Affiliate Marketing News : What Is It and How Do I Find It?
This is the first in a series of articles I will publish in the next couple of weeks, explaining a step-by-step plan to successful affiliate marketing. This first article is aimed to introduce absolute newbies to the concept of affiliate marketing and to the different ways in which to find a product to promote.
This first article is not for experienced marketers neither is it for those who know and understand affiliate marketing and know how to find good products, as it covers only the essential basics. My following articles will hopefully discuss more complex steps and thus may be of interest even to experienced marketers.
Let me begin by answering the question “What is affiliate marketing anyway? I like to compare Affiliate Marketing to the California Gold Rush. The treasures are there and they only need to be discovered. However, to get to the point: if you are an affiliate marketer of a certain product, the merchant or the product publisher will pay you a commission each and every time he or she makes a sale as a result of traffic you have sent to their sale page.
The “product” may be physical – from a bar of soap to a private plane; it may be digital – anything one can instantly download from the Internet: ebooks, software, video courses etc.; and it may be a subscription or a registration to a newsletter or a list. Tens of thousands of companies pay their affiliates a commission for a sale, a registration or a lead.
You can see that the fortunes are there, hidden under the ground in Internet land. You need to go out there and dig it out. Most new affiliate marketers learn that their first step, i.e. finding the right product, is the most complicated one.
I will show you a few ways to find it:
1. Have you ever purchased a product online which you really liked? Why not try to become an affiliate? Go to the product’s site or sales letter, click on the “affiliate program” link. You’ll find there all the information you need.
2. Do you have any hobbies? Things you know a lot about like a sport, music, cooking, whatever. You may also participate in forums in which your interests are discussed. This will be very helpful in the future when you promote products associated with your hobbies. Let’s assume you like sewing; you have a lot of information about cloth, patterns, and sewing machines. Look for any kind of product in the field of sewing which you can easily promote.
3. Do a little research on the Internet. Think of products that do very well in the United States but are unknown to Europeans, become an affiliate and promote the product using Google Adwords campaigns in Europe. You can do the same with a product that you’ve discovered in Europe, or any foreign country, and promote it in North America.
4. Try to follow the hot items that your children and/or other young people spend money on. Teenagers are a vast group of consumers.
5. Subscribe to or buy regularly some popular publications. Follow the reports on the newest fads and fashions.
6. And last but not least: join one of the big Affiliate Program Providers, such as Commission Junction, ClickBank, to name just the biggest ones, but there are more out there which will offer you thousands of products to promote.
In Article 2 I will describe the second step on the way to rewarding affiliate marketing.
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