Your Craigslist Classifieds Authority Site

Affiliate Marketing

The above paragraphs about ebooks and Clickbank lead right into a subject I'm dying to talk about. And that is affiliate marketing. What is affilaite marketing? Well, it's one of my most favorite things in regards to making money on the web. My ebook “ How I Made $16,452.47 In One Month With The XBOX 360” covers it. But I want to touch on it a bit here, give you a summary of what it is, and why you should be interested in it. I've made thousands of dollars a month with affiliate marketing. Here's what it is:

Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses (merchants/advertisers) in which an affiliate (publisher) is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts

The above is what Wikipedia says. So what is it in laymen's terms? It's simply selling other people's stuff for a commission!

Here's how it works: You essentially become an “affiliate” of a person or company by making an agreement with them to send business their way in return for a commission. You are not an employee of that company, nor do they pay you a salary or by the hour. The agreement is you make with them is much more flexible. You are basically telling them, “If and when I send you traffic or sell an item for you, I want you to pay me. I will work my own hours and I may never send you one lead but I expect to be paid when I do”.

Is that a great agreement or what?! You aren't really locked into anything. Most of the time, signing up as an affiliate means going to a website and filling out a short form. There are even websites like Commission Junction(cj.com) whose sole purpose is to provide an affiliate a pool of companies you may be interested in being an affiliate for. Commission Junction at his writing has a collection of over 1000 companies whose affiliate program you can sign up for right on the spot. These companies range from tiny businesses to giants like Ebay. And again, it is free to sing up as an affiliate with any of those companies.

Once you sign up as an affiliate, you are then given a special link to that company's website. You can post this link on your website or in an ad. If anyone clicks through that link and buys something from the site you directed them to, you will get a commission. The size of the commission depends on the company you are being an affiliate for.

Commission Junction is a type of site called an Affiliate Network:
Other major affilaite Network sites are:

Linkshare – www.linkshare.com

Performics – www.performics.com

Digital River – www.digitalriver.com

ValueClick Media – www.onresponse.com

Kolimbo – www.kolimbo.com

Pay Dot Com – www.paydotcom.com

Clickbank – www.clickbank.com

Or just go to a web site that you are interested in selling products for and see if they have an affiliate program. You can usually find a link at the bottom of their web site.

Here's a screenshot from CircuitCity.com showing the link to their affiliate program. The link is usually at the bottom of the page and sometimes hard to find, but if you look you will find many companies have affiliate programs

Another way to find companies that have affiliate programs is to do a google search for “(company name) affiliate program”. Ex: “Best Buy Affiliate Program” (see below)

--------------------

If affiliate marketing sounds interesting to you, check out the bible of affilliate marketing: Rosalind Gardner's Super Affiliate Marketing Handbook: www.superaffiliatehandbook.com

Next Page