Affiliate marketing is taking the Internet by storm. If you’re not familiar with the principles of affiliate program and its advantages over the other types of Internet advertising and sales, you might think that it is an urban legend (a bizarre untrue store).

This notion is not true, if you have the right affiliate program and affiliate internet marketing tools at your disposal, affiliate-marketing could be very profitable for both affiliates and advertisers (web publishers).

What Is Affiliate-Marketing?

The concept of affiliate programs is not new.

A Web publisher produces their product (e-book, video, hard goods etc.) and advertise to anyone interested in promoting their product and get certain amount of commission (the higher the better for affiliates). In some cases, this is getting more common, the publisher will provide the tools (sales letter, e-mail, banners etc.) to promote their products.

Some advanced affiliate marketers will bypass the publisher’s tools and make their own marketing tools to differentiate themselves from other affiliates remember, thousands of affiliates may be representing/marketing one product.

As an affiliate, you put the banners or text links of an affiliate advertiser on your site and when a visitor from your site goes to the advertiser’s site to register or to buy a product, you get paid a commission.

Many people look at affiliate-program differently; some people just need extra money in addition to their salary while others want an affiliate-program to be their real source of income. As with any business, whatever effort you are able to put into the affiliate program is the result you will get out it.

From an affiliate point of view, affiliate marketing is an easy and stable source of income because there is no product to produce. For many affiliates, affiliate programs are a golden mine, which brings them thousands of dollars every month on auto-pilot.

For advertisers, online-affiliate-marketing is a much better deal than PPC (Pay Per Click) or CPM (Cost Per Mille – a Thousand impressions) because they pay for results (registrations or purchases). Compared to PPC and CPM the commission or fees paid to affiliates are much higher than their PPC ad cost, yet advertisers are happier because they pay for real results.

With So Many Affiliate-Programs, How Can You Choose?

Followings are the tips of what to look for when finding a good affiliate program:

• Ask questions first before you join an affiliate program (payment dates, commission rate, is there a fee to join? one-tier or two-tier etc.)
• High percentage of commission is better
• Any promotional material that is readily available is a good one; also a branded e-book that you can use to invite people
• Will you be able to follow-up with your prospects?
• How long are you going to be tied to your prospects, one of the best that I have seen is Ken Evoy’s 5 Plillars Affiliate Program that offers a life cookie which means as long as your referral continue to buy their products/services you will get commission and residual income.

How to Become an Affiliate Marketer

Becoming an affiliate marketer is not difficult. You need to have an account with an affiliate network, such as ClickBank, Google AdSense, Amazon, Commission Junction, Share a Sale or individual publishers.

After you open an account with an affiliate network, you will get links to advertisers sites to put on your site. These links have your affiliate ID encoded, so that when somebody clicks on a link on your site and registers with or buy from the advertiser, the advertiser knows it is you, who brought the customer/client and will reward you with commission which will be released to your Paypal account or bank account.

As you probably guess, making your visitors register with or purchase from the advertisers site is much more difficult than to make them click on an ad they find interesting. This is quite logical and it is compensated by the higher commissions affiliates pay for a successful registration or purchase most publishers are not moving towards paying for actual referral or purchase rather than clicks.

Affiliate-Marketing-Tools

One of the tricks to being a successful affiliate marketer is to have the right affiliate marketing tools at your disposal. Usually affiliate marketing tools include banners, text ads but they also can include various incentives for the users.

In this aspect it is of primary importance what ads you publish on your site. If the ads you publish are not of interest to your visitors, they will not register/purchase and your pockets will be empty.

Yes, the right affiliate marketing and affiliate internet marketing tools matter that much!

To your success and happiness,

Abby Lawal

P.S. The best affiliate program to join is the one that not just pay for your effort, but also pay some percentage for the effort of those people you refer, so that you will continue to enjoy your residual income on your one time effort.