Affiliate marketing is a great way to make extra money online by promoting someone else’s products or services. It is definitely a home based online business opportunity that’s been around for a while now which can be potentially very lucrative.
Now making money from affiliate marketing may sound like easy pickings, but it’s not. Don’t get us wrong – we don’t intend to ruin anyone’s dreams of making money via affiliate marketing – but what we do want to do with this article is give our readers a clearer picture about what affiliate marketing is all about and how to go about doing it properly (via marketing tips for websites, for instance).
How Affiliate Marketing Works
Affiliate marketers make money via commission from the sales of products that they promote. Say you have your own site and you’re an affiliate of The Fast Fast Fast Running Shoes store. If visitors to your site click on affiliate links that you’ve set up at your site and then proceed to buy products from The Fast Fast Fast Running Shoes store, you’ll earn commission from these sales.
With this in mind, affiliate marketers must ensure that their marketing efforts are targeted. This means to say that the products being promoted must be closely related to their website’s compelling content. For example, a website with a focus on running should contain affiliate links to running shoe or running related product pages. In short, Internet marketers have to address niche markets in order for their promotion efforts to be effective.
Affiliate marketing is popular home Internet business opportunity because it is inexpensive and rather easy to set up. For starters, you could join affiliate networks and sign up for affiliate programs. Be sure to do some homework before doing this to ensure that you join only the best ones.
The Myth
Myth: “Affiliate marketers can roll in money overnight without much effort”
We’re sorry to say that this is very far from the truth. Many new affiliate marketers fail because of this myth. This can be attributed to the fact that these Internet marketers do not know what they have to do to achieve their goals.
The Mistake
Many new affiliate marketers figure that all they need is a website filled with links and their work is done. No thought is given to how they will get people to visit their site and hopefully click on their links. Even more experienced affiliate marketers still make one age-old mistake: They don’t track the progress of their sales.
The Money Path
The key to making money online via affiliate marketing is targeted traffic – vast amounts of it. In order to get traffic to your site, you need to ensure that your site is easily found. For this to happen, your site needs to rank well on search engine result pages with the help of very good long tail keywords, among other things.
Earlier in the article, we mentioned “compelling content“. Having compelling content on your site is important because it gives your site some “net cred“. This is why trusted consumer resource sites do very well in affiliate marketing. If people trust what you say, they will return to your site, recommend others to your site and perhaps even establish links and ultimately purchase products that you’ve recommended or reviewed positively.
Even before your site starts attracting a healthy amount of targeted visitors, you need to work on call-to-action images and text to persuade visitors to click on the links. Simply put, you have to attract visitors, convince them to consider buying a product, and then drive them to the appropriate product page. Your goal is for your visitors to be in a buying mood after reading your content, with just a little more convincing needed on the actual product page to help seal the deal.
Also, you should have 2 page designs at hand so you can perform an A/B split test. This would allow you to gauge which design will garner a better CTR (click through rate). Even a 5% increase in CTR could potentially result in more money in the bank. As a business person you should do everything you can to maximize your profits, especially if it only costs you time and not money.
Once your home Internet business opportunity has stabilized, do not forget to track your sales. Consumer buying patterns change all the time and some links might not be popular as others. Remember, you need to constantly maximize the potential and profits of everything you put on your site.
It may seem like a lot of work and the truth is that it actually is, at the beginning at least. But then again, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Once your site is established as a reputable site, you should start to see some really good figures and all the effort that you’ve put into your home Internet business opportunity would have been worth it.
We invite you to share your experiences with affiliate marketing with us. Please leave us a comment if you have anything to share.
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