Affiliate Musketeer

You might have heard about affiliate marketing on a forum you were reading such as the Digital Point Affiliate Marketing forum and despite all the posts there, you can’t quite get your head around it and just wish someone would explain it in easy to understand terms. Well, today’s your lucky day because that’s exactly what I’m going to do in this post.

Affiliate Marketing is the process of marketing products and services from other companies (known as ‘merchants’) and getting paid by those companies (merchants) for each sale or lead you generate for them. It is particularly effective in the online marketing world, where webmasters like yourself can set up a website and promote the products of merchants in order to send your website visitor to the merchant’s website where the user can actually buy the product. The user that you sent will then hopefully buy a product or service from the merchant and if that’s the case, you will get paid.

Now this just doesn’t work with any company and any product, so you cant just setup a website and throw up links to other websites and get paid for it. The company whose products you want to promote must run an affiliate program. Affiliate programs can either be ran in-house by the company themselves or through an independant, 3rd party company such as Affiliate Window or Commission Junction. Of course there are many more 3rd party affiliate companies out there and I’ll include a full list in an appendix at the end of this series. It makes more sense to me to use 3rd party companies because, for example, with Affiliate Window, they have access to over 700 merchants who all want you to promote their products or services and their independantly monitored so there’s little risk of ‘losing’ commissions, which used to be the case when companies kept their affiliate programs in house. Anyway, 700 merchants with websites….that’s a lot of products you could choose to promote and a huge market to tap into.

How Much Can You Earn as an Affiliate?

How much you can earn is unlimited. Really, it is. In Affiliate Window, for example, there are currently 755 merchants to promote. Lets use an example and say that each merchant has 100 products (the real average figure is probably more into the 1000s), thats 755 x 100 = 75500 products that you could promote to website users. How much you earn is only down to how much time and effort you want to put into the job at hand. There’s stories online of people earning 10s of thousands per month through affiliate marketing and probably just as many people out there offering you products or services that TELL YOU HOW TO DO IT. I’m not so sure if all of the so-called gurus have actually made as much as they claim but one guide I really do recomend is The Black Ink Project by Jeremy Palmer – this pretty much strips affiliate marketing bare and is the blueprint that allowed me to build my own affiliate marketing business up. I for one however, do like to rely on my own history and stats rather than take someone else’s word for it and I can say that, to date (as at july 13th 2009), my monthly earnings through affiliate programs are averaging £3500.

I’ve only been doing this full time for 6 months now but I did have a background in Internet Marketing (SEO) and used to work for a web design company based in Sunderland, UK, so I didn’t start from complete scratch with this. Even still, it’s taken me quite a while to pull things together and no short amount of hard, hard graft and lots of trial and error. Its my aim to share some of those experiences with you to try and help you start making a living online too. Now, don’t expect anything formal with this, it really is just a place to catalog my own experiences and hopefully offer advice to people that genuinely helps them in their own affiliate marketing endevours.

I think that pretty much covers it, come back soon where you’ll find regular progress reports and open book explanations of exactly what I’m doing, how I’m doing it and how much money I’m making!