Affiliate marketing is often described as the easiest, fastest way to make money online and frequently uses the success stories of a very fortunate minority of ‘super affiliates’ who have created a lucrative new career, which requires very little work and provides the day to day freedom that most people can only dream of. And while it’s not exactly the get rich quick, quit your day job after a couple of weeks activity it’s oftentimes made out to be, affiliate marketing has become a valuable source of supplemental income for many people and anyone can get involved.
There are a few basic steps needed to at least get started with affiliate marketing. To begin with, you need to set up a blog or website to both drive traffic to and place ads. When creating your online presence, you will need to decide what exactly it will entail, in other words, you gotta find your niche. It’s important to pick an industry or general topic you are interested in and enjoy doing, which in the long run will hopefully lead to better results, including what you put into it and what you get out of it. The subject of your website or blog should reflect the products and/or services you are going to be promoting; you should however, also consider commission structure and competition for anything you are interested in becoming an affiliate for.
Once you have your online presence and idea of the types of products or services to push, it’s time to enroll in an affiliate program, which in itself offers a variety of options. A major one to consider is whether it will be Pay-Per-Click (PPC) where you are paid each time a visitor clicks on your ad and visits the merchants site, or Pay-Per-Performance (PPP) in which case, you are paid only when a user completes a desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter on the merchants site. As soon as you are set up with your affiliate program, it’s time to place the ads (affiliate networks will often help with ad support) on your site. These appear once a code, which is also used to identify your site as the source of incoming links to your merchant’s website, is placed on your site.
From there it’s all about driving traffic, monitoring your site, tweaking your ads to maximize performance, and hopefully collecting some additional revenue!