Thursday, November 22, 2012

What Is Affiliate Marketing? A Simple Explanation


What is affiliate marketing? For those who ask, "What is affiliate marketing?" there are competing ways of explaining it. The simplest way to explain it is by defining it as a method of making money on the Internet that is characterized by rewards given in exchange for assisting a business with the promotion of their service, site or product.

There are different methods of this niche, but the most popular version will have you acting as a publisher who earns a commission when one of your site visitors clicks on a link within your blog, which then takes them to another site so they can purchase a product or a service. One different take on this is when a person earns a certain amount just for referring a site visitor who then takes a specific kind of action. This can be anything from just signing up for an offer to completing a survey and leaving their name and address.

How to Get Started

What does affiliate marketing mean to your audience? You only need to keep two things in mind: Locating the proper affiliate product and establishing a loyal audience that will buy what you promote. You need to put greater important on locating the right affiliate product, and one of the most proven ways of doing so is finding one that offers a benefit to your site's audience. For instance, if you own a blog on weight loss, then promoting a product on buying and selling stocks will be utterly out-of-place, resulting in absolutely no sales (or barely any).

You must promote a product that ties into the theme of your blog in some way. Further, it also cannot hurt if you first try out the product or service that you are promoting. That way, you can be reasonably sure that the product or service your readers will use is legitimate. If you write quality blog posts, you will soon develop a loyal audience to whom you can promote products or services. So what is affiliate marketing? It is about high quality products and services being promoted to a loyal audience.

Affiliate Programs and Blogs

So how does this type of marketing work with blogs? It is not the only way to help your blog earn, and it surely is not for every blogger. However, there are a couple of reasons that this can well be worth your time and effort. When someone asks, "What is affiliate marketing?" tell them it is about trust and building relationships. This relationship involves the one between the publisher and the readership.

It follows then that readers are increasingly likely to trust a publisher's recommendations for a product or a service when they already have a deep faith in the opinions and observations of the publisher. Still, this is not a surefire approach because this trust may also be irreparably broken if your blog was to, say, promote a product or service that turned out to be a lemon.

Is It Easy Money?

What is this type of online marketing, and can you earn efficiently from it? There is a good number of people who have already at least heard of it, but there are quite a few who are curious if it is easy money. When they ask, "What is affiliate marketing?" tell them that there is a distinction between easy money and it being lucrative. Yes, this business can be lucrative if done right, but this hardly makes it "easy money."

A lot of people who try their hand at it fail to make a lot of money because they are confronted with several factors that they all have to do effectively for it to make them a lot of money. These factors are obtaining a high flow of site traffic, discovering useful products, locating high-quality products, establishing solid reader trust, possessing a readership that is in a purchasing mood, and having the talent to write effective sales copy. The issue largely revolves around how willing you are to make it work.

The topic of affiliate marketing revolves around promotion of a product, service or a website, for which you will be rewarded with a certain amount of money. The challenge of this endeavor relates to finding good products and services to promote to a loyal audience of your site visitors. So the next time somebody asks you, "What is affiliate marketing? tell them that it is not easy money, but they can earn a lot from it if they focus on promotions.




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