Whether you're looking for a long-term career or just to make some extra cash, affiliate marketing is the way to go. It's highly profitable and provides a real return on investment with no barriers to entry. And most importantly, it's an incredibly user-friendly field where anyone who follows a few basic rules can become successful quickly. This article will teach you nothing new — we've summarized the most effective techniques from our top experts and put them in one convenient place so you can apply what you learn today.
You'll learn everything from choosing a niche to email marketing to writing your first blog post, and you'll discover the thinking that helped some of the most successful affiliates become that way. We've talked to affiliate marketing's top guys before, but if you're just getting started, their tips will serve as a guide for you to continue learning long after today. Get ready to change your life with some new ideas on affiliate marketing!
So What are the Basics of Affiliate Marketing?
If you're new here, this may be a little overwhelming. The best way to make sense of it is to break down the affiliate marketing field into two parts: affiliate network vs. customer acquisition. Let's begin with affiliate networks first.
Affiliate network is simply a group of affiliates who can be clients of a particular company. A large company will have a network of affiliates that it uses to sell goods and services on its behalf, and a small business owner will have a network of his or her own that they use for more local marketing. The main thing you want to learn about affiliate networks is that it's extremely important to choose the right one if you're going to be marketing more than one product.
The more products you market, the greater the chance you'll get lost in the crowd if you don't do things correctly from day-one.
There are two kinds of affiliate networks: network marketing and referral. Network marketing is when you join a company and get an entire "team" of other affiliates (your own team!) that you can market your products to. You'll get a cut of the commissions earned through all their sales, and you'll also get the same team discount. This is common in businesses like Herbalife, which promise people a lifestyle change (and massive earnings) through vitamins and supplements.
But the real benefit of being part of a network is being able to reach out to tens or hundreds of thousands of potential customers at once — especially if you have a large back catalog of sales history.