What Is Affiliate Marketing? – Get Paid to Promote Products

Affiliate marketing is probably the easiest way to make money online. The main advantage of affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to create a product to sell. You simply create a website that sells somebody else’s product or service, drive traffic to it, and make money from the sales.

One of the first online affiliate marketing programs was Amazon’s, launched in 1996. It wasn’t the first one to be set up, but it was the first one that was huge and popular. Amazon basically wrote the book on how affiliate marketing is done and they continue to innovate.

How Affiliate Marketing Works

Affiliate marketing is an easy step-by-step process that anyone can follow. First, you sign up at an affiliate network. This is a website that lists hundreds of different products in various niches. One of the most famous of these is ClickBank, which focuses on digital products, but it’s by far not the only one. After signing up at a network, search the site for a product you’d like to promote.

Once you decide on a product, you sign up to promote it and the network gives you an affiliate ID and an affiliate link. The ID identifies you as the one who is referring website visitors to their merchant’s page. You’ll put the affiliate link they give you on your website and it will direct your visitors to the product’s homepage where they can buy it. When the customer buys, you get a cut of the money.

One of the great things about this commission is that it can be quite generous. Depending on the network and product that you choose, you can get commissions that are nearly half the product’s actual price. This is why affiliate marketing is so profitable.

Tracking Your Sales

How does the affiliate network or merchant know that a visitor to your site has purchased through your link? In particular, if a customer visits your site, but doesn’t buy a product until 2 days later, there must be a way for the network to track those sales back to you so you can get paid.

The most common method used is cookie tracking. This method is the most popular because it’s simple and it doesn’t require you to change your website design. With cookie tracking, your affiliate ID is located within your link. When someone clicks the link, a small text file called a ‘cookie’ is placed on their browser. This cookie contains your affiliate ID so that when they click to buy, even if it is a week or more later, the product site knows they were referred by you.

Affiliate Marketing to Monetize Your Blog

If you have a blog and you’d like to see it make some money, affiliate marketing is a great way to do this. Just go to an affiliate network and look for products you think your readers would like and grab your affiliate link. Then write a post describing and recommending that product, including your link wherever you mention it. You can also put a banner ad for the product in your sidebar. Affiliate marketing works particularly well with blogs because you should have a strong relationship with prospects who trust you.

Work With Me and Be My Affiliate

I have started to ramp up my affiliate program program to share the cost of my programs and products with others. If you are interested in learning more about it (and earning up to 50% of your sales), please check out my affiliate sign up page over at https://digitalmaestro.com/make-money/ When you sign up, you will be given the opportunity to sign up for my affiliate marketing course when you will learn more!  The course, is free!