Basics of Affiliate Marketing

The concept of affiliate marketing is a variation on the outside sales position except that it all happens in cyber-space, and there is no door-to-door component.

Think of yourself as the salesman, one of many, for a specific product or service and you’ve mastered the basics of what is an affiliate.

People have all kinds of products and services that they want to sell online.

Part of the process to become successful is to have a large amount of traffic that is interested in what you have to offer. The way you can accomplish this is by having salesman or affiliate promote your products.

When a sale is made, you share the earnings with your affiliate/salesman through commissions.

Successful affiliates make a good living by promoting products and services of other vendors in order to make that commission.

For the purposes of this e-book, I will focus on one of the easiest affiliate networks to get started – Clickbank and list the others with a brief look at the larger networks. Once you learn how an affiliate network like Clickbank works, you will be able to expand that to other larger networks that have a myriad of different products and services that are commissionable.

Clickbank is one of the largest, oldest affiliate networks out there online. Clickbank sells only digital products, is extremely easy to learn how to use and has a ton of vendors just waiting to snap up a good affiliate.

There is no waiting time to become a part of the Clickbank affiliate family, and the commissions are much higher than the other networks, with some commissions going as high as 75%.

Clickbank is an affiliate network in that it is a whole bunch of vendors and affiliates all working under the umbrella organization called Clickbank.

Through Clickbank, products and services are bought and sold, accounting goes on within the network and commissions are calculated per product sold. Before we go any further, let’s look at what you can potentially earn from one product.

For example: You promote and sell on Clickbank product called Maverick Money Makers: Get Paid For Life!. It sounds like a pretty exciting product, right?

Well, it has the highest pay out of any Top 10 Clickbank Product and is the Top Converting product offer online. It pays out at a 50% commission level.

When you look at it’s pitch page, it is endorsed by some pretty heavy weight people including CNBC, As Seen On TV, Small Business Opportunities, Fox News, CBS News and Readers Digest.

As an affiliate, you will earn 50% of the $97 dollar price tag, and it’s repaid on a monthly basis.

So, that means that for every person who signs up through your affiliate link (which we will get in a minute), you will be paid $44 each month as long as that person stays signed up.

What do you think if you simply stuck with this affiliate program and reached their magical 100 referral mark. That’s $4400 per month for promoting only one product.

Are you beginning to see how lucrative affiliate marketing can be?

Think about how much you could make if you found 10 affiliate programs like this one? This is not only possible, but not that hard to accomplish if you know how.

Look on Clickbank and find 10 things that you think you might want to sell.

Make a list because as you learn more, you may want to revise it, and you may find that your choices are golden.