Affiliate Marketing

On the one hand, affiliate marketing is just another way to monetize your traffic. On the other hand, a single post can't possibly do it justice. Rather than a bland overview (apparently my specialty), I'll just try to pick out some interesting highlights.

The basic idea is to move up the food chain. With PPC advertising, someone pays you for that click-through because they think they can make money from it, i.e., convert the click to a sale. The next step is to actually make the sale and keep a percentage. Products sold through affiliate marketing channels typically have very high commissions. For example, ebooks (i.e., PDF files) for sale at prices ranging from $7 to $700, typically have a sales commission in the range 25% to 75%. If you pay $100 for 1000 clicks and convert 10% of those to a sale with an average profit of $10, you just made $900 profit. If that profit is per site per month and you have 10 sites selling different products, you just cleared $9000 for the month. Maybe $8500 after site build and hosting costs. An attractive proposition on the face of it.

What are some of the difficulties? This very much depends on the niche and on the product. If you're selling mainstream books as an Amazon affiliate at 7% commission, your difficulties beyond making the sale are likely to be few and far between. If you are selling make money fast ebooks at 75% commission, the demand for refunds is likely to be rather high. Make sure you let the guarantee period expire before starting on the kitchen renovations. The main risk, of course, is that you don't make enough sales to cover the advertising. The only real way to manage this risk is with experience, so it pays to be cautious at first. The $20 to join the members-only section of the warriorforum.com is probably a good investment as well.

If you've decided to build a landing page with hyponotic copy and an irresistible call to action, the easiest affiliate network to join is clickbank.com . You'll probably want to move on fairly soon, but lots of people get their start there. The screening phone call is mostly just to check that you aren't a drooling moron or a raving lunatic. For other affiliate networks, it's generally good advice to call in person after you apply online to make sure you're accepted into the network. There are ebooks in the Warrior Special Offer (WSO) section of the warriorforum.com that detail exactly what to say to get accepted. After that, monthly instant messaging exchanges with your affiliate manager to let them know that you are alive and interested should keep you in good standing.

If the risk is well managed, you can make large amounts of money with affiliate marketing, but you do need experience and a bank roll first. Of all the options we've looked at so far, it looks like this is the one that will get us to the $200k goal. Once you've got some money to reinvest, there are some great multiplication strategies, to keep yourself moving forward. The current recession makes it a little harder, but there are still plenty of opportunities out there. I think a key step is to become a beneficiary of globalization and outsourcing, rather than a victim. Yes indeed, a plan is coming together.

I've also spent time looking at ebay and amazon selling. Of course, it depends on what you are selling. For example, there is a big difference between selling ebooks and physical products. I'll write a little about it next post, but they tighten the rules daily to push smaller players out of the marketplace, so it isn't really looking like a good option for wealth generation.