Affiliate marketing has become a popular way for people looking to make some extra money or start their own online business working from home without the need for a lot of start up costs. One of the good things about it is that you don’t have to be a technical person to make money with affiliate marketing. But, below are some tips that can help get you started on the right path, and avoid some of the costly pitfalls. It is helpful to know what to look out for.
1. Find something unique to promote
Choosing to promote the same things that thousands of other affiliates are promotings, just makes your job a lot harder from the beginning.. You should find a unique but still in demand item to promote. This can give you the added benefit of not having to compete against so many other affiliates out there to find traffic (buyers).
2. Chose products that have quality promotional tools already available.
When you first get started in trying to make money with affiliate marketing, you will learn that having quality affiliate tools, like banners and emails to send out can save you a lot of time and money on getting your own make and tested or doing is all yourself. Spend some time and see what the merchants are offering to help you out with your sales. Some offer lots of date and others provides other helpful promo tools like keyword list, images and articles.
3. Here is a list of some useful affiliate tools that you should look for:
Articles
Pre-written emails
Banners
Adwords adverts
Free eBook samples with your links included
Product Images
Product reviews for you blog
4. Never use a bare affiliate link.
One thing many affiliate marketers forget to do is tracking and testing their results. This can go a long was in improving the effectiveness or your campaigns by allowing you to see how small changes to various can change the results that you get. It is important to know how your site is being found by the visitors along with how long they stay on your site and what they do while they are on your site.
There are lots of paid software programs for tracking, but they can be expensing and in the beginning free tools like Google analytics are quite good enough.
5. Take some time and set everything up right and then enjoy long term profits.
Affiliate marketers get paid a percentage of the sale of a product or a fixed fee for actions taken. These percentages are decided by the owner and can sometimes be as high as 100%, though the percentage for an information product is usually 50%. Sometimes you are paid your commission and that is the end and sometimes there are continuety programs where you continue to get paid monthly as long as the buyer maintains the subscription, with no further work required on your part.
At last you should remember to treat this like a business from they beginning and not like a hobby. It is not a push button business. It will take some work, especially in the beginning, but it will be well worth it.