Essential Guide To Affiliate Profits by Seth Godin - HTML preview

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Quick introduction to affiliate marketing...

Affiliate marketing is an "evergreen" way of making money online. Internet marketing strategies and 'fads' come and go, but affiliate marketing remains eternally popular and for good reason. There's good money to be made as an affiliate if you know what you're doing - and it's relatively easy to get started.

Since you're reading this report I'll assume that you know what affiliate marketing is. If you don't then it's extremely simple - you promote other people's products using your unique affiliate link (they can be digital or physical products or service) and then you get paid a commission whenever somebody you've referred purchases something.

The great thing about affiliate marketing is that you don't have to worry about things such as product creation or buying in products. There doesn't have to be an investment when you become an affiliate marketer - you simply sign up to get your affiliate link from the product vendor and away you go. You might choose to invest money in promoting your links of course but that's totally optional.

Affiliate marketing works because it solves two key problems in one go:

1. Product vendors always need more customers and thus they use affiliates to help them find them - for free.

2. People who don't have products of their own to sell can promote products as an affiliate and they instantly have something to sell with very little effort.

Of course the reality is that most affiliates are also product vendors and vice versa. Any successful marketer will both have their own products AND promote other people's as an affiliate. But if you're just getting started you can start off by being an affiliate-only and then move into creating and selling your own products as you build up experience.

How much is it possible to earn as an affiliate marketer?

Affiliate commissions can be anywhere between 1% and 100% of the purchase price. You tend to find that physical products pay lower percentage commissions whilst digital products such as eBooks and courses will pay a higher commission. This is simply because the digital vendor has very little costs involved to run their business and thus they can afford to be more generous with their commissions.

In addition digital vendors tend to have other products inside a sales funnel, which will often be of much higher value. They might offer you 100% commissions on the "front-end" product, for example - but that might only sell for $5, whereas their "back-end" product might sell for $97. In this case they might only offer you 25% commision on the back-end product or even non at all. They are basically using the front-end product to attract as many people into their sales funnel as possible - and offering 100% commission to affiliates is a key way of helping them do that.

How quickly do you get paid?

Some products offer instant commissions which are paid straight into your Paypal account as soon as the sale is made. Other affiliate schemes make you wait until the end of a set period (say 1 month) before they pay you anything - and it sometimes takes into account things like refund periods. After all, product vendors don't want to pay you a commission and then have to later refund the customer because they would obviously lose out.

If you're new to affiliate marketing then you might be wondering how product vendors know which affiliate sent them the sale, since they might have hundreds of different affiliate promoting their products.

The simple answer is that every affiliate is given a unique affiliate link (URL) to use. These links are tracked by cookies, so they always know exactly who sent them the sale and when. In many cases cookies can last for months, so even if you send somebody to the vendors website and they don't make a purchase initially but come back 3 months later and buy something you'll still get paid. Pretty cool, eh?