How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
How does affiliate marketing work? A cracking question which I will do my best to answer.
There is a lot of talk on the internet about affiliate marketing and how you can make money (if not a career) out of becoming an affiliate marketer (or should that be marketeer?!). Affiliate marketing in it’s simplest form is selling goods or services for a company or individual for a commision. The beauty of the internet is that you can now do this from the comfort of your own living room.
So how does affiliate marketing work in todays internet based world? The idea is that you will signup as an affiliate to a company, lets call that company Amazon (for the sake of convenience). You will get an affiliate id assigned to you and (depending on what it was you wanted to sell) a specific URL/web address with your affiliate id embedded into it. If anybody goes into Amazon through your affiliate id and actually buys something you will get a commision! Easy really…. of course, getting people to click on your affiliate link is based on your ability to drive people to it but that is another story for another day.
There are many great affiliate programs out there. Many of the ‘biggies’ such as Amazon and eBay run their own. Other smaller retailers signup to a specialist affiliate marketing service the biggest of which probably Commision Junction which has many retailers under it’s wing from all round the world.
It is also worth mentioning that the biggest affiliate commisions are in digital products – downloable eBooks, audios and videos. Checkout Clickbank.com as a great example of this, have a look through and let me know what you think – I will be talking more ‘how does affiliate marketing work’ in later posts .
