, you can -- it will be a lot of work. The reality is unless you are prepared to do the work, you may not see so much as a dime a year. (see, I can say this because I'm not selling anything)

IMPORTANT

With regard to links: Bear in mind that nothing prevents the customer/buyer from bypassing the affiliate link and going directly to the vendor's site. Unfortunately there is no way to track this and determine the actual numbers to do proper statistical analysis of this phenomenon. But, you must constantly be aware of this loss of income.

The interesting thing to note is that the customer doing the bypass will not save anything by doing so, because 1) The sale is on the Seller’s website and 2) Commissions are calculated after the sale and has no affect on the cost to the buyer. Really the deviant buyer saves nothing to get the satisfaction of ripping the affiliate off from a legitimate sale and referral.

I think people do it because Affiliate marketing has gotten a bad rap from greedy charlatans selling the get rich schemes.  People have become shy, wary and downright distrustful of links. That is specifically why I am introducing this FREE blog -- to get Affiliate marketing back on track and into-the-light away from the dark-side.

If done properly, affiliate marketing is a legitimate business. If you are here to make tons of money for the sake of getting yourself rich, I would prefer it if you leave now. This site is for honest affiliates. The sellers are legitimate companies selling legitimate products that are trying to fulfill the needs of real customers -- I think that they all demand your respect!

Ironically, I think that those charlatans have marketing savvy and we can learn from them. Do HOW they do, not WHAT they do. What I mean by that will become clear as you continue to read these posts. 

We should build on fulfilling needs and not by ripping each other off !

You must say no to get rich quick.  It hurts the economy, and right now that is not what our economy needs. 

Did I just say that? What I probably should have said is that the getting rich quick part is okay as long as you are not ripping people off.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to leave a comment.