Affiliate marketing is a wonderful way to get started in Internet marketing and earn money online with a minimum of investment. If you already have a website or blog with traffic you can start earning right away.
What is affiliate marketing?
Online merchants who sell their products online have the possibility to recruit affiliates to promote and sell their merchandise in exchange of a commission. They do so with an in-house affiliate program or through an affiliate program network.
When you join such an affiliate program, you are contracted as an independent affiliate and assigned a unique user id that will be used to track your sales online. Affiliate marketing is a result-based model and you will be paid only if you make sales.
There are affiliate programs for almost all products you can think of. Amazon was one of the first affiliate program and is still strong today. With them you can sell everything from books to clothes, shoes and appliances for a 6% starting commission.
Can you earn money online with affiliate marketing?
You can earn money online joining affiliate programs when you are able to match your website topic with products that will interest your audience. If you have for example a website about aquariums and goldfish, there are plenty of products you can sell to your website visitors: aquariums, accessories, books, videos, information…
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With affiliate marketing, you do not have to own the products or stock the items in your garage, you just have to partner with merchants that sell the products in joining for free their affiliate program. You will then be able to use on your site text links, banners and product images or feeds that contain your affiliate ID in all the links. Detailed statistics will show you how well you are doing and what your earnings are.
If you have a page about a particular kind of goldfish, you may match a product that will give a solution to someone’s problem. Usually, commissions on physical products (10-15%) are inferior to digital products (50-75%) because there is the cost of the product and shipment to take into account. You may be able to sell both of them and offer you audience a wide range of items via affiliate products.
To your success.