General Affiliate Marketing The History Of Affiliate Marketing

It can be said that affiliate marketing can be traced to a cocktail party. Yes, the one which includes Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon. He was chatting with one of his guests who wanted to sell books on her own webpage.

The creative genius that is Jeff began thinking. Why not have his guest link her site to Amazon and receive some sort of compensation for every book that she sold? Soon after the Amazon Associates Program was born. Indeed, it was a very simple idea. Affiliate marketers, or Amazon associates would place banners and text links for individual books or link directly to Amazon’s main web page and some of them would earn a commission. When visitors are lead to Amazon from an associate’s site, and purchased a book the website owner gets cash.

But according to some net documentation, CDNow’s affiliate program actually was the first one to come up with the marketing plan to boost sales. With its buyweb program, CDNow was the first to introduce the concept of affiliate marketing.

It works in the same way that Amazon’s affiliate program works:

The team at CDNow thought that music lovers who had websites could give out and write reviews on their site that visitors may be interested in purchasing. These sites could link the visitor directly to the item to be purchased on the CDNow website.

The rest they say is history. Countless companies and advertisers have now included affiliate marketing as part of their promotions strategy. Almost all ebook publishers take advantage of affiliate marketing to spread their work out to more people.

This has resulted to more sales for the publisher as well as extra income for the affiliate marketer. With the rapid success of affiliates, advertisers are seeing growth opportunities everywhere. There are some companies such as Clickbank that offer affiliate programs to Advertisers and easy access and promotion of these products for free to future and current affiliate marketers.

The history behind things, obviously, make them into what they become. With the knowledge of history we can prevent many mistakes that we may make by learning from others mistakes. Affiliate marketing and affiliate programs are no different. I encourage you to research the past and history of people who have succeeded in this field, as well as people who have failed.

The past holds all the knowledge you need to make yourself successful. Use it.

How To Be A Success With Affiliate Marketing

To be a success in affiliate marketing one must be committed, driven and organized. One benefit of affiliate marketing is that there usually is no fees to get started and you can make a great deal of money with it. However, that is not too say that there is no investment involved. The investment referred here is your time.

It takes time to build any successful business and that includes an affiliate business. You do not necessarily have to devote 8 hours a day to affiliate marketing, however, a few hours a day is needed to make a decent living from it. There are several things you need to do to be a successful affiliate. You need to pick out good affiliate products, you need to research effective keywords, you need to create blogs, websites and work on your link building. There are articles that need to be written, PPC campaigns that need to be created and monitored, forum posting, blog commenting and advertising landing pages. Affiliate marketing might be a free way to make money online, but you will definitely have to work it to make money from it.

With that being said, how does one organize their time effectively to be a success with affiliate marketing? Well, first you need to come up with a plan. You need to decide how you are going to work your affiliate business. What marketing methods do you plan on working on first? How long will that take? How many hours should you invest. These are the type of questions you need to ask yourself.

Once you have decided how you want to promote and how long it will take, you need to plan a course of action. Create yourself a schedule just like you would a regular job. Will it take 2 hours a day to get your tasks done or 4? Decide on that and then create a schedule around it where you can work those hours without distractions. Once you create your schedule, be sure to stick with it until the task is done. Then go on to the next task.

Affiliate marketing needs to be treated the same way you would treat a regular job or home based business. You need to be serious about your success and not treat it as you would a hobby. A hobby does not pay you, a job does. Affiliate marketing will pay you too as long as you work it, so be committed to your success, be driven to get the job done and you will see success.

Affiliate Marketing Tips

Affiliate Marketing Tips

Affiliate marketing tips for success can be summarized in 6 tips- offer, commissions, future sales, belief, guarantee, and value.

1.Irresistible Offer- (Promote This and you will see why (xyz) is The money-making program of 2010. Easiest ways to make cash in all of existence… Super conversions – make instant money and (###)Affiliates are already rich from this! Converts clicks to $$$$) These are examples of the content of your offers. Affiliate marketing tip, for people looking to purchase product, is for them to become affiliate promoters of the product.
2.Big Commissions-40% or better. Look at the their return rate to see if people are satisfied or not with this product. This will effect your income if refunds are high.
3.Future Sales- This is important, it will give you a type of residual income if they pay on future sales or on re-occurring billing.
4.Belief- You must believe in the product, its ability to deliver results; be of value to prospect and full fill a need or desire. You should be a user; customer of product, that means buy it and try it.
5.Guarantee- An irrefutable 100% refund and guarantee of the customers satisfaction. Very successful businessman agree that this is one of the keys of being a successful company or product. This affiliate marketing tip must be part of the philosophy of the product you will represent.
6.Value- The value that the customer receives from the product or service must exceed price. When V>P people buy.

To view a video on this topic go to: http://bit.ly/AffiliateMarketingTip

Note:
If your serious about building your affiliate marketing; internet business, and making an income at it, visit this website to here how I did and you can: http://bit.ly/InternetMarketingAnswers

Jeffrey Randolph-
http://JeffreyRandolph.com

Affiliate Marketing and Blogging

Blog owners can also help to maximize the profit from their affiliate marketing opportunities by doing self promotion to drive additional website to the blog. This will likely be beneficial because higher website traffic will generally translate to greater profit from affiliate marketing. Additionally, the blog owner may want to occasionally mention companies for which they are an affiliate to generate interest in the advertisements on the website.

Understanding Affiliate Marketing Requirements

Finally, blog owners should pay careful attention to the affiliate marketing agreements they enter. This is important because some companies may place restrictions on the usage of a link to their website. This may include restrictions such as avoiding objectionable content, not including links or advertisements for direct competitors or restrictions on the appearance of the affiliate links. Failure to adhere to these guidelines may result in the blog losing affiliate privileges and the blog owner being denied compensation.

Things To Remember While Starting An Affiliate Marketing Program

With the help of the following pointers, an affiliate can prepare a marketing plan that can bring sales immediately.

Understand the Consumer’s Need: Understanding the needs of the customer helps in identifying what they actually need from a seller. If we know what is expected to be bought off the shelves most easily, we would be making the most from the market. To do so, we need to understand the market that we are going to sell to. We will have to look at what is it that people need the most in a specific category in that market. We may want to sell shoes to the customer, but the market demand at that time might be for men’s health products. So if we go on with our strategy of selling shoes, we in all certainty would lose on time and money. But after researching the market if we decide to sell men’s health products, we would be getting richer by the day.

Identify the Products: After finalizing the markets to sell to, we need to identify the products that would best describe a solution for the needs of the customer. It may be a product or a group of products depending on the needs. The product should be the nearest possible solution to the customer’s woes, if not the one.

Identify the Marketing Strategy: Once the markets and the products have been identified, we should formulate the marketing strategy for the products in those markets. These strategies may differ from each other based on the markets, products, channels of communications available and the scope of marketing collaterals in the strategy. The marketing strategy may vary from being just a sales communication to being a full blown marketing exercise with campaigns and promotions.

Identify the Channel: There may be many channels of communication available to an affiliate. But the sales depend on how efficiently the affiliate chooses the channel and the communication. The most common channels available to an affiliate are:

Blogs on product related topics
Articles on product related topics
An email list
A directory submission
Forums
Advertisements on Google with Adwords