Definition of Affiliate Marketing : according to Wikipedia

“Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. It is an application of crowd sourcing. Examples include rewards sites, where users are rewarded with cash or gifts, for the completion of an offer, and the referral of others to the site.”

In simple jargon, you promote a product to a customer that is offered by a merchant and if the customer buys the product through you then the merchant will pay you a commission.

There are 3 major role players in Affiliate Marketing

1. An advertiser or merchant is the company who is selling a product or service.

2. An affiliate, sometimes referred to as a publisher or partner, is another person or company who assists in the promotion of the product and earns a commission for doing so. (That could be you!)

3. The Service Provider, then you have a management company in between the merchant and the affiliate who links the two together. An example of Management Company is ClickBank and PayDotCom.  The management company allows the merchants to place their products in the market place and publishers join the management company to promote the merchant products.

In other words, the management company partners the merchants with the affiliates and keeps track of the sales and commissions.

The advantage for an affiliate is that after joining the merchant company it can choose products from variety of categories and promote them to earn a commission.

Promoting a product as an affiliate can be as easy, as it can be very difficult. You need to choose the right product or your affiliate marketing campaign can be a disaster. Many have failed in this venture due to the lack of knowledge required to promote as an Affiliate. There are tons of training on the internet. It is important to follow some before venturing online as an Affiliate. Some Super Affiliates will provide  you with excellent training and at a very low cost.

The tendency of a newbie is to promote the first product that comes out in the market place rather than selecting a product based on customer requirements or based on what your skills or passion is about.

It is important to know your product because to attract visitors to your promotions your campaigns need to be very attractive. The critical thing is to know how to promote your product.

In experienced affiliate marketers have chosen the wrong path and have failed over and over again, sometimes going through investments in creating websites to promoting a product and after a few months have abandoned the product and website.

Before you start your venture on the internet or online business, you have to decide what you are good at, or what do you like the most or where are your skills best placed.

Choosing the wrong product which is none of the above mentioned criteria will lead to a sure failure.

Once you have found what you are good at, you then must go for the product that best suits your quality/ability/skills/passion.

I hope this article has been helpful in understanding. Please leave a comment if you liked it and come back as I will be posting more…

Wishing you success on the internet.