Affiliate Marketing

Dangerous Affiliate Marketing Myths Debunked

Affiliate marketing has become one of the most popular ways to make money online. Some people use affiliate marketing to make a bit of extra income each month, whereas others use it to generate a full time income - often from the comfort of their own home. However, it's also true that many people who try to generate income with affiliate marketing programs never make any money at all.

A Basic Overview Of Affiliate Marketing

The concept of affiliate marketing is actually quite simple. You promote another company's product or service and they pay you for the results you produce. Some companies will pay you for leads you generate. Others will pay you for products you sell. There are actually many things companies will pay affiliates for - everything from getting someone to put their email or zip code into a form all the way up to making sales of very expensive

Companies use affiliate marketing because it is a low cost way for them to potentially bring in additional revenue. Although companies still need to provide affiliate tools, marketing materials, and support, the rest of their affiliate marketing expenses are generally limited to set up costs and/or payment reserves.

Who Pays Affiliates In Affiliate Marketing

There are a few different ways payments are handled in affiliate marketing. Some companies handle payments on their own either in-house or through accounting firms. Others use 3rd party companies known as affiliate networks to recruit, manage, and pay affiliates. This is often the safest alternative for new affiliates - especially if they use an established and well-known affiliate network such as Commission Junction, Share-A-Sale, or ClickBank.

Some affiliates also work out direct deals with companies that don't have a formal affiliate program. Of course if you work out a deal directly it will be up to you to guarantee you get paid.

How Easy Is Affiliate Marketing?

If you've been online much at all, you've probably seen many sites making all kinds of crazy claims about affiliate marketing. You'll see sites claiming that you can push a few buttons and generate crazy amounts of cash. Or you might see people claiming that you can simply post links or ads and generate thousands of dollars per month. They'll even show you charts that try to make you believe that all you have to do to succeed in affiliate marketing is post as many links or ads as possible.

If you believe this type of nonsense, then you'll probably never make a dime in affiliate marketing. However, if you're willing to roll up your sleaves and take time to study how affiliate marketing really works, and understand that it could take you several weeks or several months to see any profits at all, then you have a much better chance at making money with affiliate marketing.

Surprising Things You Need To Know To Succeed In Affiliate Marketing

Some of the things you need to know to succeed with affiliate marketing are fairly obvious. You'll need to know how to pick appropriate affiliate opportunities, how to build websites which feature those affiliate opportunities, and you'll also need to know how to get people to come to the websites you build. Most of this is rather expensive to accomplish, especially if you focus most of your traffic building efforst on free or low cost traffic techniques.

A few things you'll need to know in order to succeed in affiliate marketing aren't as obvious and are rarely discussed.

1. You'll need to know how to manage your money.

Because any kind of marketing is based on testing, monitoring, and feedback, you'll need to know how much of your affiliate income you're willing to invest into such things as:

Testing new traffic strategies which could potentially increase your profits.
Testing new tools to help automate your business.
Testing new conversion strategies to try to get people to take more of the types of profitable actions you want them to take.

It's important to realize that not everything you try will work. And that's why it's incredibly important to decide what percentage of your profits you're willing to invest in exploring and testing new ideas. Whether it's 5%, 15%, or more will depend on your individual risk tolerance, how much income you want to retain in your business, along with your best guess at the likelihood of the potential success of the technique or tool you are testing. And of course that "best guess" will come with experience and typically get better and better over time.

2. You'll need to know how to manage your time.

If you're just starting out in affiliate marketing, you'll still need to understand some basic time management skills. As you probably know, when you're online it's very easy to get sidetracked by the overwhelming amount of information, entertainment, and other potential distractions.

Basic time management can take your business only so far, though. There are many full-time affiliates that only understand very basic time management techniques. However, if you want to build an affiliate marketing business that brings in a substantial amount of income, you will need to understand or work with someone who understands the fundamentals of project management. Most of you reading this page will find a basic book such as Project Management For Dummies sufficient for this purpose.

3. If you buy a significant amount of advertising, you'll need to have a good understanding of cash flow.

While it's true that you can build up a substantial amount of affiliate income by buying advertising, more often than not people who try to do this end up going broke. Why? Because they lack both a basic understanding of money management and a basic understanding of cash flow.

Most affiliate programs don't pay you immediately.

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