Thursday, November 6, 2008

Affiliate Marketing:

By Don Bethune

On the internet, when a company has a product it wants to sell, it opens up an online shop to get people to buy it. In affiliate marketing, other people with resources to sell its product may do so on their own sites and earn revenue.

This is a winning strategy for small companies, better than just advertising because the company never loses money. It only gets less profits than it would have if it sold the product directly. Unless the product revolutionizes the way people live their lives or do their work, this method is a safer to choice initially, rather than going all out to vouch for their products themselves.

But who is the affiliate marketer? Is he a door to door salesman? Is she a retailer who waits and watches for people coming to his shop to make purchases? Most likely he or she is neither. Affiliate Marketers are most often ordinary people with a good running website. On their site they have content related to the product they will be selling. The only requirement that a person has to satisfy to become an affiliate marketer is having a website.

However, success in this field does not come easily. Merely having a website doesn't mean that people will come visit, and definitely doesn't guarantee that people will actually buy what they're selling. Having content that actually relates to what the person wants to sell on the page is the first step to success. For example if the person is selling a digital camera, she should probably explain the need to have a good digital camera, on the page where the camera is for sale. She should create, on a subconscious level, an urge in the readers to buy the product.

The next step is to get traffic. This is simple, although it may be a long and slow process. The person's friends who have websites would probably be a good place to have his link featured. Posting his site's link on directories and forums is also a good idea. All this can improve the page rank of a site. The golden rule of traffic is still to have good content, and plenty of it.

With content and traffic in place, an affiliate marketer can definitely make good revenues, featuring products related to her content while her own website gains popularity. That's like having one's cake and eating it too. Although it sounds fairly simple, the job can sometimes be frustating. Patience, as always, is key.

Affiliate marketing can be a boon for both the company and the affiliate. Because neither of them loses anything.Once a product gains popularity, the company no longer needs to rely on affiliate marketers for people will directly stumble into the website of the company itself...So the company also gains advertising potential through tis affiliates

Affiliate marketing has also spread to the non-cyber world, as is clear from the success of Amway, Cossets and other brands. These companies generaly want their affiliates to pay a certain amount of money upfront, receive some training and then buy and sell their products. Although not as profitable as online affiliate marketing, these programss provide a great opportunity to housewives, retired people and the unemployed to make some cash.

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