How to make money from affiliate marketing and why it is one of the best home-based businesses
Arguably the best home-based internet business for a beginner is affiliate marketing. It's an excellent entry point to start making money online. Here's why.
You don't need to have your own product.
You don't have to do face-to-face selling, or any selling at all. The merchant's salesletter does that part.
You don't have to worry about shopping carts or autoresponders.
There's no need for a merchant account.
...and...
You never have to worry about providing any customer service once you make a sale.
Can you see why many people think it's the best home-based internet business?
In affiliate marketing, you channel visitors to merchants' websites and get rewarded for doing so, typically by being paid a percentage of what your visitors spent in those websites. If you've ever gone to a site and seen a link to books at amazon.com, for example, that's an affiliate link.
The idea is to find merchants who provide quality products in high demand. Then you sign up with their Affiliate Programs (also known as Associate or Referral programs), become their affiliate, direct visitors to their websites, and collect a commission for every sale made through you.
Signing up is usually free (beware those which are not). No worries about manufacturing, inventory, processing orders, and shipping – the merchant does all that.
The easiest way to find and join such referral programs is to sign up with affiliate program networks. These are companies that manage affiliate programs by linking merchants (advertisers) with affiliates, and managing the payments.
Merchants looking for affiliates to help get customers, will list their products with affiliate program networks. On your part, to do affiliate marketing, just sign up with these networks, select products you want to promote, and proceed to direct visitors to the relevant product websites.
It is best to join affiliate programs managed by reputable networks so that you're assured of getting paid. These networks include shareasale.com, linkshare.com, cj.com, and clickbank.com. They list thousands of merchants and their products.
You can sign up with Clickbank straight away, free, but for the others, you need to have your own website first. Here's a quick guide on how to open a Clickbank account, with screenshots to help you along.
Alternatively, if you know something wonderful that you think is a potential bestseller, you could check that product's website to see whether it runs an affiliate program.
Then follow the instructions on that website to create the affiliate link in your webpage. An affiliate link can be a text link or ad that links from your web page to the merchant's product web page, containing information that identifies the visitor as coming from you.
When your visitor clicks on the affiliate link in your webpage, he sees the relevant salesletter on your merchant's website. The affiliate program tracks your commissions through this same affiliate link.
Affiliate marketing commissions range from 5% all the way to 75%, and come from the seller's profits. Among the best home-based internet business payouts, short of selling your own product. The buyer pays the same price whether he buys via your link or arrived at the website on his own, so he's not discouraged from buying through your link.
If you want high commissions, promote digital products. These offer at least 50% commission as no inventory or shipping is needed. That makes it possibly one of the best home-based businesses to do.
Clickbank.com
is the world's biggest digital marketplace, with over 20,000 merchants, selling only digital products.
There're many ways you can go about doing affiliate marketing. You can promote several affiliate programs on one website, or create one site for each. Or put affiliate links into ads. Internet marketeers often promote an affiliate program via email to their mailing list.
If you want to see how one very successful affiliate marketeer does it, see
Confessions of a Lazy Super Affiliate
. In his salesletter page alone (you don't have to buy his ebook), you get to see his 5 traffic and profit strategies clearly spelt out in detail.
As you can see from the Lazy Super Affiliate, the biggest challenge to affiliate marketing is to get hold of lots of visitors and have as many of them as possible buy through your affiliate programs. See How to Start an Internet Business
Want to look at the other ideas for online home based businesses first? Go back to Ways to Make Money Online.
