Understanding Affiliate Marketing...And Applying It To Your Local Business

What is Affiliate Marketing and how can you use it to boost your local Business profits?

Let me ask you a couple of questions -

Would you like to be able to offer your customers hundreds of quality products that are related to what you currently sell without physically stocking or shipping them yourself?
How about if the merchants who stocked those products paid you up to 70% of the purchase price in Commission for every one of their products that you sold?
What if there was a way to track these sales so that you always got paid when someone made a purchase from you and there was no dispute when it came time to getting your money?
What if your store was open 24 hours every day of the year and made sales to customers all over the World without you having to lift a finger?

You would be making money while you slept...

Wealthy people get wealthy while they sleep.

They do certain things during the day in order to set up systems that allow them to make money 24 hours a day, every day of their lives.

This is true Financial Freedom!

Well maybe we had better look a little deeper into how to set up some affiliate programs on your website, and even in your offline marketing.

Affiliate Programs are one of the most powerful methods ever devised for the average entrepreneur or Business person to make a fortune with ease. The trouble is, most people fail to make any serious money because the don't follow some simple principles that work consistently when they are applied correctly.

So what is an Affiliate Program?

It is a system of marketing products and services through a wide network of websites and email databases that enables a merchant to sell to a vastly bigger market than they could ever hope to reach on their own.

By paying a commission ranging from 1% for hard goods (Books, pots and pans, mobile phones, etc.) to 70% or more for digital products (eBooks, downloadable software, etc.), the merchant can have potentially thousands of sales people all over the World selling their products or services for them, and who are only paid when they actually make a sale.

This differs from a regular sales force, where many sales people are paid a retainer plus commission - they are paid (but not for long, usually) even if they produce no results.

Plus, the market for the merchants product or service covers millions more people than if they were restrict themselves to a local geographical area thanks to the global reach of the Internet.

To make sure you always get paid, most affiliate programs are administered by a third party like Clickbank.com or Commission Junction.com. This way, you know you will get paid for any sales you make as long as you put your affiliate links into your marketing correctly.

The big affiliate networks have too much to lose to try to scam a few dollars out of you, so you know your cheques will always arrive when they are due - wouldn't it be nice if everyone paid up when they were supposed to?

So, how do you apply this to your Business?

I'm glad you asked.

First, decide on the theme that mostly relates to the Business you are in. Then go to one of the major search engines, and type in - your niche+affiliate - whatever your niche is.

This will bring back search results of merchants who sell products or services related to your area of Business who have an Affiliate Program.

Check them out and then apply for inclusion in the ones that are the best fit with your target market. Any program worthwhile will be free to join, as well.

Put links to these merchants on your website, send traffic to the merchants, get paid a commission every 2 weeks, sell stuff 24/7.

Sounds easy, doesn't it?

Well it's a bit harder than that...but not very much, actually.

So what else do you need to know to make a lot of money as an Affiliate marketer?

High earning Affiliates do several things differently from ordinary marketers who are trying to make a dollar on the Internet.

For example -

They don't just put up a sales page and try to flog several different products on one site, they build a website that Pre-sells their visitors on the benefits of owning one single product per page.
They know that the visitor may not buy on the first visit to their website, so they always try to get their email address so that they can send follow up information later on.
They focus on one or more tightly focused niche markets, devoting each separate website to it's own small target market.
They follow up, then follow up...then follow up some more with products or services that are closely related to the theme of their website, never straying into territory that is unfamiliar to their targeted visitors and trying to sell things that are unrelated to that theme

These and other traits set them apart from the vast majority who fail miserably at trying to make an Affiliate Program work.

Affiliate marketing, done correctly, could be a huge part of your Businesses income in a very short space of time. It really has the potential to turn your Business into a Money Tree Business like we discussed in an earlier article - you just have to know how to go about setting it up properly.

To help you do that, here's an excellent article that goes into more detail than I have covered here on how you set your Business up as an Affiliate and reap the rewards of this powerful marketing medium. You will discover strategies that less than 1% of Australia's marketers are taking advantage of - your competitors won't know what hit them.

To read this article, Click Here.

I do hope this short lesson had inspired you to add Affiliate marketing as one of your Multiple Streams of Income. Done right, it can be a very profitable, low risk way of extracting lots of extra profits from the relationships you have built with your customers.

Combine affiliate marketing with your email list of customers and you will be bringing in the cash faster than you can count it...

I wish you well with your online business,

Kind regards,

Former SBI Certified Webmaster

P.S. If you have any questions about how to get your business on the web, or how to improve your existing website's performance, I'd love to hear from you. Just use the Contact Form Here to send me an email and I'll get right back to you.

Do you have any SBI questions? Click Here and we'll be glad to answer them

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