Affiliate Marketing with Low Cost Products

Promoting Low Priced Products in Affiliate Marketing






If you are new in the field of affiliate marketing and your website traffic is not very large, then you cannot make more sales. If you are promoting the products that are low priced, then your monthly income will be very low. Usually the e-books and audio files are one of the lowest priced products which you may decide to sell. The usual sale price of these items is less than $100. This means for every sale, you will be receiving about $20 if the sale commission is 20%. In order to generate some reasonable revenue, many sales will be needed. But it is not possible in case of new websites where traffic is not very large.

On the other hand if you are an experienced affiliate marketer and your website traffic is really large then you can expect to earn a good amount even by promoting low priced products. If the products are hot and your traffic is large, then it is not a problem. For example, if you can sell 100 products, then your monthly income will be $2000 at the rate of 20% sales commission. This amount can be increased if you are promoting more than one product.

Small affiliate marketers should not choose the low priced products to promote. Such affiliate marketers should choose the hot product having a good price. For example, if the product price is $1000 and your monthly sale is 10 products then you are getting $2000 per month at the rate of 20% sales commission. It means that less traffic and sales may reward you more, if you are promoting the high priced products.

But to sell the high priced products requires some extra efforts. Offer some free reports or newsletter or some other useful stuff on your website and store the email addresses of your website visitors. Your offer should be so effective that most of the visitors should give you their email address to take your offer. Now use these email addresses to start your ad campaign. This will result in more traffic to your website. The companies that are making high priced products usually offer the free installations, free maintenance and other benefits to their customers. Study these services in detail and advertise them. Tell your visitors that they will receive the technical assistance after they purchase the product. There may be some other offers like a money back guarantee. Talk to your merchant and get the full details. Then inform your users using your website pages, newsletters and emails. These steps will surely increase your website traffic and number of sales.

The merchants, who are manufacturing low priced products, usually don’t offer extra benefits like a money back guarantee, free installation, technical assistance and free maintenance etc. This is another reason of fewer sales of low priced products.

But if you can find some merchants who are offering these extra services with their low priced products, you can choose to promote their product. But also choose some high priced hot products too. Try to sell them both.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, we can say that usually selecting a low priced product for affiliate marketing is not a good decision, because you are required to make many sales to get generate a good income. But if your website traffic is very large then you can select the low priced products, because you can expect more sales. Selecting a well priced product and starting a good advertisement campaign usually gives better results.

Affiliate Marketing With a Website

Designing Your Website for Affiliate Marketing







If you want to start marketing as an affiliate then you need to have your own website. This is the main requirement to start your online business. Your website does not have to be loaded with graphics, but it does need to be informative, simple and professional.

To make your website you will need to do three things. Purchase a domain name, purchase the hosting service and design your website to upload to your hosting server. While purchasing the domain name, try to get a name that contains the main keywords of your website. Or you may simply choose a name that you like.

While selecting your hosting company, look for reliability. Hosting companies will be responsible for the storage of your files and to keep your website up and running. Godaddy.com is a well known, reliable hosting company.

How should your website be designed?

Hire a Designer

You can hire a web designer to do this design work for you. Just ask him to make the site professional looking and clean. The easiest way to hire a designer is to use an auction website like RentACoder.com or ODESK.com. Simply type a description of your project and designers will enter their bids. You will receive many bids from different designers. Check the portfolio and rate of each designer. Select the one which is best for your work and award him your project. After getting your website you can pay him through the auction website.

Use a Free Template

If you don’t want to invest to do the designing then you can get some free templates. There are many websites on the internet that are offering free website templates. Just visit these sites and choose the template that you like. Fill in the template with you own content and upload it on your server.

Use Site Builder Tools

Another choice is to use the site builder tools. You can use “dreamweaver” and “frontpage” to make your website yourself.

Characteristics of a Good Website

Simple and Professional

Your website is meant for business, so it must look professional. It should not be over loaded with heavy graphics and lots of flashy banners. Simplicity is best. Try to use light colors. Make a nice header to show your company name and theme. The site navigation must be simple and easy. People should not have any difficulty in searching for a specific page or information; otherwise they will not re-visit your website.

Provide Search Facility

Your website should have a search box on every page to search your website. This will be a great help for the visitors that want to search for a specific product or information on your website.

Build Your Mailing List

Some affiliate programs offer you a website to promote their business. This is the ready made solution. But in this case you cannot build your mailing list. Always try to get your own website where you can easily build your mailing list to promote your business.

Your own website is the key requirement for affiliate marketing. The overall look and feel of your website should be attractive and the site must provide the information for which people are looking for. Provide easy navigation and search facilities to make it user friendly.

Start NOW as Affiliate Marketer

Affiliate Marketing - How to Get Started In 6 Easy Steps

Affiliate marketing is an easy to start online business. It is really easy to start but requires the hard work to become successful. In this article you will learn the six basic steps that are required to enter in this business. The steps are brief and quite simple. You must follow these steps in order to become successful otherwise you would not get the desired results.

1. Pick a Market

Why to choose a market instead of product? The reason is quite clear that you would like to put more products in your pipeline. You have to choose a market which suits you. You must obtain detailed information about it.

2. Pick a Product

When you have picked a specific market, now it is time to select a product. You will definitely want to add all the products at the beginning, but it is advised not to do this in the start. If you choose more products in the beginning, you will not be able to focus. Your attention will be diverted to different products. So it is better to choose one product to get best out of it. When you have started getting the sales then you can add more products.

3. Build an Autoresponder Series

After you start your business, you must create a follow up series, which is also called an autoresponder series. This series must have the information about your product. There you can add contents of your product. If you are selling golf clubs, you can build a series having some basic information about it. There you can tell your visitors how they can purchase golf clubs. You can also add some advantages or the profiles of some major golfers in the world. You should try to be more and more creative. It is observed that during the period of first few months affiliates do not get reasonable sales. But after six months, they expect to gain much better sales.

4. Build a Page to Capture Emails

Create a page in your website where you will capture information about your prospects so you can send them your follow-up series. If you are building a business, having your own web site is a necessity. This website will be needed to show your affiliate products to the website visitors. You will grab the visitor’s emails to promote your email campaigns.

5. Use Traffic Generation Techniques

Once your website is up, use some traffic generation techniques. After applying the traffic generation techniques, you should wait for some time to get the results. Try different techniques and see the results. Then on the basis of your experience, continue with the technique that shows best results.

6. Find additional related products

Once you have started to make a good and reliable income with a single product, then you should add some new products to your products list. But you must carefully select new products to put them in the list.

Always start with a single, hot and demanding product to gain good results. Concentrate on this single product, make your website to display the product and capture the email addresses of visitors. Use these email addresses and your website to start a powerful advertisement campaign. Use the techniques to drive maximum traffic to your website. Once you have started earning with a single product, add more products and repeat the process.

Things to do as Affiliate Marketer

What to do after joining an Affiliate Program

After joining a strong and reliable affiliate program, you need to take several steps to become successful. Without these steps it will be difficult for you to earn a reasonable amount of money every month. Usually people don’t know what to do after selecting an affiliate program and they simply fail.

Following are these necessary steps:

First of all, set your objective. This means set the amount of money you want to earn every month through affiliate marketing. If you are doing this business as a part time business, then you will need less effort as you want to earn less. On the other hand if you are relying on this business to meet your needs, then you should be prepared for hard work, sometimes working on holidays and giving at least 8-10 hours a day.

After that, search the affiliate programs to select a market to work. There are usually many types of markets for example, health, entertainment, sports etc.
Choose the market that is hot and suits your interests.

While selecting a market, look at the benefits they are offering to the affiliate markets. Try to select the market that is hot and which is offering a good profit share to their affiliates.

Before selecting a merchant to be an affiliate for, look at its history. How many affiliates does this merchant already have? What are the opinions of the affiliates with whom he is working? By answering these questions, you will know a lot about the reputation of your merchant. Avoid new merchants and join those who are strong in the market and have been in business for many years with success. It will be easier to promote the products of the merchants who are senior in the field. Customers will feel more at ease to make a purchase from a merchant that has been around for awhile.

When you have chosen a specific market, now it is time to select a product. You will definitely want to add all of the products at the beginning, but it is advised not to do this in the start. If you choose more products in the beginning, you will not be able to focus. Your attention will be diverted to different products. So it is better to choose one product to get the best result from it. When you have started getting the sales you desire and feel comfortable, then you can add more products.

Make your own website. Your website is meant for the business. So it must look professional. It should not be over loaded with heavy graphics and lots of flashy banners. Simple is the best. Try to use light colors. Make a nice header to show your company name and theme. The site navigation must be simple and easy. People should not have any difficulty in searching for a specific page or information. Otherwise they will not re-visit your website.

If you don’t want to invest money in having your website designed for you, then you can get free website design templates. There are many websites on the internet that are offering free website templates. Just visit these sites and choose the template that you like. Fill the template with you own content and upload it on your server.


Your website should have a search box on every page to search your website. This will be a great help for the visitors that want to search a specific product or information on your website.

You can write articles and publish them in the free article directories. You can embed your affiliate links in the text of your articles. If your articles are well formatted, informative and the article directory has large traffic, then you can expect some good traffic to your affiliate links. And you know that more traffic on your affiliate links will result in more sales through your affiliate links.

Conclusion

After joining an affiliate program, you are required to choose the right market, right merchant and right product. After that, choose the right methods to promote your products to become successful as an affiliate.

Tools for Affiliate Marketing

Essential Tools for Successful Affiliate Marketing

Following are the top three essential tools for a successful affiliate marketing business.

Create Your Own Website

Your own website is the basic tool which is essential for successful affiliate marketing. If you want to make a good start in this field you must build an impressive, credible and professional-looking website. If you are able to create a website successfully and it is appreciated by the users, then it is the sign for a successful affiliate marketing career for you. You must create a site which will fulfill the requirements of almost all visitors and all of your prospects may be inspired by it. A user friendly site will promote the user to visit the links to the products and services that are advertised on the site. This will give you sales.

An important point to note is that the majority of the visitors do not come online to buy something. The reason of using the internet is to find some information or they may be looking for entertainment purposes. So all you need to do is just fill your website with this kind of stuff to gain the traffic. It is fact that when people visit your website they will click on the links of your affiliate products. So it will help to increase your sales. You should provide your own original content on your website. You can put some interesting articles there. If you provide good stuff, it will be liked by your visitors. If you add interesting content, then your website can become very popular and your search engine rating will also be improved.

Give Incentives to Your Visitors

Competition today is very tough among affiliates on the internet. If you want to get the major share of your target market, then you should always keep an eye on your competitor. You should use every possible technique to make your users visit your site regularly. You should also stride to make it easier for your visitors to click the links and take a look at the products and services that you are offering. Creating an opt-in email list is a good method to get prospects. You should provide newsletter to your users, and offer them attractive incentives. This is the ideal way to convince them to subscribe to the newsletters. Offering free software or e-books to attract the users to your website is always a good idea.


Link Popularity

If you want to run a successful website then you must remember the fact that your success is hidden in driving more traffic to your website. It is necessary in order to achieve a good income. To achieve this goal, your website must be rated high in search engines. Link Popularity is an important factor which is used to determine search engine rankings. To get the high rankings, you must try to enhance your link popularity. Link popularity simply means how popular your website link is. For example tinyurl.com is a very popular website link. Try to choose a website name that is short, interesting, easy to remember name that is related to your business. This will help to increase your link popularity.

Conclusion

Above are the three basic tools for you to increase your sales in the field of affiliate marketing. There are still many other methods and tricks that can be used to maximize your earnings as an affiliate marketer but these are the basic tools. Make your own website. Your website must be easy to use and informative. It should deliver what people are looking for. Try to attract people by offering them free incentives. Try different methods to increase your link popularity to achieve a high ranking in the search engines. Use a simple, easy and interesting name for your website. Long and difficult names are hard to remember, so try to avoid them.

Commissions in Affiliate Marketing

Sales Commission in Affiliate Marketing

This article will provide some useful information to those who are planning to start affiliate marketing. The profit in this business is the sales commission. Affiliates are interested in the products that offer high sales commissions. The merchants want to sell their products but they want to pay less sales commission to get the maximum benefit.

This article will guide the merchants on how to set their sales commission. Also it will tell the affiliates how to choose the products on the basis of sales commission offered.

Affiliate Marketers and Sales Commission

Whenever an affiliate marketer plans to enter into this field, the following questions arise in his mind:

“Will I be able to earn commission by selling merchant's products? What will be my percentage? Will I be able to earn a good amount from selling the products or not?”

There are different types of affiliate programs. The first type is called “Pay per Sale”, the second is “Pay per Lead” and last is “Pay per Click”. There are some more types, but these three are the most popular among affiliate marketers.

In the pay per sale option, the merchant pays the affiliates on every sale. Usually the commission rate is anywhere between 10-50%. The products that are really hot in the market usually give less commission. In the pay per lead, the affiliate is paid for every person that is registered on the merchant website. Usually a visitor is offered to use a free product on a trial basis and their credit card information is stored. The visitor’s credit card is not charged during the trial period. After the trial period has expired, if the visitor is interested, he will be charged. In the pay per click option, the affiliate is paid for every click that is made on his affiliate link. The affiliate is paid for every click, even if the visitors do not make any purchases. Obviously the commission on per click is much less as compared to other options.

In the beginning, only select the products that are hot and are really making sales, even if their sales commission is lower. Greater sales will compensate you. If you are choosing the product just on the basis of high profits and not on the basis of its demand, then you may suffer. Another good way is to choose the hot products with less profit and some new products with high profit. Then keep an eye on your sales. If the new products are giving you the sales then it is ok. Otherwise remove them and select some other new product with good sales commission.

If your website has really a good and constant flow of traffic, then pay per click is a very good option for you. Because you are paid for every click and you are not required to make any sales.

Merchants and Sales Commission

If you are a merchant, then always offer a commission that is both acceptable by your affiliates and you. If you offer a very low commission, then there are less chances of affiliate’s interest in your products and this may reduce your sales. On the other hand, if you are offering a very high commission, it will attract the affiliates but in the long term you may suffer. So always try to offer a reasonable commission.

If you are a merchant and are going to introduce a new product to the market, then you can offer some really high commissions in the start. This may be like 50% of the sale. This will attract the affiliates and you will get a large number of affiliates in very little time. The affiliates will be highly motivated to make as many sales as they can so that they can earn high commissions. This will greatly increase your sales. Once your product has become popular and in demand, then you may reduce the sales commission gradually.

As a conclusion, setting a reasonable commission is an important factor for the merchants to do good business. Also the affiliate marketers should select the products that are giving them good profit and are easy to sell.

Without Website Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing Without a Website

Having your own website to promote your affiliate products is a good option. But it is not necessary. There are many methods available that can be used to do your affiliate marketing business. The list is long, but the most important methods are email marketing, writing articles to e-groups, joining online discussions etc. Let us discuss some important methods that can be used to promote your affiliate products without having your own website.


Email Marketing

In this method you can promote your affiliate links and you don’t need your own website. People can click on your affiliate links present in your emails and can go directly to the merchant website to purchase the products.

Your email should contain the introduction about the product you are promoting and your affiliate links. Try to make your emails interesting and brief.

Try to expand your contact list. Use as many methods as you can to grab the email addresses of new people. Use online forums, chat forums etc to make new friends. Your email list must contain a few hundred contacts, at least. But don’t spam. Don’t send emails to the people who don’t know about you or who don’t want to receive your emails. Otherwise they will just block your emails and you will lose your contacts. As I said, your emails should be interesting to get the reader’s attention.


Offline Promotion

You can use the offline methods of promotion, like the classified ads, flyers etc. The best choice is the classified ads because its exposure is largest.

Writing free e-books

It is similar to email marketing. But in this method you will write the informative and interesting e-books and will send to the people via their email address. These e-books should be easy to read and helpful for their readers. The topics should be related to your affiliate products so that you can recommend the products in the body of e-books. Alternatively you can add a brief note about your affiliate products and affiliate links for promotion. If the readers like your e-book, they may visit the merchant website and make a purchase.

Writing in Forums

Search for some forums, at least three, that are related to your product and have high page rank. Register on these forums and start some discussion in the forum where maximum people are involved. Just post your questions there or answer some questions of other members. But don’t add any promotion text in the body of your posts. You are allowed to put your signature at the end of your post. Here you can write you name and your affiliate links.

When you become an active member of this forum then you may get some traffic from these forums to your merchant website through your affiliate links. This will ultimately result in more sales of the products you are promoting.

Writing Articles

You can write articles and publish them in the free article directories. You can embed your affiliate links in the text of your articles. If your articles are well formatted, informative and the article directory has large traffic then you can expect some good traffic to your affiliate links. And you know that more traffic on your affiliate links will result in more sales through your affiliate links.

Conclusion

The use of a website to promote your affiliate products is a good idea but it is not necessary. You can use the alternate methods to promote your affiliate products and links. The most popular among these methods are email marketing, writing to forums, article writing and offline promotion like classified ads. The main idea is that instead of promoting your website you will directly promote your affiliate links and people will directly go to the merchant website by clicking your affiliate links to purchase the products. This way you do not have to pay extra for your website creation and maintenance.

Tips for Choosing an Affiliate Program

How to Choose an Affiliate Program

If you are an affiliate marketer, you have two options. The first option is to choose the product which has a great demand in the market. These items are expected to be sold immediately due to the interest of the people. Some examples of such particular items are dating sites, casino sites and weight loss products. The second option is to choose a product that suits your interests and you, yourself like to promote it.

We recommend you choose a product which is considered to be the hot product in the market as well as you having some interest in it. For example if you are golfer, then you should choose golfing products to promote. These products are among the hottest products on the market. Plus if you are a golfer, it will be easy for you to give detailed information about it on your website. So you can give lots of information there, you can write the basic rules about that sport, you can also write the tips about how new golfers can improve their playing skills. You can also give some guidance to anyone who may want to purchase golf equipment by suggesting the best place to go for good quality equipment. Similarly, you can give lots of golf related information on your website that may attract more visitors.

Let us look at some of the important things before promoting ANY affiliate program

Choose Hot Products

Always choose the items which have a high demand in the market. If you want to choose a product but don’t know about the demand of that product, then visit Overture.com. Here you can check the bidding status of a product. If you find that many sellers are bidding for it, then it means it is a demanding product.


Be Familiar with Product

You must be knowledgeable about the product you are selling. If you do not know much about the product, how can you satisfy and convince your customer? You must know all the drawbacks of the product. Also do the comparative study of the product with the other same types of products present in the market. Provide your customers with this comparative study using graphs and tables. This will help sell your customers.

Good Sales Letter

Your sales letter is considered to be the key point for boosting your sales. It should be convincing enough for your consumer to want to buy. A good sales letter will attract visitors. You should also add some testimonials in it to make it more effective and believable.

Money Back Guarantee

If you want consumers to buy your product with no hesitation, then give them the benefit of a money back guarantee. If the affiliate program owner is not providing this guarantee with the product, then you should look for another merchant.

Contact Info

Physical address and contact info must be given on the site. This makes your website more reliable and trustable to your customers.

Real-time Statistics

Choose the affiliate program that can show you the real-time statistics of your visitors and sales. This will tell how many visitors are going to the merchant website from your website and how many visitors are converted into buyers. This will help you to see your progress.

How to find profitable affiliate programs

It is not difficult to find profitable affiliate programs. It is advised to search the most popular directories like AssociatePrograms.com or AffiliateMatch.com. Another option is to search in regular affiliate networks like Click Bank (for digital goods) and Commission Junction (mainly for physical goods).

Choosing the right affiliate program is the key factor. Always study the program in detail before choosing. See what are they offering? Good affiliate programs offer good profit, money back guarantee, real-time statistics and complete information about their products. You can search the good affiliates by using well known and trusted affiliate networks like Commission Junction and Click Bank.

Popular Affiliate Programs

How to find profitable affiliate programs

A successful website can easily make thousands of dollars for you every month. We are providing you with the links of some affiliate networks that will give you the ads to place on your website. First of all they will visit your website and check that either your website has the capacity to get the visitors on it. If they are satisfied, they will give you their product ads of their merchants to promote on your website. The ads may be in the text format or it can be a banner. Place them on your website where you want and then sit back and earn a good amount just for doing nothing.

It is not difficult to find profitable affiliate programs. A good option is to search in regular affiliate networks like Click Bank and Commission Junction.

Following is the list of some good, reliable and reputable online affiliate networks that can provide you the best affiliates. You can join many affiliate networks at a time so that you can make a good income.

1) www.cj.com:

Join for free. This affiliate network is acting as an intermediate between the publisher (you the webmaster) and the advertisers. You are required to register here. Your website will be checked and if accepted, then you will be allowed to get the ads. Hundreds of advertisers are there from which you can choose the best according to your website nature. Get the ads or banners of the advertisers and place them on your site.

For every action that is done on these ads e.g. a visitor goes to the advertiser's website, registers there or makes any purchase; all this is recorded by the cj.com. The revenue is collected from all of your advertisers by the cj.com and is paid to you every month. Good websites are earning 10,000 to 15,000 dollars every month.
Their famous advertisers are e-bay.com, Quick Loans, Backcountry.com, Crucial Technology, Expedia, Zappos.com etc

The well known publishers are netflips.com, MyPoints, Ebates etc.

2) www.affiliateseeking.com:

Join for free. This affiliate network is acting as an intermediate between the publisher (webmaster) and the advertiser. Choose the advertisers which you want to be an affiliate. Every advertiser offers you different incentives for every sale, visit or signup to their websites through your website.

3) www.affiliatetip.com:

Join for free. Look at this website and check all the advertisers and their offers. Choose the best ones according to the nature of your website and start earning today.

4) http://www.element5.com/

Join for free. Element5 enables you to build partnership with software publishers and begin marketing their products. Each sale will generate revenue for you.

There are many other affiliate networks available on the internet but above mentioned are reliable and have been in business for many years.

5) www.clickbank.com

This is a very well known affiliate network. It only markets products that are downloadable, especially software products and e-books. ClickBank is very easy to join and is very inexpensive. If you are an affiliate, then you will pay 7% and $1 for each sale.

6) www.linkshare.com

It has more than 600 merchants and 10,000,000 affiliates. If you are an affiliate then you have the chance to promote a larger number of different products. Some famous merchants are Dell, American Express, Disney and others.

7) www.sharesale.com

It is a big network with more than 400 merchants. They pay good commissions. The fee for affiliate to use their service is 20% of affiliate revenue. You don’t need to buy any additional software.


8) www.clixgalore.com

This network has more than 1200 merchants and 2500 programs. All applications are accepted at the time of submitting application so entry is very easy. Usually small and medium level affiliates like to join this network. It offers 2-tier referral payment system for affiliates. Advance payment is collected from the merchants so there are no chances of commission theft.

Conclusion

There are many other networks available on the internet, but above mentioned are more reliable.

Different Types of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing: Different Types

Affiliate Marketing is classified into many types. All kinds fall under two basic categories. These are pay/click and pay/performance.

Pay/Click

It is also called PPC. It is considered to be the easiest and most popular affiliate marketing method. This is the greatest thing for small websites. With this method the affiliate marketer places the banners and text ads of merchants on his website. The affiliate is paid for every click made on these banners. When any visitor clicks on these banners and visits the merchant website, the affiliate gets credited. It is not essential that the visitor makes a purchase. However, the typical earning for a single click is very small, usually less than one dollar.

Pay/Performance

Pay/performance affiliate marketing, also called PPC, is extremely famous among big affiliates and all types of merchants. In this method the affiliate gets credited only when any visitor from their affiliate id performs the required action. This required action may be a purchase or becoming a member of a merchant website. This method is very good for the merchants because they will only pay when they are paid. For affiliates, it is attractive because they are getting a good share in the sales of merchant products. The usual share is about 15-20% of sale.

If we classify the affiliate marketing on the basis of depth, then it can be divided into 3 classes. These are single-, two-tier and multi-tier programs. Another type is the one in which an affiliate marketer is paid for every sale that is made by a person referred by him. This is called residual income affiliate marketing. Let us study these types in detail.

Affiliate Marketing: 1-Tier, 2-Tier & Multi-Tier

In an affiliate program of single-tier nature, the affiliates get the commission, only, for the visitor’s traffic or sales to the merchant’s website. Pay/performance and pay/click fall under this category.

Talking about Two-tier marketing, the affiliate gets the commission for every action done by the visitors referred by him. Plus he will get the profit whenever some other affiliate, referred by him, gets the commission. So in this way affiliate is earning directly as well as indirectly.

The multi-tier marketing is the same as two-tier marketing. But in this type, the affiliates get the commission for the sales made by their affiliated affiliates in multiple tiers. The depth of this type may be unlimited.

Residual Income Marketing

In this type of marketing, affiliates get the commission for every sale that his referred person makes on the merchant website. The only requirement is that on the first time visit, the person should come from the affiliate link of the affiliate. Next time if the same person visits the merchant website, even without using the affiliate link, the affiliate will be paid for every sale made by the visitor. The question that arises is how the merchant will know the affiliate id. The answer is very simple. On the first visit of the person from the affiliate website, a cookie is created on the computer of the visitor. This cookie stores the affiliate id of the affiliate. This cookie usually expires after 3 months. In some cases it may be longer. Whenever a visitor visits the merchant website, the visitor’s computer is checked for the existence of any previously created cookie. If the cookie is found, the affiliate id is retrieved from it and the affiliate gets credited for any purchase made by the visitor.

Advantages of Affiliate Marketing

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing


Affiliate marketing is very beneficial both for merchants and affiliate marketers. It is a popular method to earn profits from the websites and also helps the merchants to increase their sales.
It is the cheapest business on the internet that can make you the highest profit.

Lets us discuss some important benefits of affiliate marketing to affiliate marketers and merchants.

Benefits to affiliate marketer

1. No Need to create a product!

One important benefit of affiliate marketing is that you are not required create or produce any products. It is the duty of merchants to create the products. So you are only required to select the products to sell, get the affiliate links and start your business in ten minutes. You can focus on selling the product as you don’t need to do anything with the production or delivery of the products.

2. You Can Start with No Money, or with as little as $100

Another important feature of affiliate marketing is that you can start your business with little or no out of pocket expense. This is the lowest possible investment in today's world to start a business which has a great scope in the market. If you simply don’t have any money to invest, you can always use free tools to start your business.

3. The Easiest Online Business

It is the easiest online business due to the fact that the merchants do all the hard work like making products, delivering products to consumers, handling money transactions etc. Affiliate marketers are not responsible for any of these tasks. They just need to focus on promoting their affiliate links.

4. Make Money While You Sleep

As you have your affiliate links on the website which is available on the internet all the time, you are not required to remain online to keep in touch with your customers. People can visit your site whenever they want and can visit your affiliate links. If they like the product they can easily buy it by just by clicking the given links.
Your only concern will be checking your email to see how many sales you have made from your links.

5. Penetrate Hot Markets Fast!

You can select any hot market at any time to choose the products you wish to sell. If you observe that other marketers are making money with pet care related products for instance, just register with an affiliate program to get some hot pet related products, set up an adwords campaign, and in 10 minutes, you can start to make money!


Benefits to Merchants

1) More Sales in Less Time

The products of different merchants are advertised by many affiliate marketers at the same time. The main website of the merchant is also advertising the products. If the page rank of the merchant website and his affiliate marketers are high, tons of traffic, which are your buyers, will visit the product pages. The website of every affiliate marketer will send the people to merchant websites. This results in more sales in less time.

2) Broader Market to Sell Products

Having new affiliates just expands the market of merchants. Don’t select the affiliates blindly. Do the research to check if the affiliate’s website is related to your business or not. If the affiliate marketer’s website is matching your products theme, then there are more chances of sales. The affiliate’s website will receive hits for the people who need to know about your products and they are more likely to visit your website to make a purchase.

3) Less Efforts Required

Affiliates are doing the hard work of advertising for your products. If your affiliates are doing good work then you don’t need to spend extra time and money for advertising. Just concentrate on improving the quality of your products and launching new products.

Affiliate marketing can provide the easy, fast and reliable money to affiliate marketers. At the same time it gives more sales in less time and money to the merchants.