|
One of the easiest ways to earn money online is affiliate marketing. We consider it one of the easiest ways because it doesn't require a website (although you can use it if you have one) or any sophisticated preparation or specific knowledge; mainly you should understand the idea of affiliation which is very simple. By "simple" I don't mean that you don't have to do anything, it means that you don't have to study a lot before you can start, and that you don't have to spend a lot of money. You can start right away.
The idea of affiliate marketing is that a publisher (or a seller who owns a product) wants to sell a product, the affiliate marketer promotes the product and send customers to the publisher and gets a commission for any product that is sold to a buyer who came through his promotion. In order to know where the buyer is coming from, each affiliate gets an individual link to the sale's page.
In order to make things easy there are some websites specializing in connecting between sellers and affiliates. There are Clickbank, Paydotcom, CommissionJunction just to mention a few. These websites give you a list of products that sellers want to sell, they supply you with personalized identifying links for the products that you choose to promote and they give you the stats of your sales. Some of them also give you ads and banners (to use if you have your website) and even promotional text that can be used in solo ad in ezines, or as a letter to your subscribers (if you have any). Sometimes the website process also your payment, in other time the product seller will pay you directly. Some of these websites pay twice a month and it generally depends also on a minimum sum of commissions to be reached.
To all these websites you can subscribe both as a seller and as an affiliate. Subscribing as an affiliate is always free but each of these websites takes a very small percentage of the commission for following all the process and processing the payment. While subscribing you will have to choose a user or nick name, whatever you choose will appear in all the links so be careful while choosing your user. In addition to this kind of websites you can also find websites that have their own separate affiliate programs.
After getting your personalized link (which is the easy part) you should promote the product and send traffic to the product sale's page using your personalized link. Methods for driving traffic are specified in another page, since it's the same to drive traffic to your own website or to someone else's. However a very useful book that explains about it is Google cash. It explains very elaborately and clearly how to use PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising on google using affiliate links without having to have your own website. Since it was first published in 2003 it was revised several times to keep it updated, since things keep changing in the dynamic world of internet marketing. If you don't want to buy the book you can subscribe to the newsletter, and hopefully you'll find it useful as well. Of course the book teaches you how to use PPC very efficiently, and that can be useful at any point when you will decide to have your own website and products.
Clickbank is one of the most popular and reliable websites connecting between sellers and affiliates. It deals with virtual products, and it is so popular that there are some affiliates websites that are actually based on it like CBmall. Unlike Clickbank that is meant for affiliates CBmall is a kind of an already made shop meant for people that are looking for the products of their interest to buy (unlike Clickbank that is meant for affiliates). CBmall is especially useful for a beginner. A beginner who doesn't have a website of his own can buy the website and own a website with 60 different selling pages with only a single payment. It is good for several reasons:
|
1.
|
Instead of wasting time and money promoting different products separately the affiliate can promote only one page that contains hundreds or even thousands of products.
|
|
2.
|
Along with the website the site owners gets also entrance to a member's area where they can have important instructions about marketing that can help not only in promoting CBmall but also in promoting products of other affiliate programs.
|
|
3.
|
There is a single payment only for having the website, while generally owning a professional website means paying a monthly fee for hosting and an annual fee for the URL.
|
|
4.
|
CBmall enables joining other money making programs and promoting them along with the other products on the affiliate website.
|
The only deficiency that I found in CBmall is that the website is a standard website, equal for all affiliates who buy it. The affiliate doesn't have a way to make it personalized in terms of content and looks. Still I think that it is very good for beginners who don't know how to change the website. Later on if an affiliate wants to have his own personalized website he may promote on his personalized website pages of his CBmall website that are related to his personalized website.
When you enter CBmall you can subscribe to a free newsletter with tips on marketing. Even if you don't buy the website it can be useful.
One of the greatest problems of the affiliate market is theft of sales. That means that a person comes to know about a product through a promotion of an affiliate, but then instead of buying through the affiliate link he or she changes the nickname of the affiliate and put instead his own affiliate nickname. Unfortunately that is especially common between affiliates (since only they have nicknames). To avoid theft some of the websites do not enable the users to buy through their own links. Clickbank though, enables to buy through one's own link, because in this way a person can check the product before promoting it, but such a person will not receive his payment if he doesn't promote products to other people as well.
One of the ways to overcome this problem is by using a cloaker. A cloaker makes the link look differently than what it is and in this way hides the real link in a way that sometimes it doesn't even look like an affiliate link.
Here is a link to a free cloaker program. We never tried it personally we hope it will work for you.
http://www.brothersoft.com/cloaker-buzz-109733.html
|
Psst!...Have you Heard the Buzz? 
