[Keith Brown's Promotions] Beginning Affiliate Marketing Tips

[Keith Brown]

Affiliate marketing programs are a great way to earn money online and a great introduction to e-commerce. You leverage products and services from others to make a profit.

"Affiliate marketing programs are the process when a company offers to pay you either a set amount for a click through from your website, or a set amount for visitors signing up, or even a percentage of a purchase made by visitors as a result of being referred from your website."

Even if visitors don't make a purchase immediately, almost all programs offer cookie duration, normally consisting of 30 - 90 days. What this means is that as long as the visitors have the cookie in their cache, you'll still receive a profit from the sale.

You still need to create some kind of traffic using your affiliate links to make the sales. The good part is that there are ways to generate traffic without the need for your own website or domain.

One time thief is searching for and investigating possible affiliate programs. Online companies like Clickbank and Commission Junction make your work much easier as they have compiled large amounts of publishers that would like people like you to help sell their products and services.

The most commonly used source for affiliate marketing is probably Clickbank. They offer a special interface for locating good affiliate programs, the marketplace. But it is a bit too rigid in what it offers to really allow for the powerful searches and number crunching needed to pick the top affiliate programs you should promote.

A product like CB Affiliate Revenue makes your life as an affiliate marketer working with Clickbank much easier, and it will save you a lot of time that would be better spent on other moneymaking tasks.

Affiliate tracking can also be a problem. Once you have applied to become an affiliate for a company, they'll usually supply you with a personalized link or code. It's very important that you implement this code into your page correctly, or you may be sending visitors to the company without receiving any profit. CB Affiliate Revenue will help you do this when working with Clickbank.

A majority of snippets in the code will contain a unique user ID, which the company uses to distinguish which site sent traffic.

Make sure you take notes when you find a good affiliate program. Write down were you found it, when you started to use it, any login information you may need to get back to your affiliate information, your affiliate ID (and/or urls) and where you use the link to send prospects to the publisher.

You will need all this information further on in your affiliate marketing career; and as the number of affiliate programs you join increases, so does the risk of forgetting where it came from.

New Download: Keith Brown's Marketing Strategies - Vol. 2: Turning One Into A Million!

--
Posted By Keith Brown to Keith Brown's Promotions at 8/10/2008 08:09:00 AM