Jan 19 2009
Making money through affiliate marketing
Those who make a great deal of money online fall into two categories. The first write a great blog and get several hundred thousand visitors to their site. With traffic like that, it’s not hard to earn a decent living from the advertising on your site. The only drawback is that you have to get the traffic, which is hard.
The other method involves affiliate marketing. This is where you market a product on behalf of an online retailer. You don’t need to stock any goods, you just need to introduce buyers to the retailer, and get commission from it. Depending on what you are selling, this can be quite lucrative, especially if you are operating in a niche area which doesn’t have much competition. Remember, with affiliate marketing you don’t need huge traffic - you just need qualified traffic. i.e. visitors who are already looking to purchase your product. The best traffic for affiliate marketers is via Google, as people seldom search for things they arn’t interested in. Therefore a big part of the affiliate marketers arsenal is getting a good pagerank for their site and featuring well in the search results.
Do be careful when you choose your product though. It’s tempting to go for high-value stuff like plasma screens, but along comes a recession and scuppers all that. Affiliate marketers need to be nimble. If a product you are trying to sell isn’t shifting, try something else. Despite the recession, people are still buying things, the knack is finding out exactly what and supplying it to them.
