Affiliate Marketing Help

The different types of affiliate marketing

The term “affiliate marketing” is a rather broad term that refers to a way to make money online by promoting other people’s products and services. It actually started way back around 1994 when many online stores or e-commerce sites started to use affiliate marketing as a means to increase their sales.

Now, many years later, affiliate marketing is a very serious business that earns a lot of people significant incomes online.

It all starts when someone joins an online merchant that offers an affiliate program. This can be a website as large as Amazon or as small as a local company offering online eBooks for sale. When you sign up to promote those products or services, you are then considered to be an affiliate of the company and as an affiliate of the company, you will create an income for yourself every single time someone purchases a product through a special link that is provided for you by the company you’ve just signed up with.

But, as we’ve said, the term “affiliate marketing” in and of itself is very broad since there are many ways to earn an income online as an affiliate.

1. First there are Pay-Per-Click companies or, as they’re commonly called, PPC companies. This is a way to earn income simply by displaying advertisements on your website - usually text advertisements. Whenever someone clicks on one of those ads, you receive a commission. In the case of PPC, it varies depending upon how competitive the term is and how much the advertiser paid to be listed on the ads. Google’s AdSense program is a good example of a PPC program but there are lots of other companies as well who fall into this arena; another one of them is AdBrite.
   
2. Another way to earn commissions as an affiliate is to promote actual physical products. An example of this would be Amazon.com for example. On Amazon you can purchase everything from books to electronics and when you sign up as an affiliate with Amazon, every time someone purchase a product from them through your special link, you receive a commission. This is true of many companies that offer physical products as well.
   
   Here’s a tip though…if you’d rather not spend your time searching out a lot of individual companies, you can choose to go through an affiliate network. An affiliate network is a company that takes care of affiliate commissions for many well known and established companies such as GoDaddy.com or even Wal-Mart. The only difference between an individual company like Amazon and an affiliate network are the number of choices that you have when it comes to the different companies.
   
   It’s in your best interest to promote products and services on your website or blog which are related to what you already talk about. This will also help increase your sales.
   
   Some commission networks are Commission Junction and LinkShare.
   
3. Another very popular way of creating affiliate income online is by promoting digital products such as those found at ClickBank.com. At ClickBank you’ll find a wide array of digital products on all different topics available. When I say digital products I mean things like eBooks and software. Things that your customers can download and use as soon as they make a payment.
   
   What makes ClickBank so wonderful for the affiliate is that oftentimes you can receive a 50% or more commission just for one product purchase and the customer is instantly happy because they receive the product instantly rather than having to wait for it to come in the mail.
   
   ClickBank also offers one of the highest payouts in commissions available online.
   
   If you’re brand new to affiliate marketing, I suggest that you first start with ClickBank. Once you get signed up with an account (for free I might add) you have access to their entire catalog of products that you can begin promoting right away.
   
   Then, all you need to do is to add that special code to your website or blog when you promote the product and when a sale is made, you get a commission.
   
   An important note here is to learn how to mask your affiliate links which we get into in another article…I suggest you read that before you begin to promote products.

Affiliate marketing really is one of the easiest ways to make money online - you don’t have to keep an inventory and you don’t even have to provide customer support. Your only job is to advertise.