Welcome to the first of many posts in my beginner’s affiliate marketing and Internet marketing strategy tutorials. To be honest, I really would like to get straight into my sort of advanced Internet marketing strategies, but this being a new blog I thought would be best to build up to that point with some foundation posts.
Now admittedly, I don’t particularly like to write articles about basic Internet marketing methods because at this point, I’m a little past the point where basic affiliate marketing information gets me excited. So what I’ll try to do is compensate for both you and I; I’m going to give you the information in spite of the pain It may cause me.
So sit back relax and let’s do some fun learning about basic affiliate marketing…
A Quick Introduction to Affiliate Marketing
Okay, so basically in affiliate marketing there are two components to the whole deal. Well actually three:
The affiliate – the individual, often referred to as an affiliate marketer who promotes and refers sales for other people’s products online. The products can be physical (diet pills, etc.) or digital goods (e-books, software, etc). In return the affiliate gets what’s called a commission. A commission is usually a percentage of the referred transaction. An affiliate can also earn money by referring a lead to a company who is willing to pay for leads (such as names and emails).
So for example if you’re an affiliate, you might promote an e-book that teaches the reader secrets to improving their golf swing. Now say this is a $40 e-book and its commission is 50%, therefore you would earn $20 for every sale you referred as an affiliate.
The merchant – the person who really benefits the most out of the whole deal, or often called the product vendor is the owner and creator of the product. The merchant will either have an in-house affiliate program for which an affiliate can sign up, or they may add their product to an affiliate network like Clickbank. The affiliates receive what’s called an affiliate link and can then promote the merchants product for a commission, or percentage of the product’s price.
The customer – the absolute most important factor in the whole equation, is the one who has the money. If the person who has the money finds neither the affiliate nor the merchant, then we’re both broke. There are several ways for an affiliate to find and target interested customers in order to refer sales, but that’s a topic for another post (coming soon).
The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
I think, and this is hard to dispute, affiliate marketing is the absolute best way to start making money online. Affiliate marketing offers tons of benefits and upside as opposed to the downside of affiliate marketing.
• Affiliates don’t have to carry any stock or worry about delivering any product to the customer. Once the prospective customer clicks to your affiliate link and goes on to buy the product, the affiliate gets paid and the merchant has to deal with all further responsibility.
• Affiliate marketing is easy as hell. Even if this is the first article you’ve ever read about affiliate marketing or Internet marketing in general, you could go on the Internet and find enough information on affiliate marketing today to theoretically start making money within the next couple of days.
• One What I mean by that is on the type of person who likes some good competition. Usually I come out on top, but if you stick to reading this blog and following my strategies you’ll most likely be coming out on top more often than not.
• Affiliate marketing is a lazy man’s way to make money online. You can literally work an hour or two a day and still make some nice extra spending money on the Internet as an affiliate. Then if you want to take it to the next level and become a full-time affiliate marketer, it’s probably the easiest and quickest way to get to that point.
• You can start making money with affiliate marketing with no list, no website, and best of all no money. Does it help to have money? Absolutely; but you can start without a dime to your name. In fact, on one promotion I made over $9k and never spent a dime in advertising.
• Affiliate marketing is his overall kick ass. That’s really all there is to it.
• Affiliate marketing is a billion-dollar industry with literally millions of niches. Simply put, there’s always money to be made.
Affiliate Marketing Lesson 1 Recap
So let’s quickly go over what you’ve learned in lesson one, my introduction to affiliate marketing…
Affiliates promote other people’s products and earn a commission whenever they refer a sale or generate a lead. Merchants or vendors create these products and either place them in an affiliate network or run their own in-house affiliate program. Customers are targeted by affiliates and a variety of different strategies and methods, by in which they take the recommendation of the affiliate and purchase the merchant’s product.
So there it is, the bare-bones basics of affiliate marketing. If this is the first time you’ve heard of affiliate marketing, you should be very excited right now. That’s because we’ve got a lot of learning to do in a huge journey in front you. The best part is you can start and continue that journey right here on this blog.
In lesson two of my series of affiliate marketing guides I’m going to go over how affiliates use affiliate and CPA networks. You’re going to learn:
• The difference and advantages or disadvantages of pay per sale versus pay per lead
• All about Clickbank and a couple of my other favorite affiliate networks
• A fool-proof strategy to getting accepted by any affiliate or CPA network even if you’re the greenest of newbies.
Affiliate marketing is an awesome way to get started making money online. And my blog here at ground zero profits is an awesome way to start learning how to make a lot of money online from someone who knows. So tuned and you might want to sign up to my RSS feed.
Your Homework
You didn’t think I’d let you off that easy did you? You’ve got an assignment!
1. Go on Google and search and read 20 articles about affiliate marketing. Trust me, there’s a lot of good solid information out there. Really get acquainted with the subject of affiliate marketing before continuing onto lesson.
2. Ask any questions you may have right now by leaving a comment below. You can also contact me directly if you wish. I’ll be adding all questions and answers to the blog in some sort of fashion ( I haven’t decided yet).
3. Get excited. Because you’re at the start of an awesome journey. For rizzle… Yeah, I said “for rizzle”.
4. Sign up to the RSS feed for GZP by click HERE – now! Don’t wait. Once you do that, email me with confirmation of your subscribing to the feed and I’ll I’ve got a cool gift for you, just for doing so.
What are you waiting for? Chop-chop… andele, andele… vamanos… Let’s Go! Seriously, stop reading this non-sense and get to work.
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- AM Lesson 2: Using Affiliate and CPA Networks
- Sales Tsunami
- Google Conquest
- Linkvana
- Why Social Media Marketing is So Important
