The Newbie Path To Affiliate Marketing

Experts tell us that the Internet is growing by over a million pages everyday as more and more people utilize the Internet for information, education, entertainment, business and other personal reasons. It doesn’t take a business genius to realize that this phenomenon offers an opportunity for huge financial gains. The Internet’s fast-growing popularity in the recent years has become an opportunity that savvy marketers have capitalized upon to make fortunes.

The Clickbank Marketplace is just one of the avenues being used. Over 10,000 digital products are featured on Clickbank, not all of them top-notch, but enough of them for a newbie to cash in on. You can earn a part time or full time income by becoming an affiliate of the top marketers.

No doubt you have come across the term "Affiliate Marketing" while surfing the net. Simply put, affiliate marketing is revenue sharing between a merchant and you. You get paid a commission for referring or promoting the merchants’ products and services and someone buys. Now, commissions can be pretty hefty, depending upon the product being sold. Many product sellers offer 50% to 75% commission per sale. Affiliate marketing has proven to be a cost-efficient and quantifiable means of attaining great profit for the merchant, the affiliate, and a company like Clickbank that handles all the business aspects of the deal. Clickbank takes a small piece of the transaction.

Affiliate marketing works effectively for the merchant and the affiliate the product owner gains a small army of people to advertise his products to a larger market, which increases his chances to earn. The more affiliate websites or hard-working affiliates he gets, the more sales he can expect. By getting affiliates to market his products and services, he is saving himself time, effort and money in looking for possible markets and customers.

When a prospect clicks on the link in the affiliate website, purchases the product, recommends it to others who buys it, the merchant and you multiply your chances of earning. The process saves the affiliate, that's you, from having to create a product and, in many cases, the product owner will provide free marketing tools. It could be a ready made website or a sales page plus banner ads, text adds, and even email content to send to your contacts.

If you want to be an affiliate marketer and make a living from the Internet, here are some steps to get your started on the right path.

First is to get your free Clickbank ID from their website. This is a link that identifies you to the seller so you get a commission. You may have a particular thing you are interested in or passionate about but that should take second place when you are choosing a product to market. Following your passion might ensure you won’t be bored but it may not be a hot selling topic.

Focusing on a specific area you know very well may help you bring out your best marketing effort. You can add a personal touch to your site and give your visitors, who are possible buyers, an impression that you are an expert in your field. In this way, you gain their trust and eventually encourage them to buy the products you endorse. It would be ideal to find a product that fits your passion, if you can, but the goal is to earn income.

In choosing the product, you must consider its conversion rate first, that is, the number of visitors-turned-buyers. Clickbank provides up-to-date statistics with each product that identifies the most profitable products and best paying merchants. The key here is, be wise enough to choose the right one. Pick one (or more) that pay at least $15 commission. You should make a decent buck for your marketing efforts.

Once you have decided where to concentrate, have chosen the products to endorse and the merchant you are supporting, take advantage of marketing tools offered by the merchant. Contact them for help getting set up.

There is a lot of advice that says you need you own domain name and website. That's good advice once you start making some money but, for now, you can get a free blog at Blogger.com or Wordpress to promote from. Search engines love blogs and spider them as often as you add content. So, be prepared to add several articles a week to your new blog. You will, of course, feature the products you are promoting.

In affiliate marketing, it is possible to earn large sums of money in a short span of time especially when you’re endorsing high-priced items. Keep in mind that expensive products are hard to sell. Some people are making big bucks on products that sell for less than $30. How much money you earn depends on getting traffic to your site and to the product sales page but that's another discussion for later.

If I have made affiliate marketing seem easy, that was not my intention. It involves some hard work on your part. Making money on the Internet involves some level of persistence and committment just like making money does in real life. The beauty of the Internet is it allows an introvert to earn like an extrovert because there is no face-to-face selling. In affiliate marketing you don't even have to provide customer service. The product owner handles that for you so they can get the customer on their mailing list. Eventually you will need your own mailing list to make even more money, but, again, that's for another discussion.

Clickbank is a good place to start your Internet Marketing career because you can actually make money while you sleep. The Internet never sleeps.

Author of this article is Jim DeSantis

Jim DeSantis is a retired broadcast journalist who examines the truth about making money as a Clickbank merchant or affiliate. Visit Jim's Earning with Clickbank website for a series of unbiased tips and advice.