How To Make Money Online – An Introduction To Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an arrangement where a merchant pays a marketer a commission for helping to sell the merchant's products. The marketer sends prospects to the merchant's website and the merchant pays the marketer if the customer buys from the merchant. This arrangement is called “pay per sale.” Sometimes the arrangement calls for “pay per lead,” where the affiliate is paid if the prospect provides certain personal information to the merchant.

The affiliate does not need to handle products or customers. The affiliate simply has to send customers to the merchant's site. Strictly speaking, the affiliate does not even need a website, but a website or blog is highly recommended in current practice. Another advantage of affiliate marketing in particular, and online marketing in general, is that it works for you 24/7. After you invest the time to develop a profitable promotion, it requires a minimum of your time to keep it going, so you are free to spend time developing other promotions. After you develop several profitable promotions you may be able to “retire.”

"With affiliate marketing you can start a business with little money"

Affiliate marketing on the Internet is an excellent way to develop a business with a relatively small financial investment. It costs nothing to join affiliate programs, and there are many free tools available for you to use in building websites or blogs.

To make money in affiliate marketing, you need to send traffic to the merchant's website that “converts.” By convert we mean that the prospect actually makes a purchase or performs the action for which the merchant pays a commission. The challenge for every affiliate marketer is to get traffic that converts.

The fastest way to get traffic is through pay-per-click advertising (PPC), but it is also the most expensive way to get traffic. When you do a search in a major search engine such as Google or Yahoo, the search engine returns its results on the left side of the page. On the right side of the page and sometimes at the top of the page, the search engine displays advertisements related to your search terms. Those advertisements are PPC ads. To have an ad display, the advertiser bids on search terms or "keywords" indicating how much he or she is willing to pay per click. When you click on one of those ads, the advertiser has to pay the search engine for your click. If you use PPC, the challenge is to earn more in commissions than you spend on clicks.

"Many affiliate marketers use PPC advertising"

Many affiliate marketers use PPC advertising to drive traffic to their sites or to merchant sites. Because PPC advertising can become quite expensive, you should not use it unless you know what you are doing. If you have been doing any investigation of PPC, then you have probably already seen a number of advertisements for courses that promise to teach you the way to instant wealth using PPC to promote affiliate products. Many novice marketers fall prey to these ads and buy courses expecting to get rich overnight. Well, many of the courses are very good and can teach you a lot about affiliate marketing on the Internet, but attaining riches overnight is not likely. So while I will not discourage you from buying these courses, I recommend that you read the sales pages with skepticism. I will recommend some courses later.

There are free sources of traffic that you should utilize: There are a number of sites where you can post free ads, and there are sites where you can post articles. Make use of all free traffic sources. You should join Internet marketing forums where you can get lots of helpful information for free, but remember that even in the forums many people are trying to sell courses. To find forums, just do a search for “Internet marketing forums.” You can also gain valuable information from blogs on the subject.

Most PPC marketers use Google Adwords. Google provides free tutorials that you can find on their site and on YouTube. These tutorials will teach you how to setup an Adwords account and how to use Adwords, but they won't teach you how to make money. Google also provides free tools for keyword research and campaign management.

"I recommend two excellent courses for affiliate marketers"

Finally, I'd like to recommend two courses that I found to be quite good and will teach you how to make money with Adwords. The first is GoogleCash, which is in its 3^rd edition. GoogleCash is an excellent course that teaches you how to do affiliate marketing using Google Adwords PPC advertising. It provides excellent guidance to PPC novices as well as more experienced marketers. You can make a lot of money with what is taught in GoogleCash, but it is not likely that you will make a load of cash overnight. It takes time to execute the strategies and the learning curve for PPC is deceptively steep. It is easy to use Adwords, but it is also easy to lose money at it, so study the lessons carefully and don't get in too big of a hurry. GoogleCash is provided as an instantly downloadable e-book and audio files.

The second course that I recommend is Commission Blueprint. Commission Blueprint is a downloadable course with about 5 hours of hi-definition videos plus some short e-books. This course is not for beginners! If you are a novice then you should get GoogleCash which was mentioned in the previous paragraph. Commission Blueprint's strength is in the detailed way it shows how to do keyword research and tracking. Finding the right keywords is crucial to the profitability of any Adwords campaign.

In the interests of full disclosure, I am an affiliate marketer and I will earn a commission if you buy these products through the links on this page. I recommend these products because I bought them and found them to be of great value to me. They are sold through Clickbank, so if you find them unsuitable, you can get a refund within 56 days of purchase.

I wish you success.

Rudolph McBride
January 21, 2009

Get GoogleCash                Get Commission Blueprint

Below are some products of interest to online marketers.

Lunarpages Hosting

For your own website you will need hosting. I use Lunarpages for my hosting. I have found Lunarpages to be a great value and reliable, and the staff is very helpful. Here is the link for Lunarpages. By the way, you can register your domain through them as well.

Click here for more information on Lunarpages.

XSitePro

I build my own websites and had tried using a number of free products. I even built one site by hand coding the html and css. Though I could get the work done, it was just too slow. Time is money.

I didn't want a steep learning curve before I could get a site working, so I chose XSitePro. It comes with a number of templates and it is just what an Internet marketer needs. You can build simple landing pages or multi-page sites quickly.

Click here for more information on XSitePro.