What is Affiliate Marketing & How Does it Work?

Mar 8, 2009 Small business marketing

Affiliate marketing is marketing and selling products on behalf of another company. The marketer doesn’t produce and warehouse products themselves, instead, as an affiliate marketer you are affiliated with one or more companies to sell their products.

Online, affiliate marketers are given a special URL with a unique AffiliateID (affiliate identification) that’s embedded in it. This is so all traffic you drive to their site through your marketing efforts can be identified as yours. When a potential customer visits the site through your link, their browser also sets up a cookie which is also linked to your AffiliateID.  How long the cookie lasts varies by website; it usually doesn’t last indefinitely, instead cookies typically expire in 30 – 60 days. This means that even if a person does not purchase a product on their first visit to the site, if this person returns to this site and ultimately makes a product purchase, the credit for the sale will go to you, the affiliate marketer.

Most companies compensate their affiliate marketers in two different ways: either Pay Per Lead, or Pay Per Sale. Pay Per Sale is more common and as the name implies, the affiliate marketer only gets paid a fee if the click-through is converted into a sale. The marketer typically gets a flat fee per sale or a percentage of the total sale. It is very cost-effective for companies to use affiliate marketers as they only have to pay for results; the affiliate marketer does the rest of the work. Pay Per Lead is different in that the affiliate marketer gets a fee when their link is simply clicked, whether or not the click-through leads to a sale.

To get started in affiliate marketing consider choosing a product that is popular, easily promotable and has keywords or keyword phrases that you can dominate quickly on the search engines. If you’re seeking an idea on where to start, consider products that help with a specific task, like how to do or get something or how to stop or get rid of something else.  Along with being easy to target with keyword searches, people looking for this kind of information are typically farther along in the buying cycle than those just browsing and therefore they are easier to convert into a sale.

Once you have success with a select number of products and established a proven method of marketing and promotion that works for you, expand your efforts. With your proven methodology and tactics, you can promote many products for different companies at once and grow your earnings. You can either stay in the same niche on your website or start a new website. It’s the old “wash, rinse, dry & repeat” cycle.

If you’re thinking of becoming an affiliate marketer and ultimately working your own online business from home, it may be one of the biggest decisions you make. The idea is great, you don’t have to clock in or worry about rush hour traffic. The problem is, the learning curve to success can be steep. However, it shouldn’t have to be too complicated.

If you’re getting into internet marketing for the first time and getting inundated with “buy this” and “buy that” or “get the latest wonder tool.” These constant messages can quickly become overwhelming.

What should you do to successfully launch your business?

Consider a membership in Portal Feeder.

Following is a partial list of what’s available to members. As you can see, Portal Feeder provides the affiliate marketer with the best tools to super charge their business:

- 6000+ Blog Network
- Highly interactive Forum/Community
- Your own personal affiliate marketing Mentor
- Ad Copy Wizard (More than double your conversion rates)
- Affiliate Research Tools (clickbank database, monthly keywords and reviews)
- PPC Training
- RSS Account Creator & Submitter
- Social Bookmark Account Creator & Submitter
- Article Directory Account Creator & Submitter
- Blog Content Management
- Site Builder
- DataFeed management
- Blitz PPC (similar tools sell for $500)
- PPCKahuna Software
- Monthly PLR
- Web 2.0 Training
- Blog Training
- SEO Training
- 3 Way Link Exchange
- Monthly Newsletter
- Webinars
-AdWords Digger Software
-Blog comment software

There is much more to the Portalfeeder membership. It also includes the most advanced web building software Portal Feeder 3.0, an incredible suite of promotional and site optimization tools, extensive training material covering all aspects of affiliate marketing, a blog boot camp course which helps you to successfully launch your site, PLR articles, html and Wordpress templates and an amazing forum community that is essentially a safety net for when you run into a “bump in the road.” You’ll be surprised, no mater what the issue, the answer is within the community, just ask!

The doors to Portal Feeder will open again soon. It could be six months before they re-open again. If you’re floundering in your online marketing endeavours right now, then do yourself a favor…get on the Portal Feeder notification list right now so you don’t miss the boat.

Tags: Affiliate marketing, online business, Pay per click, Pay Per Lead, Pay Per Sale, Portal Feeder