One of the legitimate ways to start making real money online is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is selling products that are not yours for a commission. You can learn more about affiliate marketing if you sign up for free training available here. If you decide to make money this way you can choose from thousands of affiliate programs you can find online. You can anything you want: books, merchandise, software, services, and when a client that was referred by you purchase something from the merchants website you will earn money. How much money you will make depends on many things but it will usually be percentage of the sale price which goes from several up to 50 – 75 % for digital products like books or software.
Making money online as an affiliate marketer is not easy and in the beginning many new and inexperienced marketers will suffer losses, but later on will be profitable as their experience and knowledge of promoting affiliate products increases.So how do you start learning about affiliate marketing? If you search online you will find many books and free reports about making money with affiliate marketing. They all have a rather simple concept of finding a good product with affiliate program you can join, and promoting it using many free and paid methods available. Many of the marketing “gurus” claim you can make thousands of dollars very easily through affiliate programs.
One method is to display advertisements on your blog or website and when someone purchases something from the merchants website, you will earn money. Other way is quick start method and uses paid advertising methods. Using paid methods of driving traffic to your affiliate programs is quick and relatively simple method, but it will cost you certain amount money for every visitor you will receive. Although marketers can drive lots of traffic using paid methods, that that does not mean that the visitors will actually make a purchase. If they don’t buy something than you also wont make any money and may end up paying more money for the paid advertising than you will actually make from your affiliate programs.
Many marketing gurus that sell ebooks say that anyone can make fortune overnight with affiliate programs using paid traffic methods. What they claim is that you can start making money immediately by become an affiliate and start sending traffic through PPC ad network like Google Adwords. PPC stands for Pay per click, which means you are charged certain amount of money every time someone clicks on your ads and comes to your website.
Although at first glance making money online with affiliate programs may look simple and attractive that is not really the case. Fortunately you can find great training for free that is available to beginners. To start buying advertising from PPC networks you need to open account with Google Adwords or other PPC network and set your PPC advertising cost per click. You are charged the amount of money you bid when someone clicks on you ads, but if that person purchases something you earn commission. The amount of money you will make from a single in the end must be higher than the cost per click or you end up losing money even if all the visitors you send purchase something. Also the total amount of money you will make this way must be higher than the amount of money you will spend on paid advertising for you to be profitable.
PPC advertising is a way to send large number of targeted visitors to your sales page in very short time, but because it costs money you can end up spending a lot of money from your advertising balance and not getting a single conversion or few conversions that will not even cover the advertising expenses.
Here is a word of advice if you plan to use PPC for promoting your affiliate programs:
- Instead of starting your first PPC campaign, you should first educate yourself and learn all you can about affiliate marketing. You can find lots of information online about making money with affiliate marketing and there are also many good books on this subject you can buy on Amazon.
- Find affiliate programs that are successful and invest more money and efforts in promoting them. Pick programs that pay at least $15 in commission. Don’t just pick one product that you think will might be successful but try many like 10 – 20 at a time. If after a short time some of them don’t bring in profit stop promoting them. If some of them do bring profit then invest more money and hard work in promoting them.
- Always track your campaigns. See how many visitors you need to send to the sales page to have a conversion. If you are paying too much for PPC advertising that are not generating enough income to cover your expenses, stop promoting them. Write many different ads for a single affiliate program and see which of them brings in most sales.
