Affiliate Marketing

What exactly is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is the single fastest growth industry on the Internet. It’s also true that affiliate marketing is one of the fastest and most creative ways to make money and have a career on the Internet.

Simply put, affiliate marketing is selling products on a commission basis. You own a business that advertises and sells products for other companies. You may have a product of your own to begin with or not. The things that a successful affiliate marketer must have are:

Your website is the jumping off point of all your marketing efforts. So the first step in any successful affiliate marketing business is building a good, credible and professional looking website (well, this just really depends on who your audience is, because crappy looking sites can be good money makers as well). You must build a user-friendly website, which will attract your prospects and motivate them to click on the links to the products and services you are promoting and make a purchase. There are companies whose business is building websites that you can hire to build one for you.

Types of Affiliate Marketing

1. PPC – Pay-Per-Click is a highly promoted and used affiliate marketing method by affiliates with websites or small websites. This is also the easiest way for them to start making money. Under this method of affiliate marketing, the affiliate is paid a commission by the merchant when a visitor visits the merchant’s site through the affiliate’s reference, that is, whenever a visitor clicks and goes to the merchant’s site through the banner or text ads that the affiliate has put up.

A website owner would be given a simple code (html codes) to paste onto any webpage where the website owner wants a visitor to see the advertisements. The ads will be related to the webpage content. Pay per click is free to join but they have very strict policies especially against fraudulent clicks by owners of websites on which the advertisements are displayed.

2. PPP- Pay Per Play:  Pay per Play (PPP) is the latest wave in internet advertising. When a person visits a webpage which hosts these ads, they will hear a single 5 second professional audio advertisement. The advertisement will be relevant to the content of the webpage.

How does this work? It works much like current Pay per Click programs, minus one critical element – there will be no click required by the visitors! 100% of visitors to the webpage will generate revenue for the webpage owner. That’s the Pay Per Play Advantage! Advertisers will bid to have their ad placed on a particular website. The winner’s ad will play when a visitor opens that webpage. In turn, the website owner will get paid for every visitor to his website. The more pages the website owner has with these ads, and the more traffic he has, the more income he will generate.

3. Pay-Per-Performance (PPP) - PPP affiliate marketing is the most popular among merchant and is also the most lucrative type for the affiliates. In this type of affiliate program, the merchant only pays the affiliate whenever his referral translates into an action – that is whenever the visitor he has referred actually buys something from the merchant’s site or when the visitor becomes a lead.

A further classification of Pay-per-performance affiliate marketing can be done into two types: pay-per-sales (PPS) and pay-per-lead (PPL). Both these are very popular:

a) Pay-Per-Sale (PPS) - In a pay-per-sale type of affiliate marketing, the affiliates get the commission from the merchants whenever the visitor he has referred to the merchant’s site actually buys something from the merchant’s site.

b) Pay-Per-Lead (PPL) - The pay-per-lead type of affiliate marketing is a slight variation of the PPS type and is often used by insurance and finance companies and other companies who rely on leads for their company to grow. In this type of affiliate marketing, the affiliate is paid whenever the visitor he referred to the merchant’s site fills up an application form or any similar form related to the business of the company.

4. Single tier – In a single-tier affiliate marketing program, the affiliates are only paid based on the direct sales or traffic he has referred to the merchant.

5. Two tier Affiliate marketing program – In two-tier affiliate marketing programs, the affiliate is not only paid for the direct traffic or sales that he refers to the merchant’s site, but also on every traffic or sales referred by various other affiliates who joined the affiliate program through his recommendation.

6. Multi tier Affiliate marketing program – In Multi-tier affiliate marketing , although the affiliate gets additional commission for a wider number of affiliates in different tiers in the affiliate network.

7.  Residual income affiliate marketing  – In residual income affiliate marketing, the affiliate gets paid not only once for every customer he has referred to the merchant’s site. Rather, the affiliate is also paid whenever the customer he has referred returns to the site and purchase another product. Compensation for such type of affiliate marketing is based on either sales percentage commission or fixed fee basis

So Where Do I Find Affiliate Marketing Programs?

Easy, here are a few ClickBank, Linkshare, Commission Junction and eJunkie. Also if you thinking of promoting a specfic product check the providers website. Normally there is a link at the bottom called “affiliates”, “partners” or something similar to those.

Affiliate Marketing Website Case Study

Recently I came across a site that I really liked and thought it would be a good case study to discuss. The site is HowLifeWorks, which is not my site, but I’ve built sites in a similar manner to this myself, which make me great commissions daily.

This style of site goes against what most affiliate marketing training would tell you to do, which is to find a specific niche and become an expert in that area and get your slice of the larger niche by targeting the micro niche.

This approach does work, and I also have quite a lot of sites that make me money with this approach, so I’m not saying either is better, but each style does have their advantages.

The style that the How Life Works site is employing, is a very general site, with no specific focus on any one niche or product, but rather has content on many niches. The domain allows them to pretty much discuss anything they want on the site, as the topic has something to do with life then it fits!!

You’ll notice that on that site they have many categories, such as business, finance, beauty, relationships, shopping, technology etc…and they run a lot of CPA offers on these pages.

With the CPA offers they can just swap them around at any time they like as long as the keyword phrase targeted is not a product specific one.

On that note a good network I have started with recently is Never Blue, they have loads of great offers and fantastic metrics for their affiliates.

The advantage of building a site that is not targeting any one specific niche is that you get a choice of topics you can write about and adding content to your site is endless. This is a great, because if some of the pages you build and do your SEO on don’t work out for you, then all is not lost, as you can just find more keywords and add more content and carry on.

If you build niche specific sites, you can run the risk of choosing a dud of a niche and struggling to be able to repair the site if it’s not working and be forced to start again with a new site. The problem with starting again with new sites all the time, is that they can take some time to gain trust with Google, whereas adding content to an older site with history in Google doesn’t have this problem as much.

Just to be clear though I do build niche specific sites also, as they do still work well, I’m sharing some ideas for other approaches in this post.

When I build sites I employ many different styles, depending on the potential I can see in a niche, and also with more affiliate marketing experience, I tend to be able to know if a niche will work or not, although not all sites work out as well as I had hoped, but that’s just business.

Hopefully sharing this website style helped sparks some ideas for you all!

Regards,