When you first come across the concept of affiliate marketing, one thing that crosses your mind is whether it really works or not.
After all, why should someone buy through your affiliate link rather than someone else’s link or just go direct to Amazon or wherever?
The off-the-cuff answer is “it varies”.
Think about other things you buy – soft drinks, burgers, etc.
Long term, you should be aiming to use your own website for your affiliate marketing but if you’re just starting out and really can’t spare the cash for a domain name and some cheap hosting, is it really possible to make money on the internet without having a website?
Providing you’re happy to relinquish some of the control – and providing you’re happy to have your destiny in the hands of a computer program written for a company who has likely never heard of you and whose program doesn’t care whether or not your content stays live – then yes, it’s doable.
Affiliate marketing success sounds easy – promote someone else’s product and take a commission.
And in theory that’s all there is.
Of course, like near enough everything in life, it’s not quite as simple but the less unnecessary obstacles you put in your own way, the easier it will be to achieve success with affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is like most other businesses online – if you don’t do anything to help your business grow, it will gradually shrink,
That’s down to a combination of factors including that Google’s robots get bored if you don’t update your site often (so they call less often) but even more importantly there is more and more new content appearing, day and night.
So – unless yours is a massive site – your chance of appearing in the search results diminishes over time.
Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways of earning money on the web.
But how can you get the most from your affiliate marketing?
Are there some things you can do to increase the return on your investment of time (and maybe money) in your affiliate marketing business?
What kind of site works best for affiliate marketing?
Is there one style of site that’s head and shoulders above the rest?
Or should you even have a site? Is that the best way to carry out your affiliate marketing?
On the face of it, you can make money with affiliate marketing just by putting your link somewhere people will click it.
But is that all you need to do?
Surely it can’t be that simple?
Well, in essence, that’s how affiliate marketing works. But, as with almost everything, the devil is in the detail.
What is affiliate marketing?
In essence, it’s the internet’s equivalent of being a commission-only sales person.
That’s the simple answer – you get paid an affiliate commission for each sale generated as a result of a visitor you send.
It would be difficult to employ tens, hundreds or even thousands of people to potentially sell a product so affiliate marketing provides a solution.
Bloggers have an edge in affiliate marketing because they have a website that’s under their control.
A small edge is often the only thing that you need – there’s very little difference between the top few results in the search engines for most searches so if you can give yourself a slight advantage, go for it.
It’s often difficult to know where to start in affiliate marketing.
Like so many things on the web, there are almost endless places to start.
If you haven’t already chosen a niche and checked out whether there are affiliate products to promote, have a read this page and then come back here.
Assuming you’ve chosen your niche then you need to decide how you’re going to promote the affiliate products in it.