What is Affiliate Marketing
The Internet is a powerful tool for making money. It has grown in popularity over years, and it grows exponentially every single day. Due to its popularity, it has created opportunities for thousands of people to realize their dreams of starting businesses in their homes. Many home Internet businesses are easy to start and take very little capital investment. These can include blogging, selling things on online auctions or other possibilities. However, one of the more popular ways to make money online is through affiliate marketing.
The way affiliate marketing works is pretty basic. You have a supplier and an affiliate. The affiliate is the advertiser; the one with the website traffic or email list. The supplier is the one that has the product they need to move. The supplier will offer a percentage of sales derived from the affiliate's web traffic. This percentage can vary a great deal. Higher priced items may offer lower percentages, but the earning potential per item can be pretty high. On the other hand, informational products or lower priced items may offer higher percentages. But, the revenue per item may be lower on these types of sales.
Amazon is known as the pioneer of affiliate marketing. They started offering it very early in their creation. And, they still offer it today. They have thousands of affiliates making thousands of dollars every month off of the products on their website. Amazon only pays affiliates on items that are purchased from visitors to their sites from affiliate sites for 24 hours after their arrival. So, if you send someone to Amazon's site today because they read about a review of binoculars on your site and they do not buy it until 3 days from now, then you do not get a commission.
Before signing up for an affiliate program, it is a good idea to show the supplier that you have some kind of web traffic already. Many affiliate programs want to see existing traffic, or past examples of sales in affiliate marketing before allowing you to join their program. They want to make sure that affiliates understand how this business works and will only be sending them legitimate traffic. Many have tough standards and high expectations, and they want to make sure they are getting affiliates that best represent their brand, and will not do things that will hurt them on the Internet. There are several nefarious things that can be done in affiliate marketing so they want to make sure they are getting affiliates who know how to run a clean campaign.
Affiliate marketing has grown for years now ever since the likes of Amazon started their program years ago. It is a win-win situation for the affiliate and for the supplier. The supplier does not have to hire hundreds of sales people and pay them salaries. And, the affiliate does not have to store thousands of dollars of inventory and risk it will never sale. Instead, each party can focus on their strengths in the equation.
