The Affiliate Marketing Solution

Many companies are now turning to affiliate marketing as the solution to getting relatively low cost, highly focused traffic to their websites or to a "warm-up" site that increases the chances of a customer actually buying something from the main site. The affiliate marketing solution is a solid and very effective web marketing tool which helps to reduce a company's overall marketing costs because they only pay for quality performance and they have no costs involved in employing permanent workers, e.g. tax, insurance, holiday, sickness, etc; also it is the most efficient use of outsourcing where the company pays for a service on a microscopic scale which eliminates outsourcing companies adding a mark-up to cover risks taken or money invested.

Affiliates

Affiliates are the first to take advantage of new emerging trends and technologies, where established advertisers do not dare to be active, and they are prepared to risks; "trial and error" is probably the best way to describe how affiliate marketers are operating. Affiliates can be search engine marketers who run pay-per-click campaigns in order to drive traffic and sales for an advertiser and they are compensated according to the value of the conversion through a variety of pricing models including cost per click, a flat fee per conversion, a percentage of sales transaction or some combination of all three of these. Affiliates generally attract traffic either via paid search or Search Engine optimization.

What about the money, you say? Well, often people are tempted by lucrative offers of earning money online without having to do anything, which is obviously appealing to everyone, but it is essential to know exactly what you are getting into, before you start investing your hard-earned money on an online business which may not be a very good choice.

In order to become good at affiliate marketing, you need to be prepared to invest your time and money wisely. Firstly, do as much research as possible about the company whose product(s) you will be promoting and the type of customers that might be interested in those products; try and find the type of places that users of these products are likely to be found, e.g. blogs, forums and social networking sites such as MySpace.com, and see what these people are interested in, have a need for, etc.

Once you have identified a good product with a good market, then it is usually a good idea to start an AdWords campaign where you pay as little as possible for keywords that are related to the product that you are trying to promote. Time can help you as an affiliate marketer to hone your trade, as you can study what links your readers are most interested in by tracking their clicks, where your traffic comes from by seeing what keywords they used to find you, and what affiliate links convert to the most sales.

Affiliate Marketing Solution

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