October 31, 2008

What is Affiliate Marketing?

There are various ways to generate income online and one of the most effective ways is known as affiliate marketing. The easiest way do define affiliate marketing is to call it any form of advertising not run exclusively by yourself. That is, it’s a form of advertising in which you generally get a commission of a sale. There are three types of affiliate marketing (contains affiliate links):

Pay Per Click

This type of advertisement is a common moneymaker for entrepreneurs, and includes programs like adwords and adsense. These programs pay publishers a certain amount of money when an advertisement is clicked on. For some, these programs can be extremely profitable, and for others, they generate “table scraps.”

Pay Per Sale

This type of advertisement involves giving the affiliate (that’s you) a commission on each product sold. These types of programs include SEOBOOK, OIO Publisher, and Performancing Ads. These are generally the most profitable types of affiliate programs when it comes to professional blogging, but you should take care as to how many you join.

Pay Per Lead

This involves paying an affiliate when a referred client signs up for a service. Programs such as scour fall into this category. This is probably one of the hardest ways to earn money, simply because you have to convince people to take action.

How Do I Get Started?

To get started on an affiliate program, all you have to do is sign up. Of course you’ll usually need a paypal account in most instances to receive payments. From then on, it’s mostly touch and go. You should see what programs do and don’t work for you, and adapt. You can learn more about affiliate marketing from SugarRae’s series on reasons you fail at affiliate marketing. Problogger also has a great post on how to make money with affiliate programs on your blog.

What are your thoughts on affiliate marketing? Are you a part of any programs? What are your biggest money makers?

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Corey Freeman is a web designer and aspiring developer who has been blogging and building sites since 2004. Deadly Clever Designs is her first online business and provides custom website and wordpress designs.

  • Wei Liang | ABloggerBlog
    October 31, 2008

    Affiliate marketing is definitely one of the best ways to monetize a blog as the rewards gained from this could be huge. I personally do affiliate marketing with my existing email list that I have build up over 1 year plus of blogging.

    Most of my products are from clickbank or JV with some other bloggers. Looking forward to making my first 5 digit from affiliate marketing though. Do you practice affiliate marketing?

    Wei Liang

  • Corey Freeman
    October 31, 2008

    @Wei Liang
    Thanks for sharing your experience. Diligent is a fairly new blog so I’ve just recently gotten into affiliate marketing. I’ll have to see how it goes, but I know it’s been very profitable other bloggers I talk to. I’ll have to see how it goes.

  • Harish
    November 3, 2008

    Hmm great post.I mostly trust on PPC

  • Rajeev Edmonds
    November 4, 2008

    I have used Commission Junction on my tech blog, and results were really encouraging.

  • Corey Freeman
    November 4, 2008

    @Rajeev Edmonds
    I’ve never used that before, but congrats. I guess I’ll have to check the program out.

  • Corey Freeman
    November 4, 2008

    @Harish
    Thanks! I’m using mostly affiliate programs right now.

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