Someone Please Explain What Affiliate Marketing is
If you are new to affiliate marketing or have never heard of it, the following information will explain to you what it is so you can gain a basic understanding. If you were given this information by someone it means they care about your education.
Are you ready? Great! Let's learn about affiliate marketing.
What's an affiliate?-
An affiliate is nothing more than someone who promotes someone else's product online
and is paid a commission for selling a publisher or merchant's product.
It is understood by most affiliates that the best way to promote a product
is to give their personal story and other's stories.
It gives it a more human face and people are more likely to buy if they hear someones unbiased perspective.Today's potential customer will almost always do research before buying a product.
What are publishers/merchants?
It is almost always free to become an affiliate for a publisher or merchant.
A publisher is someone who writes an e-book and has affiliates selling their ebook.
A merchant is an online store like godaddy.com or amazon.com.
I'm sure you can see why a merchant or publisher would want as many affiliates as possible selling for them and therefore becoming an affiliate for them is free.
Often a potential customer will see a product over and over again before buying. There is a better chance a customer will go to an affiliate's landing page or squeeze page
(a page that presells the product) and then buy the product using the affiliate's link.
This is called preselling. Without any story or background information a potential customer will most likely leave an affiliate's site looking for more information.
An affiliate's link is easy to spot. Take a company like godaddy.com.
Godaddy is a domain name seller and if you hover your mouse over
a godaddy affiliate's link it would look something like this:
http://www.godaddy.com/kl_?aid
The link is a special access portal to godaddy.com that will allow godaddy and you to keep track of how many visitors are visiting through your link and will track your sales.
Godaddy then pays you the affiliate for every sale made through this portal.
When you join an affiliate program, be sure to see how long the cookies will stay on a visitor's website. For the purpose of this article cookies are files that keep track of where a computer has browsed on the Internet. This is important because you want credit for the sales you helped generate.
Some merchants/publishers will only pay for the most recent affiliate's site visited before a consumer buys. Too bad for you if someone visited your site and then purchased on another affiliate's site.
What are affiliate managers?
Affiliate managers handle the money distribution between merchants/publishers and affiliates.
Two examples of affiliate managers are clickbank and commission junction.
Alot of affiliates prefer affiliate managers. Affiliates know the merchants and publishers will pay because the managers handle the money first and there is no chance of getting burned.
What is Clickbank?
Clickbank has hundreds of thousands of affiliates and can be a very powerful tool for merchants.
For affiliates clickbank is a great way for finding products to promote.
Most merchants with clickbank offer 25-75% commissions which is very good compared
to amazon.com which is usually less than 10%.
The mistake alot of beginner affiliates make is to find a product they want to promote with clickbank, create the link, create an ad and without the proper research they blindly promote the product with paid advertising.
You must do your research and understand your customer. I always recommend free advertising to beginner affiliates so you can get your feet wet before wasting money.
How do affiliates promote products?
Affiliates promote products by using on line advertising, forum marketing, e-books, article submissions, off line advertising and search engines.
AdSense and PPC
There are two major forms of Internet advertising.
Pay per click or PPC is just what it sounds like. You pay 5 cents, for example per click or whatever it takes to secure your ad on the top or right side of search engine results. It is often competitive for more popular keywords.
For example a search for "books" is going to be more competitive then "history books written before 1912" .After all how many people are looking for "books" versus "history books written before 1912"?
By the way a keyword is simply the phrase or word typed into a search column on a search engine.
This is how an advertiser using pay per click (ppc) advertising controls where their ad is placed. Every affiliate using advertising is looking for niche keywords. Niche keywords are words with high searches and low competition with other advertisers.
AdSense.
If you visit an actual website, Google or Yahoo will pay the website owner for every click that is made on one of the ads that are usually on the top, left side,or right side of the web page.
You the affiliate are charged per click for having your ad on someones website.
Google and Yahoo profit from the difference paid to the website owner and what they charge the advertiser.
Obviously it is more advantageous for the advertiser to advertise
history books on a history book website and not a candle website.
What if someone clicks on these ads and just for fun keeps on
clicking so you pay for someones expensive prank?
It does happen and it's called click fraud.
The chances of an affiliates' website being in the top ten search results for a given search is becoming harder and harder. The method called SEO or Search Engine Optimization means creating pages with good content for human readers and search engines. It is a lot of work. The search engines want good content for their readers and SEO allows the web page writer to deliver the keywords being searched for. The search engines create new algorithms all the time. This can be either bad or good for your website as far as placing in any given search.
This is why a lot of affiliates prefer to buy their way into the on line ads.
This way they are guaranteed a spot as long as they are willing to spend the money.
They must have the highest bidding price per click in order be at the top of the page.
Conversion
Conversion is a statistical analysis of how well your ad is performing.
The ratio between how many visitors visit your site and how many result in a sale is called conversion. It is very important to track this data so you know if your ad is worthwhile.
Another important analysis of your web page performance is called click through rate or CTR.
The CTR is the percentage of total visitors that will perform what it is you want them to do. If you want them to sign up for your ezine and 1 out of 10 do this, your CTR is 10%. If you want them to click on an ad then the total number of visitors divided by number of people who click on the ad is also the CTR.
This information gives you a basic understanding of affiliate marketing. Review the information from the person who gave you this article to help further you in your affiliate marketing education.
Thanks for reading,
Mat Gunnufson craii.com
About the Author:
Mat Gunnufson is considered an expert in affiliate marketing. His website,craii.com is designed to help complete beginners become successful online marketing gurus.
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