What is affiliate marketing?

Although affiliate marketing is sometimes considered to be a grey area, somewhere between advertising and organic referrals, this hardly matters to the people who earn money in this way. Affiliate marketers’ greatest asset is their list (or audience): they are able to earn a revenue share only because of  the highly-qualified (relevant) traffic they can drive to someone else’s online businesses.

Why Affiliate Marketing Works

The people who create products or supply services are usually not going to be experts in the field of selling, or marketing. Rather than trying to learn how to do it themselves or pay someone to do it for them, it makes economic sense to use affiliate marketers who already have a wide audience to recommend products to people who have already bought similar offers. Even though commissions for digital products can be quite high, often > 50%, this is still a good deal for the seller. Once a digital product has been produced, there is no additional cost for extra sales, so 50% of each sale an affiliate makes is better than 100% of no sale at all. Right? So affiliate marketing works because it is a win-win situation.

How Affiliate Marketing Works

Affiliate marketers gain their success by cultivating a particular audience and developing a rapport with them. Some of the tactics used are:

• Establish themselves as an expert in their industry
• Sharing their  stories, about particular products or services they’ve used themselves & found to be helpful to them
• Publish reviews of products or services
• Create in-depth buying guides that compare several similar products or services
• Offer special discounts to their list members for the products or services they promote

I’ll be following up with more about this topic in the next few weeks as I review current ways to make extra money online.