Monday, June 1, 2009

Have You Ever Wondered How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

By Winson Yeung

Many people are deciding to finally give the Internet a try when it comes to trying to generate some income from it. If that's the case for you, affiliate marketing and the affiliate -- and how it works -- is something you need to know before going whole hog in the affiliate marketing world. The answers can be gained readily enough, but actually implementing a successful affiliate marketing campaign can be tricky.

For starters, affiliate marketing is all Internet-based. In it, a business (and it can be for just about anything) rewards an affiliate - you, in this instance - for getting the business a visitor or customer. This visitor or customer is brought to the business through the affiliate's marketing efforts.

Most times, an affiliate will make his or her money through those fees, or commissions. There can also be small fees paid when a consumer clicks on an ad the merchandiser has placed on the affiliate's website, but that's pretty uncommon.

Marketing as an affiliate is a very large business on the Internet. Affiliates set up websites strictly for the purpose of attracting visitors who they then convince to go over to another site where a merchandiser hopes to sell them something of value. Good affiliate websites can expect to earn a steady stream of commissions in this manner.

In affiliate marketing, there are techniques used to earn a profit. An affiliate marketer will first establish a website that has something to do with whatever it is that his or her merchandiser will be selling. If it's performance golf clubs, the affiliate will design and set up a site that reviews these sorts of clubs. The site could also have a series of articles on a proper swing, or the care and upkeep of golf clubs. The affiliate will also be working hard to get his affiliate site "ranked" in all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.).

Affiliate marketers live and die on search engine placement (called "rankings"), and they spend a lot of time trying to get highly ranked, i.e. on the first few pages of the search engine. One way they do this is by writing and submitting articles - on finding a good entry level guitar, for example - to article directories. Naturally, those articles will have links back to the affiliate's website.

The most successful affiliate marketers use a wide variety of techniques and processes for getting traffic to their own sites and then moving that traffic to a merchandiser site, where a sale will hopefully result. There are any number of tip sheets, guides, and software programs on how to set up a successful affiliate marketing site. Learn as much as you can and you may find yourself making a nice living, eventually.

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