Affiliate Marketing a Golden Opportunity or a Waste of Time?

by: Noble E. Dennie Sr.
The idea of doing business over the internet has been thoroughly been explored and many potential entrepreneurs are searching for the best possible way to do business period. Old school business owners thought that brick and mortar was the only way to go but recently, since the advent of the internet, brick and mortar is not necessarily the choice for today’s businessman. Now, doing business comes down to whether you want to set up your own business and online store, or sign up for an affiliate program.

Well, First of all, let's define what is meant by an affiliate program and an Affiliate Marketer. An affiliate program is… primarily an internet business set up by someone other than the affiliate. This could be a group, another business, a single business person, anyone but you. This business is already setup, running and hopefully making money. If you do your homework and find through research that the business is not profitable, go to another business this is profitable. “How can a non-profiting business make you money?” You see, the purpose of an affiliate program is to make money from someone else’s efforts or ideas. If the idea is not making money for the owner who designed it, chances are it will not make money for you, the affiliate marketer. The owner could be selling physical goods, educational products, informational products or any other products that can be sold online. However, the responsibility of the affiliate marketer is to make sure there is room in that business for them, the affiliate marketer, to make money.

Know this; if you sign up as their affiliate, you are helping the owner of the product promote their product, business or online store. In return, you, the affiliate marketer, will be paid a commission for each sale that is generated under a code number called your affiliate link, or affiliate ID. This link or code is used every time someone buys any product from you, or from your link / affiliate ID. That is what is meant by affiliate marketer.

An affiliate marketer would go to the internet lookup and find any product they want to promote, check it out through let’s say clickbank and check out the gravity and a few other key codes that will be discussed in future articles to see if the product is selling, how much commission is being paid on a given product, sometimes up to (%75) commission and how much competition is there for that commission. Very importantly, you should check out all of these and there are other ways to tell if a product is worth while promoting.

There are many ways this can be done; one of the most common ways is through a product hosting company called Clickbank. Now, Clickbank is one of the more commonly used companies to pay affiliates for bringing buyers to a product. We will discuss more on clickbank in another article. There are others for example Paydot.com, Amazon, wordtracker.com, but clickbank is the leader when it comes to affiliate’s commissions, tracking and freeing up the product owner so they don’t have to worry about paying out commissions. This is done seamlessly and tracked as well as the owner’s profits from the products. The owner hopes to have several affiliates promoting their products so he or she will receive their desired profits from their products and thus grow their business. Of course, the amount of commission may vary between different affiliate programs.
for more on affiliate marketing go to http://moneymakersaffiliatetraining.com.