Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Do You Have What it Takes to be a Successful Affiliate Marketer?

By Tony Buel

Affiliate marketing is a business model where you as the affiliate marketer sell products and services, which you don't own in order to generate sales from which you get a percentage.

Affiliate Marketing works because it allows people to take direct action and participate in the growth of a business or industry.

Affiliate Marketers attract an audience of buyers for the products and services people are searching to buy. This can be via banner ads, Pay per Click ads, websites you own, email marketing, blogs, etc. There are a myriad of ways to generate this traffic.

The way you as an affiliate marketer make money is that whenever a buyer clicks through one of your links and purchases a product you receive credit for the sale.

Now you need to know that Affiliate Marketing does take some work. It does take know-how and effective use of your time and resources. Some marketing techniques you use will cost a little - for example advertising. Others can cost you almost nothing (such as SEO to get your site ranked high in the search engines), but can take some time. Balance is the key.

The more you put into it, the more research you do into winning strategies, and the more you implement what you learn, the more successful you will be as an Affiliate Marketer. And the money will follow close behind.

Diversity is the key to being a successful in this business. The more programs you sign on to and promote, the better your odds that you will pick a real winner. Not all affiliate programs are equal and it does take some trial and error to find the good ones.

The successful Affiliate Marketer knows how to drive customer traffic to those areas where they will be compelled to click through your link and buy. The better you are at this, the more you can generate for yourself

Good Affiliate Marketers will make use of the entire internet. In a coordinated effort these can work quite successfully in funneling the traffic where you need it to go.

One of the cool things about affiliate marketing is that while it does take work, once it is properly set up it can create a nice income for months or longer. Once the hard work setting it up is done, all that is necessary is some routine maintenance and tweaking here and there to make sure things are still running smoothly.

But in some ways it can be thought of as the ideal 'set it and forget it' business. You can keep things in place generating a substantial income for you while you go and research other lucrative affiliate programs.

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