The Easiest Way To Make Money From Home: Affiliate Marketing
If you are looking to make money from home online, affiliate marketing is the way to go. It is very easy to get started. You do not even need your own website, or have to spend a red cent to get started.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing refers to one business rewarding another business (or person) for sending them a customer, or a visitor to their site.
The most common form of affiliate marketing rewards occur when you (the affiliate) sends a visitor to a merchants site. When that visitor makes a purchase, you earn a commission.
Cost per Click (CPC) vs. Cost per Action (CPA)
The scenario described above, where the affiliate gets a commission for sending a visitor who makes a purchase, is called Cost per Action (CPA) compensation. You, the affiliate get paid when a specific action is taken by a visitor that you send to a merchants site.
CPA also refers to getting paid for having a visitor fill out a loan application on a lenders site, or an insurance application, and so on. There are literally endless CPA offers from merchants who are willing to pay big money to affiliates.
Cost per Click (CPC) means that an affiliate gets paid when a visitor merely clicks on a link to their site. A good example of CPC is Google Adsense ads, the small ads that appear on websites and blogs. When a visitor clicks on an Adsense ad on your site, you are paid a commission from the business that placed that ad with Google.
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
You do not need your own product, you do not have to handle sales, shipping, legal issues, or deal with customer complaints and returns.
Getting Started with Affiliate Marketing
It is easy to get started. All you have to do is sign up as an affiliate for a program or product that you want to promote. You will be given a link with your affiliate identification and/or a tracking code to place on your site. The best places to find offers are Clickbank for informational products, and Commission Junction for all kinds of CPA nd CPC offers.
You Do Not Have Spend Any Money
To get started with affiliate marketing you do not have to worry about buying and building your own site (or sites). You may of course wish to consider this once you have gained experience. What you can do is use free services like Squidoo and Hubpages, or take advantage of free blogging services.
I would recommend using Squidoo, where you build what is called a lens. Your lens would be about a question or problem that the product you are promoting provides a solution for. And, of course, your lens would have your affiliate links to the product you are recommending. There are plenty of free resources available online that teach you step by step how to build a Squidoo lens. It is easy and fun.
Do Some Research
Before you promote a product, research the market and discover if there is a demand. Visit forums relating to the product and find out what people are talking about and what questions they have. Research keywords relating to the product to see what exactly is being searched for.
Then you can design a Squidoo lens using the keywords you have selected. The content of the lens will answer questions and provide solutions as you discovered in your research. Helpful Tip: if you are just getting started, get involved in a market niche that you already have an interest in. For example, if you love fishing, look at promoting fishing products and information. You get the idea? Good.
Drive Traffic to Your Site (or Squidoo Lens)
To make money in affiliate marketing, you have to get visitors to your site. This is pretty obvious. You can choose one of many free methods of marketing: article marketing, posting in forums, free ad sites and so on. Search Engine Optimization is an extremely valuable skill. Learn some of the ways to get your site listed high in the results of a search for a particular keyword and you can drive a ton of traffic to your site.
You can also use paid advertising: pay per click, posting ads in ezines, and email marketing. A word of caution: do not place pay per click ads with a link to your merchants site using your affiliate link. This is a recipe for disaster.
Once you start making some money in affiliate marketing, you can repeat the process, applying the skills that you have learned, for other products. Since there are no end to the amount of products and programs to promote, you can literally create multiple streams of income online from affiliate marketing.
And this makes affiliate marketing the easiest way to make money from home.
Mark McCullagh is the author of the NewSuccessOnline blog where you can get access to a free video from affiliate marketing expert John Reese that will provide solutions to the above 3 factors to help you make money at newsuccessonline.com/affiliatemarketing.
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