Business Directory and Guide - iBizDir.com

Are you looking to be the next dot com millionaire, do you struggle day after day trying to create the next Google or Facebook? The truth is most online entrepreneurs are also trying to achieve this, I mean why wouldn’t you, with sites like YouTube selling for prices in the billions why wouldn’t you want to experience those types of riches.

Enter ‘Affiliate Marketing’, the marketing practice in which the marketer advertisers a companies product and earns a sum of money on every product they help sell. These type of marketers now become ‘affiliates’ for the company.

Affiliate marketers often use there own websites or content to drive sales to the sellers website. Common internet marketing methods are also used, such as SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC (Pay per Click) and Article Marketing. E-Mail marketing has also proved very successful for some marketers.

The most common ways for affiliates to earn money are by receiving a percentage of a sale or a predetermined amount per ‘lead’. Lead normally means that the marketer convinces the customer to sign up for something, which hopefully equals to a product sale.

Advantages of Affiliate Marketing

Being able to work from home – Affiliate marketing has enabled a lot more people to work from home, instead of going out selling products they can just as easily do it through an online medium. There are even affiliate marketers making hundreds of thousands from home.

Scalability – With affiliate marketing you can run at your own pace, even if you decide that’s a steady crawl. Because of the nature of affiliate marketing, you don’t necessarily have to invest any money, which makes it a good little earner in your spare time. Where as if you are looking to increase your sales exponentially you can invest in online advertising through programs like Google Adsense where you can spend between one and one million dollars a day on your advertising campaign.

Semi Auto-Pilot – Once you have got your affiliate marketing to a good level, you could potentially leave it on auto pilot so to speak. Your campaign will run for twenty four hours, seven days a week, so unless something drastic happens you may be able to sit back and relax most of the time.

Multiple Income Streams – If you are already running a rather successful blog on fishing tackle for example, and then you get approached by a fishing tackle willing to give you 25% commission on every item you sell, it would make obvious sense to attempt to advertise they products on your blog, this technique often leads to much higher conversion rates than landing pages, because your readers are much more willing to trust products you refer to them.
 
Disadvantages of Affiliate Marketing
Biggest disadvantage is if you do not do your home work and end up spending more money on promoting the product than you will make by selling affiliate products.

How do I find products to sell?
Luckily you won’t have to go bugging people asking if they would like you to sell there products, thanks to businesses called ‘Affiliate Networks’ (like ClickBank). Affiliate Networks act as a go between for affiliates and merchants. The affiliates are able to find products to advertise, and the merchants are able to find more people to sell there products, it a win-win situation.

Affiliate networks make there money one of two ways. They even charge the merchants a set fee to create a listing on there website, or they take a small percentage of the commissions. It doesn’t cost the affiliates anything to join, so there’s no need for hesitation.

There are many ways to advertise your affiliate product:

PPC - By running PPC campaigns like Google adword.

Article Directories – By submitting valuable, quality content to article directories and including a link to your landing page you can generate sales effectively.

Review Sites – If you can write well structured reviews on niche products followed by a link to a purchase page you can often create substantial revenue.

Shopping comparison website – By comparing your affiliate product to other retailers you can often make customers believe you are offering them the lowest price which leads to sales.

Niche sites – By creating extremely targeted niche websites it is easier to attract the type of visitors you are really looking for, the ones ready to buy a product.

Personal Blog – Once you have developed a relationship with your readers it becomes increasingly easy to sell them products, this is unless of course you repeatedly do so and they will become aware of your tactics. As a guideline I only recommend trying to sell them products you have used yourself and believe they are worthy of the cost.

In conclusion affiliate marketing appears to be the perfect starting point for entrepreneurs big or small. Just make sure you stay away from spamming and illegal activities and you should be fine!