What Is Affiliate Marketing And How Does It Work

For those who are just getting started online and want to get an understanding of what affiliate marketing is I will attempt to describe it in this post as succinctly as possible, although I do tend to ramble sometimes.

Okay so lets get into it…

Affiliate marketing is basically a way where you can get paid for referring someone to an offer that they eventually purchase. So imagine you go and watch a really good movie and then you tell a friend about it and as a result they go too. In the affiliate marketing world you would have made a commission from that referral.

Now imagine if you write an article saying how great you thought the movie was and you publish it in the local rag, and some people liked what you said about it, and decided to go watch the movie too. Well in the affiliate marketing world you would get paid a commission for each person that went as a result of reading your article.

Usually it breaks down like this…

I find an product that I want to promote and if someone buys that product based on my recommendation or review then I get paid a commission. So in a way I am doing the promoting for the product owners and in return he is paying me a commission. This is a pretty simplistic over view of what happens, and it need not get anymore complicated than that.

Usually the easiest way to find a product to promote is by going to clickbank.com there are literally up to10,000 products that you as an affiliate can promote, so finding products to promote is the easy part. I’ll talk about the hard part soon.

Now there are many ways to promote a product, but the most common ways are through blogging / article marketing involving seo, video marketing, social media and paid advertising. Most people have a preference in terms of what promotional method they adopt primarily because each requires a certain commitment to get it working correctly.

In the old days you could create a webpage and get it ranking in the search engines without too much hassle, however 2013 has brought with it many changes to search engine algorithms, and the focus is more on quality based content than meta tag stuffing or other blackhat techniques.

No surprises there.

So what you have to do is find a promotional method that works for you and then start pushing out good content, and this is where most people fail. They typically go from one method to the next, paying little mind to the underlying principles of each method. However, understanding principles to the method is key to playing this game.

Google Principles

Let’s take Google for example – what has made them successful?

The quality of the results that are being returned for a certain search phrase. This is their bread and butter at the end of the day. If the results that are being returned do not meet the searchers requirements then the searcher will use a different search engine – like Bing.com or Yahoo.com. This is the exact reason why people use Google as opposite to the other two.

So, if that is the case then to win in Google, you have to focus on quality content that fulfill the searchers intent.

Facebook Principles

So what makes Facebook successful?

They offer a way for groups of people to socialize online in real-time, therefore selling stuff in Facebook will work differently to how it works in Google because the principles that make each successful are different. So whatever promotional method you try, just make sure that you understand the underline principle of why they are so successful and then make your promotional material work in line with that.

I am currently promoting a product that you can too, want to know more join me here.

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