Affiliate Marketing

Most people on the internet today have experienced some form of affiliate marketing. As you’ve browsed around to sites that interest you, you’ve no doubt seen text links from pay per click campaigns, banner advertisements from media buys and video advertisements from viral marketing campaigns.

To sum it up simply, becoming an affiliate means you provide a means to promote a certain product, service or brand through a website or display advertisement and are given a commission for every new customer you refer from your efforts.

Wikipedia Defines Affiliate Marketing as:

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 crowdsourcing.

The Affiliate Marketing industry has four core players at its heart: the Merchant, the Network, the Publisher and the Consumer. The market has grown sufficiently in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including Affiliate Management Agencies, Super-Affiliates and Specialized Third Parties vendors.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Affiliate marketing — using one website to drive traffic to another — is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers’ marketing strategies.

In my career I’ve been lucky enough to experience the ‘back-end’ of affiliate marketing, rather than stumbling onto it as a newbie. With 4+ years experience managing PPC campaigns, SEO Programs and researching conversion optimization for small businesses I’ve been lucky enough to gain a deeper perspective on the industry than most newcomers are offered.

I’ve collected some of my favorite links that best describe the subject better than I ever could, so if you are a newbie to the industry; check out these sites and learn more about different methods you can use to become successful in internet marketing. Come back here, and I’ll do my best to give you tips and techniques to maximize your potential.

Affiliate Marketing Resources

Nicky Cakes is the no bullshit affiliate marketer. You can read his newbie guide to affiliate marketing on his blog.
Geno Prussakov of AM Navigator has a great post up that outlines different methods of affiliate marketing.
Jeremy Palmer offers a straight forward action plan for success on his Quit Your Day Job website.
Additionally, Jeremy covers his affiliate marketing business step by step from start-up to success in the Black Ink Project.
Rosalind Gardner’s Net Profits Today – A great resource for all newbie to intermediate affiliate marketers. Check out the section for beginner affiliate marketers if you’re just getting started.
Wicked Fire – The ultimate internet marketing forum, not for the timid or total newbie, but if you can handle reading between the lines of having your skull smashed with the SEO Book, you might learn a thing or two about affiliate marketing.

Top Affiliate Networks

Once you have your head around how affiliate marketing works, you should start develop your action plan. The crucial steps here are to research your prospective markets for marketing potential and join affiliate networks to discover what sort of offers you can promote to these markets. Here are some of my favorite networks to work with, all of which are top notch in the industry for responsiveness, support, diverse offers and reliable reporting.

At this point you’ve registered for some affiliate marketing networks and have an idea of the offers available to you, you should be able to really zero in on your target audience and come up with a plan of attack. There are quite a few routes you can take all of which require a certain amount of blood, sweat and tears.

I’m sorry, but this industry isn’t easy, anyone who tells you it’s simple is lying to you. It takes time to learn, money to get started and effort to make work. However, with that said, it’s still the easiest entry point to legitimate business in the world. Invest the time to learn and you can’t possibly go wrong; the possibilities are endless.