Making money as an afflicate marketer

As you may already know, affiliate marketing is simply promoting other people's products or services and getting commissions in return. There are strong attractions for opting for affiliate marketing as a means of making money online: One, the product has already been made. So you don't have to spend money or lots of time creating a product to sell. All you need to do is to find a product that has good demand, promote it and earn commission up to 75% of it price. Two, the sales page has been professionally designed to ensure sales, much better than if you were to do it yourself (assuming you are a newbie to affiliate marketing). Three, a system for taking orders, delivering the product to buyers, and attending to customers concerns, is also already in place. You don't need to worry yourself about all issues relating to both sales and after sales matters. Again, all you have to do to make money on the product is to promote it. However, to successfully promote an affiliate product, you will have to drive traffic to the product's sales page - this is the critical point about making money with affiliate marketing. The more targeted traffic you direct to the product, the greater the chances of making sales. On the contrary, if you don't expose the product to potential buyers, even if the product has a great demand with killer sales page, there will still be no way you can make sales or succeed in marketing it. So, it is clear that driving traffic to your affiliate product is the dividing line between making money in affiliate marketing and making no money. There are two broad ways of directing traffic to your affiliate product: 1. By buying traffic e.g using Pay Per Click, PPC, advertising platform, a very good example is the Google AdWord. AdWords are the little text adverts you will usually see on your right-hand side of the page that comes up when you do a search for something on the search engines, such as Google. You will see it assigned the title "Google Sponsored Ads" on the Google search engine. To use AdWords to direct traffic to your affiliate product, you have to sign up AdWord with Google or a similar service of such from Yahoo, depending on which one you want to use, though Google is more popular; then fund your account and set up your Ads. When your target buyers click on your ad, your AdWord account with Google will be charged. That is, you will pay Google a couple of cents (depending on what you have set when setting up your campaign) for each click on your Ad. That is why it is called Pay Per Click. The person is then taken to a page (the landing page) where the product can be exposed to him or her. There are two ways you can do this, I will explain. One is to direct the potential buyer who clicks on your ad straight to the sales page of the product, where they will get the details of the product and be enticed to order it. Applying this method makes things very easy for you. You wouldn't need to set up a web page, full website or blog to promote the product, as you only need to find a high selling product, pick good keywords that will most likely lead to purchase, set your bidding right, write a compelling ad, run it, and drive traffic directly to the sales page of the product, through your affiliate link of course. But this method has two problems. One is that, some affiliate centers, such as commission junction do not allow their affiliates to send traffic from AdWords directly to the sales page of the products registered with them. Therefore, if your preference is to go with this method, you will have to leave out Commission Junction and go for ClickBank and other centers that don't bother about directing traffic straight to the sales pages of the products you are promoting. The other problem with this method affects your ability to make money. It takes more than one exposure for people, including yourself, to buy something (if I'm wrong please send me a comment through my website) By sending someone directly to the sales page of the product you are promoting only exposes them to the product once. If they didn't buy then, it means you have lost the chance of selling it to that person for good. This does not mean it is not possible to make sales and even make profit at the end of the day with this method, sure, out of two hundred clicks or thereabout, you may have at least one sale depending on how hot the product is and how compelling its sales page is also. But the fact is that the chance of making sales with this method is slim and it is even slimmer now with the global economic melt down currently ravaging the world. Although this method used to work very well before, now a lot of people are keeping their wallets a hundred meters away from them. 2. That brings us to the second way by which you can send traffic from your AdWord campaign to your product. This is a highly effective method and it is what produces the results of tens and hundreds of thousands of Dollars sales you hear other people are making in affiliate marketing. Instead of directing someone who clicks on your ad straight to the sales page of the product, using this method you will direct that person to a page you have setup to get free report or e-book relevant to what he or she is looking for. For instance, if you are marketing an anti aging food supplement, you can prepare a report or e-book on a topic such as "How to Live up to 100 Years". Together with a good copy to compel people to want the report hungrily, you will put a form on the page that anyone who desires the report should fill to be able to download it. With this form you will capture their e-mails (this is your passport to making the money). In the report or e-book, you will carefully introduce the product to the prospective buyer as the ready solution to the problem they want to fix. I hope you appreciate that this information I'm freely sharing with you is a strongly guided secret that the internet marketing gurus sell for hundreds of Dollars online. And that's because this affiliate marketing strategy spins cool money over and over again. Even if your prospect didn't immediately buy the product or fill a required form that will ensure you making a commission (that's if you are promoting a CPA), you still have their e-mails list to use to follow them up. Better still, you can later market related different products that you think they will like e.g., aging control program, again and again to them and continue to make money from the list. The second way to drive traffic to your affiliate product is the free method, which involves using a blog or website. By having a blog or website with valuable content for your visitors, you will over time establish yourself as an expert on the subject of your blog or website. Then it will be easy for you to refer products to your e-mail list and have thousands happily buying them through your affiliate link. This is how top internet marketers make six to seven figure incomes yearly. A blog, especially enables you to build a strong relationship with your readers who over time come to trust you and regard your words highly. So, whenever you find a resource that they will find useful and helpful, you can refer it to them, and many will usually buy. For this method to work well, you will have to gradually build your blog or website, and optimize it strongly for the search engines (search engines still remains the largest source of free traffic). You can also hunt for free traffic from other sources, and you must put in place an e-mail capturing system to secure your visitor's contacts. Although the first method of promoting your affiliate products, which involves buying traffic, is faster to producing result, the second method, which involves building blogs or websites, produces more consistent sales on the long run as more people read and enjoy your blog or website. Therefore, if you are able to build such blogs or websites in any profitable niche of your interest (not necessarily in the make money online niche), you are assured continual huge income from your site. My name is Michael Clement Okogho. I am an internet entrepreneur and consultant. The main purpose of being here is to share vital and profitable information with fellow network marketers (both new and old in the business or about to start).