Welcome to the World of Affiliate Marketing

If you’ve been looking for a new way to monetize your website, this might just be it. Affiliate marketing gives you, as the website owner, flexibility and the freedom to market products and make money in a way that works for them.

How Affiliate Marketing Works

While there may be groups such as affiliate management agencies who handle the ads, payments, and other details, there are generally four main users involved in the process: Merchants, who are the product owners or sellers, the network, which runs the marketing system, the publisher (the website owner or person marketing the product), and the customer who ultimately buys the product.

To get started, you’ll first need to decide which products or companies you would like to promote. You could choose to promote companies and products that:

• meet the needs of visitors to your current site.
• fit a certain theme or industry you enjoy or be a company you like.
• have particularly high payouts or allow certain opportunities.
• are in high demand and are under-served in the market place.

(To find companies and products offered through affiliate marketing, you can either go to your favorite websites and see if they offer this type of marketing or go to places such as eJunkie, Commission Junction, andClickBank.)

Once you’ve chosen your products and companies, you’ll get access to a number of things, which might include banner ads, rules and limits for advertising, and support. Most importantly, you’ll get a special affiliate code. This looks like a regular URL, but it will have some kind of identifier string on the end of it. It’s this string that’s responsible for marking customers who use your link and tracking the money you make.

How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

Flexibility is the biggest benefit to these types of program. It works with your other marketing techniques to help enhance your income.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Create an entire website around a particular product or company.
• Review and add content to your existing site to promote each item.
• Sell via email marketing and banner ads.
• Promote them through Pay-Per-Click, social media, and SEO.
• Use widgets, create an app, or game.

Have you tried affiliate marketing? What have you found that works or doesn’t work? Any tips to share?