What Is Affiliate Marketing?
We live in the time of greatest opportunity to be running our own highly profitable business than ever before in history.
The internet offers many ways of doing this.
But the best and quickest path to online business success is to become an affiliate marketer.
Before you can become an affiliate marketer, you need to understand what affiliate marketing is.
In its simplest form, affiliate marketing is selling other vendors' products and getting paid a commission.
Consider a Real Estate agent. They contract with a vendor to sell their property. The contract is a legal document that ensures that everyone gets paid what they are due. The agent brings potential buyers by various means, such as advertising on websites, including images of the property in their brochure or monthly magazine and by contacting their list.
Eventually, they sell the property for the vendor and get paid the commission according to the contract.
Affiliate marketing works just like that except that everything is online.
Just as the real estate agent specializes in, well, real estate you as an affiliate marketer will specialize in a niche and seek out vendors who supply products in that niche (and, of course, have an affiliate program). And don't worry, I will teach you in this course how to find vendors ready and happy to pay you insane commissions.
But, unlike the real estate agent, you may have several niches and be making substantial commissions from each of them!
Affiliate Marketing has been around for many years and is a solid, recognized online business model.
The vendor that you are an affiliate for gives you an affiliate link. This is a short piece of computer code that you include on your website (I'll teach you how to do this) attached to a product image, a button or some text, referred to as a link.
The button or text is referred to as a CTA (Call to Action). CTAs can be very powerful, and I will be teaching you all about them.
When a visitor to your site clicks on the CTA, they are taken to the vendor's site with your affiliate link built in.
If the visitor buys the vendor's product, you are credited with the affiliate commission.
There may be a qualifying period before you get paid (to allow for refunds) and you may have to accumulate a minimum amount of commission before it's actually paid, but this will all have been laid out in the affiliate agreement.
There's no manual intervention. This is all handled automatically by software. And, as I said, it's a mature business model, so the software that handles it is also mature and reliable.