4 Vital Steps to Make a Fulltime Income from Affiliate Marketing

Among the several ways to make money online, affiliate marketing appears to be one of the most popular. Apart from the fact that the business model of affiliate marketing is quite simple, it is a business you can do from anywhere and at your own convenience. What affiliate marketers really do is to help product merchants sell their products and they earn a commission on each sale they generate. Simple! The affiliate marketing concept is pretty simple. These commissions range from 10-50% of sale-value depending on the products and the affiliate program. Many affiliates even earn residual incomes for a long time because of their affiliate activities in the past. If you are getting started in affiliate marketing and you want to earn a fulltime income from it, the following four vital steps must have to be taken.

1. Choose a Profitable Niche

The first wise step is to find a way to market in a profitable niche if you really want to earn good income in affiliate marketing. Carefully choose what you are going to promote that will help you to earn good commissions. In this quest, try to be as specific as possible to target products that your audience will like. One great tip is to follow trends and get into niches that are expected to grow. Niches in the hotels and hospitality industry, home ownership, travels and tours, sports and games, food and drinks, fashion and clothing, new technology and a lot more are popular niches affiliate marketers do make money from. Make sure you settle for the best opportunities you can find and you are good to go.

2. Join a Reputable Affiliate Program

The reputation of the affiliate program you can work with matters a lot because of the sustainability of the business and good commission payments. There are many websites that offer affiliate marketing opportunities but Strong Future International, SFI is highly recommended. In SFI, you are required to join FREE with no obligations whatsoever. As soon as you sign up, you can commence promoting products and earning money almost immediately. Since affiliate marketing is a performance-based business model, the more products you help to sell, the more commissions you earn. Simple!

 
3. Select a Marketing Channel

You cannot do business successfully online without a credible online presence. That is why you need your own blog/website to work from. Even if you decide to build a blog, review website or a social media profile, you must be prepared to populate the website with quality content consistently. That is what attracts traffic to the website. Many affiliate marketers find it easier though to specifically build a website to review and promote products. Whatever you decide, you must carefully handle the website design, SEO strategy, link-building, and more to help you attract organic traffic from search engines particularly Google. This is of immense importance because without good traffic, you can hardly make good sales. Therefore, you must take quality time to consistently produce high-quality content on your website and this content must be relevant to the niche you have chosen.

4. Grow a Responsive Audience

Building an audience also depends on the type and nature of content you are producing. If you keep the content going long enough with the proper approach, you will build a great community to market to. This community could be your perfect opportunity to find a tool many of your followers would use. If for instance you’re building a tech-savvy audience, you can promote almost anything; from gadgets to high-end tech. Always make sure the content you produce is worth the while of your audience. Once the content you produce resonates with your audience, they pay more attention to what you are promoting. Getting leads and sales begins from there.
 
Summing Up

The key to making good money and even a fulltime income from affiliate marketing is to promote popular products diligently and consistently. Build trust with your audience and work with a reputable affiliate marketing program. In the end, affiliate marketing is all about consistency. Be patient when starting out. Making money from the business is not a sprint but a marathon. Develop that mindset now. Good luck!

Indispensable Skills Needed for Profitable Affiliate Marketing

If you want to be a good affiliate marketer, you must have some indispensable skills. This is aside from Computer and Internet skills that are also essential for any online business to succeed. Without these skills, it is difficult to catch on in a hugely competitive business like affiliate marketing. If you have these skills, you can smoothly ease into affiliate marketing business without much difficulty.
 
Following are some of such skills expert affiliate marketers like to recommend.

1. Good Communication Skills: Affiliate marketing is a business involving lots of people with different backgrounds. If you want to make it in the business, you must be able to effectively communicate with lots of people many of which you can never get to meet face to face. It requires good communication skills to make that happen. Any affiliate marketer who wants to succeed in the business should have the best communication skills (written and spoken) to get their marketing messages across to a huge lot of people.

2. Conscious of Trends: The Internet is always evolving, so is affiliate marketing. New products get into the marketing daily so are affiliate marketing techniques. To succeed in affiliate marketing, you must be conversant with and aware of all the latest trends in the business.

3. Knowledge of its Working Strategy: You cannot expect to succeed in the business of affiliate marketing if you don’t know how it works. Affiliate marketing is a simple business model which is performance driven. It is all about commissions earning really. Affiliates simply help product merchants to promote products and earn commissions from the sales they manage to generate directly through their promotional efforts. Simple!

4. Ability to Prioritize Customer Needs: If you cannot find buyers, you cannot be a good affiliate marketer. The more the number of customers you have, the more sales you generate and the more commissions you earn if you are a good affiliate marketer. For this reason, you must be able to identify and prioritize your customers’ needs at all times to be able to secure their patronage.

5. Good Knowledge of Brands: The ignorant can never be good affiliate marketers. Good knowledge of brands and products are essential in the business. Affiliate marketers must always have an idea about all the brands and the products they are marketing. That way, they can always take informed decisions about which products to promote and earn good commissions.

6. Knowledge of Customer Needs: Good affiliate marketers always have an idea of demand trends. They know which products people are mostly in need of and the brand selling such products. They must have sufficient knowledge about the demand trends of people in the society and how to help source products to meet these demands.

7. Good Presentation Skills: Aside good communication skills, affiliate marketers must also have good presentation skills. These are the skills they really need to be able to influence and convince their customers and lots of other people to purchase products they are promoting.
 
8. Ability to Leverage Social Media Audience: With over 4.55 billion active users worldwide, social media has become one huge market out there on the Internet. Therefore, good affiliate marketers must be able to grow and maximize their followers on all social media accounts. This is because the more followers you have on social media, the bigger the audience you can effectively market to and the more sales you can make.

9. Being Active on Social Media: It is not enough to have social media accounts. As an affiliate marketer, you must be active on these accounts to get the real benefits of having your business on social media. If you regularly and consistently post good content on social media, you grow your following and consequently your marketing audience. A huge audience size on social media means good market.

10. Ability to Convince People: This is another indispensable skill for affiliate marketers. If cannot convince people to buy, you cannot make sales. A good affiliate marketer should have the best convincing power through the use of the right words, the right way and at the right times.
 
11. Consistency: Consistency helps to build trust which is vital for a healthy business relationship, most especially in affiliate marketing. Good affiliate marketers should be consistent and loyal to their work, their business, their affiliate partners and their customers.

SFI Newbie Orientation: Getting off the Anti-Wealth Plan

Though painful to say, most people go through their entire lives on what we call the "Anti-Wealth" Plan. Others call it the "40/40/40 Plan." That is, work 40 hours a week for someone for 40 years and retire with $40 in the bank!    

That's somewhat of an exaggeration, of course, but the U.S. Social Security Board, for example, has reported that 85 out of 100 Americans won't possess as much as $500 in savings by age 65. And only 2% will be self-sustaining; the rest will be dependent on family, church, or the government!

The main problem with a typical job is that when YOU stop, the money stops.

MAKE SURE you understand this: If you ever want to acquire real wealth, you're just not going to get there trading hours for money. The world's wealthiest people have known for hundreds of years that if you want financial freedom, you MUST tap into at least one of the following:

1. Residual Income

RESIDUAL INCOME is income that keeps coming in month after month, year after year, from work you do just ONCE. It's like a royalty. An example would be writing a book or recording a song and getting paid forever on it. Wouldn't it be absolutely awesome to have that?!  Well, with SFI you can!

2. Leveraged Income

LEVERAGED INCOME is earning money through other people's efforts. There are only 24 hours in a day. Hence, there's only so much you can earn through your own efforts.  But with SFI, you can earn Leveraged Income on the activity of your personally sponsored affiliates (PSAs).

Earn even more Leveraged Income when they sponsor other affiliates, and when your affiliates’ affiliates sponsor affiliates...and so on—on up to 12 generations!

The fact is, by simply sponsoring a few good, active SFI affiliates, you can eventually have hundreds or even THOUSANDS of affiliates and members putting money in your pocket...from around the world...around the clock!

But that's not even the best part.  Each affiliate on your team has his or her own vested interest to build and KEEP ON building his or her business and income. This, of course, means YOUR income can continue and grow month after month–even when you want to take a vacation or decide to retire altogether. And there are few things greater than returning home from a nice vacation to find that your commissions for the month increased from the month before!

BOTTOM LINE: If building financial security is one of your goals, you've found the vehicle to do it with SFI!
 

Article Source: SFI Blog Forum Time-Tested Tips

14 Points you ABSOLUTELY Should Know to Succeed in SFI

1. Don't wait for everything to be exactly right to start...THERE WILL NEVER BE A "PERFECT" TIME! Start now, with whatever you have. The things you need will come to you as you work toward your goal.

2. Though SFI is one of the few businesses where you can earn while you learn, think of your first six months primarily as a training period. Don't expect large earnings until after you've educated yourself. 

3. Don't give your affiliates unrealistic expectations.

4. Don't be derailed by "perfection paralysis." Realize that you won't be able to do everything perfectly. Do the best job you can, then move on to the next project. Keep learning and keep moving ahead.

5. Read books (such as Napoleon Hill's classic, "Think And Grow Rich") that will convince you how powerful your mind really is. Develop the tremendous potential in you (that we all have) that has never been tapped!

6. Always present yourself and your business in a professional and ethical manner.

7. Stick to the facts. Don't exaggerate the opportunity.

8. Realize that "rejection" is natural. For every 20 people you contact, expect 19 "no's" for every "yes." You may very well do better than that, but expect 19 rejections. This way, the rejections won't bother you because you expect them. Also, realize that they're not rejecting YOU—they're simply rejecting an idea. Just keep moving ahead. Be persistent, ignore the rejections, and you'll get more than enough "yes's" to build a highly successful business.

9. Have FUN! People can't resist someone having fun. Make your business so much fun that others will flock to you to join you.

10. Ask for people's opinion on the opportunity. It's a good way to determine what objections they might have to joining and also allows you the chance to overcome those objections.

11. Don't place a few ads or contact a few people and expect the money to start rolling in. Expect to work your business consistently for two to three years before seeing a really substantial income.

12. Ask for referrals. Ask, "Do you know anyone who might be looking to earn some extra money?"

13. Build a list of contacts. Add to it daily.

14. Don't become obsessed with sponsoring a "heavy hitter." Instead, learn how to become a heavy hitter yourself.

More Awesome Tips

For even more success tips, see these and other SFI Getting Started and Sponsoring Affiliates training articles:

* LAUNCHPAD Lessons
* Be An Awesome Sponsor
* Rules Of Success
* Introduce Yourself!
* Your Role in SFI - Being A Sponsor: What It Means

Article Source: SFI Blog Forum Time-Tested Tips

5 Techniques to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketers are independent business persons who work to earn commissions. They help product merchants market their products and earn commissions from their efforts. They are not directly responsible for product manufacturing, warehousing/storage, product delivery or customer service. These are the responsibilities of product merchants.  The job of affiliate marketers is to simply direct traffic from their websites, blogs, newsletters, and online posts to the brands they are promoting. Affiliates earn money in form of commissions in exchange for driving traffic and/or purchases to the referring brand.

Here are some tested techniques affiliates use to earn money in affiliate marketing.

1. Coupon Sites

When product merchants want to introduce a novel or underappreciated product/service into the market, coupon sites come in very handy. For a limited period of time, you can promote a reduction on first-time purchases in an affiliate arrangement with a coupon website. These coupons can entice buyers to visit your website and sign up to become supporters of your brand. Commissions are paid for connections made in this process.

2. Bloggers/Influencers

If you connect with popular and established writers or social media Influencers in your business niche, they can directly help you through their separate audiences to expand your own reach. That makes your reach exponentially wider. If these writers and influencers help to propagate your marketing messages or write articles to promote or endorse your products, it directly enhances your sales. What they write or endorse, because of the trust they have built with their separate audiences over time, can directly attract people from their audience to look up the website of the product merchant. When these visitors make purchases, the writers or influencers are then entitled to be paid commissions relative to the sales made.

3. Review Sites

Products merchants take to review websites when they have high-priced products to sell. It is customary for buyers and customers to desire more information about any product before making their buy decisions. That is where review websites become handy to provide this additional information by way of product reviews. When businesses and authors on review websites willingly give a referral link to your product and rate it highly, it usually increases the likelihood that potential buyers will click through and buy from you. The referring parties earn commissions from their referral efforts.

4. Search Affiliates

Search affiliates are mostly independent business owners who spend money on ads to have their products shown in search engine results. There are affiliates who earn commissions through PPC on their ads. The ads can also be placed on popular social media networks, like Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook or other online advertising networks. The more searchers click on these ads, the more commissions the affiliates earn.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing may have been around for quite a while but it is still a very efficient affiliate marketing technique. It remains one of the most efficient methods to get individuals to sign up for a brand, a survey, a contest or a webinar. Affiliate marketers can send out a huge mass of emails with the contents having affiliate links to the product they are promoting. Once these links are used to sign up or make purchases from the product merchant, the affiliate earns a commission. Quite an effective affiliate marketing technique no doubt!

Wrapping Up

Earning money with affiliate marketing is a simple business model that is performance based. The more you intensify your promotional activities, the more commissions you earn. It is however unrealistic to expect to earn tonnes of money overnight. If you have the diligence and patience to set up the right techniques, money will gradually start to come in with time. Affiliate marketing is really a very simple legitimate business that requires perseverance, ingenuity, focus, and devotion over time. That is when appreciable income is expected to start to accruing to the affiliate marketer.

8 Major Benefits of Affiliate Marketing Model to Your Business

Affiliate marketing is a unique marketing model hugely popular with marketers because it is simple to implement and it is fair and highly rewarding. Marketers who understand its benefits as a business model can always succeed if they adopt the right tactics/techniques. These techniques can be fine-tuned for effectiveness if marketers research the business enough to know how it works and why it works. If they understand how it works, some of the major benefits derivable from the research and marketing efforts come from its relative ease and low-cost to set up and execute, increased competitive advantage, grossly reduced or non-existent risk, increased conversation rate, improved competitive advantage, and much more. More specifically:

1. Reduced Risk: The less you invest in affiliate marketing, the less the risk you are taking. When costs are relatively low, the risk is highly reduced in affiliate marketing strategy. Affiliate marketing as a business model may be prone to some slight chance of loss when payment is done only after actual conversions since it is best suited for businesses on a lower budget.

2. High Return on Investment (ROI): Keeping costs low and returns high is typical of affiliate marketing. If you use affiliate marketing in your online advertising methods, it can significantly lower your start-up costs and influence your overall revenue. That tells on the ROI of the business. ROI provides the right information as to whether the rewards the business gets justify the efforts put in to marketing the business. If you run a marketing campaign, you can through the ROI determine whether the amount of revenue generated during the affiliate marketing campaign rightly justifies the resources spent on the campaign. Marketers who do these calculations have determined over and over again that the affiliate market has a considerably higher ROI when compared to other online marketing strategies. The primary reason for this is because affiliates work for commissions and what they get is relative to what they bring out in terms of sales from their marketing efforts. Such affiliate activities help to keep costs low and returns high.

3. Low-Priced Start-Ups: Business success is directly hinged on keeping costs low and returns high. Affiliate marketing is typically known for low-priced start-up costs. Through diligent research, business owners always make sure they choose cost-effective measures particularly in products advertising while making sure not to get their brands involved in too pricey and non-profitable but mere fanciful marketing schemes. When business owners are extra careful while making purchases, they manage to keep the risk factors involved in the purchases as low as possible.

4. Less On-going Costs: Keeping overhead or on-going costs low always help the bottomline of a business. In affiliate marketing, most of the promotional activities are done by the affiliates themselves. That way, they share in the cost elements of the business. If the affiliates are many, that cost element shared becomes extremely low and even insignificant in some cases. When compared to the commission the affiliates earn that is performance-based, on-going costs pale into insignificance. On the other hand, business owners only have to pay affiliates commissions based on the sales they bring in. This way, affiliate market model only guarantees that business owners only part with their money only when a sale is made. That helps to keep costs low and justified.  

5. Targeted Traffic: Many affiliates are independent business owners in their own rights. They have their own online audience and favorite marketing channels. If you select affiliates in your business niche, chances are higher that their audiences will be interested in what you are selling. Your affiliates can therefore directly target this audience with your marketing messages. In affiliate marketing, targeted traffic is a more responsive traffic. When the traffic is targeted, the e-commerce store tends to receive higher traffic that is characteristically risk-free and with high ROI. Since the affiliates you deliberately select are in the same niche you are, it increases the chances that the targeted traffic they send to your store are individuals who will most likely be interested in the products you are selling.

6. Developing Brand Recognition: As a business owner, building brand recognition helps to build your business. In this quest, affiliate marketing directly helps to connect with social media influencers and bloggers who, in turn, could channel organic traffic towards the business owner’s website. Affiliates, even if in their thousands, are directly responsible for spreading unrestrained info about the positive side of any business. That helps in no small measure to build brand recognition. They act like some sort of brand ambassadors working round-the-clock to help push the brand and strengthen its recognition in the Internet market.

7. Reputation Boost: Affiliate marketing helps businesses to build reliable affiliate networks. These networks play very important and significant roles to help promote businesses even if indirectly. This can result in a rapid reputation boost for a business. If you work with reputable and reliable affiliates, it helps your own confirmation as a reliable and reputable business. Every successful business is built on trust. This is why businesses with strong reputations are trusted more and they always attract many more people to do business with.

8. Flexibility: Affiliate marketing business model is a simple and flexible business model. It is therefore easily scalable and can be transformed into bigger or smaller affiliate programs at minimal or no cost at all. This flexibility factor is one great attraction for more and more people who get involved in affiliate marketing. It is characterized by time flexibility, scale flexibility, location flexibility, products flexibility, promotional channels flexibility and so on. As an individual getting involved in affiliate marketing therefore, it is absolutely up to you to decide the type of business you want to promote and the time and effort you are prepared to put in which may generally range from a few hours per day to a few hours a week or even a few hours a month.

Why Affiliate Marketing is So Effective to Make Money Online

In affiliate marketing as a business model, an affiliate makes money online simply as a business partner who helps a product merchant sell products with a view to earning commissions. Essentially, to make money online, an affiliate simply acts as a bridge that connects potential customers to e-commerce stores. It is a performance-based business arrangement and a great way to make money online. The main role of the affiliate in the business arrangement is to simply direct buyers to an e-commerce store. Once these buyers make a purchase, the affiliate earns a percentage of the sale as commission. The affiliate receives a commission for each buyer that visits the e-commerce website and makes a purchase. The more sales the affiliate generates therefore, the more money he makes. The actual terms of the collaboration and commissions payment depends on the affiliate scheme run by each individual affiliate program. Most reputable and very large e-commerce programs like SFI, Strong Future International, ClickBank and eBay run decent and profitable affiliate networks.

 

Here is why Affiliate Marketing is so effective.

As most digital marketers very well know, affiliate marketing has proven to be very effective in driving traffic to online e-commerce stores for several reasons, prominent among which are:

Progress is Easily Quantifiable: Each affiliate has a unique affiliate link or code for easy attribution of marketing results. Depending on the agreed interval of commission payment, whatever quantum of sales attributable to an affiliate can be easily quantified and commissions due calculated out of it. It is thus fairly easy for each affiliate to get an accurate picture of his returns.

Payment is Performance Based: In affiliate marketing business model, affiliate earnings and payments are performance-based. Affiliates earn commissions based on the work they’ve already done not what they are yet to do. On the part of product merchants, it always makes more budget sense to pay commissions out of the sales they’ve already made and at known internals which in most cases is monthly. Because affiliate marketing is based on performance, it ensures a better return on investment. What’s more, the traffic the product merchant receives is always relevant, since the products are promoted by well-matched affiliates. 

Building an Online Presence: Product merchants and affiliates are both independent business persons in their own capacities. They have their own audiences and marketing channels. When affiliates use their own online assets to compliment the assets of the product merchants, building online presence for products on offer becomes easier and faster. In marketing efforts, that is some collaboration that works well for both parties. Most product merchants tend to work with affiliates they believe are reputable and already have a strong online presence and great audience. This helps to better enhance the online presence and credibility of the product merchant.

Easy Tracking: Most reputable affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI, ClickBank, Amazon and eBay have in-house software modules that allow them to easily track and manage their affiliate programs. They are able to easily measure and monitor the performance of each affiliate in their network. This info is readily available to affiliates themselves to help them gauge their performance at any point in time. Such info becomes quite useful to help affiliates devise their own advertising strategies and marketing campaigns for better and more results-oriented marketing.

Major Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

Thinking of having a go at making money on the internet? Think affiliate marketing first. You may have several business opportunities to make money online, but affiliate marketing appears to be the most highly recommended for many reasons relating to the huge benefits derivable from it. Any new marketer who gets to understand these benefits is bound to be excited about their prospects. Before getting carried away by the benefits, be sure to know the basics and what to avoid about the business. On the internet, it is not all that glitters that is gold. Yes, it may be quite easy to start affiliate marketing but it also involves a lot of dishonesty and scams. The internet is so full of scams and misinformation sufficient to discourage anyone just starting out in affiliate marketing. Not to worry though! Once you have the right knowledge and sound advice just like the one you are receiving here, you are good to go. 

Affiliate marketing is quite popular among online marketers because it is a low-cost and low-risk business model. Compared to other business models, you only need some little money to start and operate affiliate marketing. You need money only to set up a business website, obtain research info, acquire a domain name and have the website hosted by a reputable hosting provider. Then you are good to go by creating and sharing quality content regularly and promoting products/services out of your website. Yes, it may take a while to start receiving good traffic, leads and sales but for so long as you stick with it, they’ll come.

Following are the major benefits and attractions to affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Works 24/7

Once you set up your promotional activities on your website, you are in business 24/7. This is one of the most attractive benefits of affiliate marketing. If you sustain your promotional efforts for a while and your campaigns become profitable, it opens a great opportunity for you to make money round-the-clock and even while you sleep or on vacation. Now that’s one great way to make money online if you ask me. The reason for this is simple. Once you set up your campaigns correctly and they are live online, they are active and earn money for you regardless of whatsoever you are doing elsewhere or wherever you are.

Low-Cost and Low-Risk Business

Affiliate marketing requires very little or no start up fees, aside the minor costs associated with getting a website and hosting it. An affiliate marketer simply markets third party products/services in return for commissions. The affiliate incurs no costs for product handling, warehousing, customer care and products delivery. These are the responsibilities of the product merchant. The duty of the affiliate is simply to promote products as widely as possible. If a customer gets to buy a product attributable to the affiliate’s promotional efforts, the affiliate earns a commission as per agreed terms. Quite a simple business model really provided you do it right.

Operates from Anywhere

Affiliate business is one business you can operate anywhere there is internet service. In most cases, it is best done right from the comfort of your home. This is one huge benefit as well. You get spared the cost of renting office space, staffing and working regular hours. You can work the business at your convenience and in any hours you want. The icing on the cake is that you have no boss breathing down your neck. No commuting to and from work either. There is utmost time freedom to do whatsoever else you want to do. An ultimate work freedom and being your own boss if you ask me!

Focuses on a Niche

Affiliate marketing business is quickly and easily profitable if focused on the right niche. That focus is a huge benefit because it helps to shield you from the deluge of marketing information internet users are bombarded with daily. Arising from this information bombardment, without focus, you can hardly stay on track. Daily, most marketers receive emails promising yet another great opportunity to make quick money online. If you are focused already on a niche for your affiliate business, it is difficult to get distracted easily.

What You Need to Know to Make Money Online With Affiliate Programs

Many internet users have found out various ways to make money on the internet. The real challenge many do face however is deciding exactly how and where to focus their attention. Yes, many people believe that affiliate marketing provides the best and easiest opportunity to make money online. Here is what they know that reinforces this belief.

You do not need to have a product of your own to make money in affiliate marketing. Once you can position your website well enough to help product merchants market their products, you earn commissions once a sale is made through your promotional efforts. Thus, an affiliate simply acts like some sort of “middle man” between product merchants and consumers. They promote products to consumers in return for a commission for a specific action or when a sale is made. The commission payment varies greatly between products and it is usually between 5%-50% for physical products. Some Digital products often have higher commissions.

In some cases, the affiliate is expected to drive traffic to a product merchant’s products and, depending on the affiliate agreement, gets paid a commission if a product is sold, or gets paid a fee if a lead is generated. So, all you need to do to make money online with affiliate programs, is to drive traffic to a product merchant’s products. From this traffic, if the potential customer performs the required action as per agreed terms, the affiliate earns a commission.

To set up and operate an affiliate marketing business is cost-effective. You need a very small investment of some $10 or even less to get started. With that, you can set up a website, pay for domain hosting, and procure a bit of software to help you research your niche market.

What you need next is to sign up as an affiliate with a merchant or an affiliate network. They will issue you unique affiliate links that include your personal referral code. You may also have access to their promotional materials such as banners, emails or other text, you can use in promoting the product you have chosen. The unique affiliate links/codes allow for correct and proper attribution of all marketing actions and sales to the right affiliate for commissions payment purposes.

Depending on the restrictions placed on the affiliate by the affiliate agreement with the product merchant, affiliate traffic is expected to come from a website. But, traffic may also be from banner ads placed on other third party websites, emails sent out to Opt-in lists, links from Pay-Per-Click, PPC ads, links in articles, blogs, or forums and social media.

Even if you are new in affiliate marketing and without prior experience, you can do well and make money in the business because:

•    you don’t even need to have a product of your own
•    start-up costs are very low
•    there is no need to employ staff
•    there is no need for stock inventory
•    you can work when you like and where you like, 24/7
•    you don’t need premises/store space
•    you can even work from home

Online affiliate programs are numerous and easy to find on the internet. You have access to lots of reputable and well-established affiliate networks such as SFI, eBay, Alibaba, ClickBank and lots more. You also have lots of affiliate networks that represent physical big-name product retailers, such as Dobe, Affiliate Window, and buy.at. You can simply sign up free with any of these networks and start making money almost immediately.

What is most gratifying to know particularly for people who are new to affiliate marketing is that most affiliate networks are free to join. But, some are more particular about who they let into their network than others. In some exceptional cases, some affiliates may be required to pay a token registration fee to join.

Last Line

No doubt affiliate marketing is a very clean way to make money online. It is one business you can work anywhere including the comfortable confines of your home. That makes affiliate marketing a typical work from home business.

Affiliate Marketing Needs You Must Never Overlook

In affiliate marketing, if you know what to do and how to do it, it can save you several valuable hours of hard work before you start making money. If you don’t know what you are doing, you can spend a huge amount of time trying out bad strategies and promoting low paying products. Here are a few of such needs.

You need to carefully choose the affiliate products you wish to sell. If you like the products and you have bought and used them yourself, the better. Doing so is a good affiliate marketing policy since you can more easily create content around something you’re interested in and know well. In addition, you must make sure there is a need to settle for high value products as against low value products. High value products pay higher commissions of about 30%-50% on sales while low value products pay commissions in the range of 10% or less. A high ticket product sale can earn you the same as by selling hundreds of the lower value items. It is best to use subscription products, high ticket products and a product range, rather than low value products which only offer single commissions. With a product range you can benefit from subscription products, one off commissions and high ticket sales. In addition, you can also benefit from a built in sales team, who close sales on your behalf.

Most marketers prefer free marketing strategies unaware that if they use a product range, paid marketing strategies are much more within reach. With a high ticket product range, it is much easier to make a profit while running paid marketing. With it, market growth is much easier too. This is because once you’re profitable and you are running paid advertising campaigns, you can scale up quickly by simply increasing your marketing budget. If you rely only on organic and cheaper marketing strategies, scaling up is much more difficult.
 
Affiliate marketing as a business concept may look simple and many people believe they can always go it alone. That’s not quite true. To succeed better and faster in the business, you need professional help because it is quite difficult to build a successful online business from scratch. You need professionals with the technical know-how to help you build a user-friendly website, host it, optimize it and position it for effective marketing purposes. However, if you know how, you can build and host your website yourself with the help of online software. You can also get valuable help from fellow affiliates, friends, family members, coaches and mentors. You can look for help any and everywhere. If you join a community of online business owners, they can help you to build the much needed self confidence that you too can succeed in affiliate marketing. Now that’s one huge help many marketers never quite recognize as such.

 

In affiliate business, you need automation to save time and money and still get very good results. What readily comes to mind is Artificial Intelligence, AI. For communications efficiency, just get an email autoresponder. This is one great software that allows affiliates to collect emails from a website and automate the delivery of email messages to the email list they’ve built over time.  Because most customers will often need several contact points before they make a purchase, an autoresponder becomes highly valuable to keep them constantly engaged through AI.

As most marketers very well know, a single landing on a website rarely generates a sale. On a website, a visitor only has a small window of opportunity to make a buying decision. You can latch on that small window of opportunity to make a sale through autoresponder. Because you have your visitors’ email information on your email list, you can extend this time period by weeks, months or even years through constant customer engagement through autoresponder.

Last Line

Even though statistical data indicate a drop-out rate in affiliate marketing to be close to 95%, it is still a business you can make money from if you follow the rules diligently and work hard at the business. Always remember the reason you’re in the business, find a good affiliate program, do the needful and stick to it, you’ll be OK.

Popular Models of Affiliate Marketing Based on Affiliate Connection

As most digital marketers very well know, there are distinct models of affiliate marketing based on the affiliate’s connection with the product they choose to promote. The affiliate partnership arrangement remains the same and all the models of the programs offer several similar benefits to both the merchants and the affiliates. In all the affiliate models, the affiliate is paid a predetermined commission for the sale of a product they are marketing on behalf of the product merchant. Through the partnership arrangement, a product merchant can leverage the wider reach of all its affiliates to reach a wider audience to promote its products. The wider the affiliate network is, the better and larger its reach. The larger its reach, the more it helps the product merchant to build brand awareness for its brand. 

The following are the commonest and most popular affiliate models peculiar to most affiliate programs.

Related Affiliate Marketing Model

In Related Affiliate Marketing Model, the Affiliate has some relationship with the product they are promoting. The Affiliate’s niche where he has some knowledge and expertise becomes useful to promote products. That is where the relationship is even though the affiliate himself may not directly be using the product. The knowledge and expertise allow the affiliate to have some influence over the general targeted audience of the product he is promoting. That is the influence the affiliate relies on to drive traffic towards the product merchant’s website. When that traffic converts and generates sales, the affiliate earns a commission.

Involved Affiliate Marketing Model

Involved affiliate marketing model is the type of affiliate marketing where there is a deep connection between the product and the affiliate promoting it. The affiliates’ influence on their audience is essential for the success of this type of affiliate marketing. This is because each affiliate must know the product very well, trust the product and genuinely use the product. This helps the affiliate to build the requisite trust and influence over the audience they’re promoting the products to. That way, the product’s reputation is linked with the affiliate’s reputation. To maintain this trust, the affiliate thus needs to be very careful when recommending the product to the audience.

Unattached Affiliate Marketing Model

Unattached affiliate marketing is the primary advertising model in which the affiliate has no presence, authority, or connection whatsoever with the product he is promoting. There is also no connection between the affiliate and the consumer. All the affiliate is required to do is to advertise or place product links in front of the consumers for them to click and buy. This is the model of affiliate marketing that is most uninvolved because the affiliate does not have any known skill/expertise about the product they are promoting. On the surface, such affiliates are actually in no absolute position to promote the product but they do and get results. This is why this model is about the most popular form of affiliate marketing. The affiliate does not necessarily have to build up a targeted network’s trust, and they can widely promote products without any responsibility to the audience/consumers.

How to Profitably Engage Affiliate Marketing for Your Business

Affiliate marketing is a marketing strategy many business owners rely on to sell their products/services. It is an effective and low-risk method of building audience for your business by partnering with like-minded individuals and brands. This partnership is hinged on mutual benefits for product merchants as well as affiliates. Affiliates work on commission-based formats which the products merchants put in place. All the affiliate does is to promote unique affiliate links to products through their content/blog. Any time a purchase is made through this unique link, the affiliate earns a commission from the sale. This process is easily adaptable and beneficial for most types of business models. Here are some proven ways you can profitably engage affiliate marketing for your business and be glad you did.

Establish a Clear Brand Identity

Affiliate marketing is most effective when you already have a clear brand identity. Therefore, before launching a wide-scale affiliate program, it is advisable to first build a solid brand identity. Since most affiliates will promote your products across multiple online platforms, your brand identity ensures uniformity and continuity across these platforms. This is why you must clearly establish a viable brand manual that denotes clear brand colors, fonts, and voice. That makes it possible for all your affiliates to properly present your brand identity to avoid confusing and or inaccurate promotion messages.
 
Collaborate With Complimentary Brands

Affiliate marketing is a versatile concept that is suitable for promoting most brands. It works with collaboration with other brands as well. This collaboration is a type of partnership that allows for cross-recruiting and premised on a wider audience base. It is mutually beneficial for brands when one brand promotes for the benefit of another brand in some kind of cross-selling. By this arrangement, both brands can benefit from the promotional activities as well as earn commissions both ways from referrals and purchases.

Launch an Affiliate Email Campaign

Email campaigns are still very effective in online marketing activities. More so when such emails are specially designed for affiliates. If you launch an affiliate email campaign, it serves as a form of internal communication for your existing affiliate network. This method allows for clear and concise brand collaboration. You can thus set up an email campaign to update affiliates about upcoming promotions and sales as well as provide up-to-date marketing materials to make their marketing activities more result oriented.

Work to Improve Conversion Rates

Without good conversions, it is pretty difficult for marketers to make sales. You can therefore make optimizing conversion rates the ultimate goal of your marketing strategy. If you do the right things, affiliate marketing has a high chance of success when it comes to improving conversion rates on your website. For effectiveness, you can handpick and choose your affiliates to ensure brand compatibility. Take a step further by offering enticing promotions such as incentive bonuses, free products, and enticing commissions to keep potential partners interested. If the affiliate team you have selected is well trained and works in efficient collaboration, it can create the right synergy to improve your conversions rates.

Partner With Podcast Hosts

It is difficult for marketers to ignore Podcasts these days because they are widely consumed by the population. Aside from being easily absorbed, Podcasts are effortlessly entertaining modems and therefore great as effective affiliate marketing tools. Online, Podcast hosts typically come with a loyal and trusting audience. What that means is that Podcast followers take brand partnerships seriously. So, if you partner with podcast hosts to entice them to plug your brand into their episodes, the results are great. For this reason, you can grant Podcast hosts an exclusive discount code for their listeners, as well as a set percentage of profits. Your business benefits a great deal from such arrangements.

Target Slow Selling Products

It is smart marketing for marketers to deliberately use less popular products to motivate higher commissions. Some products may be slow selling but once a sale is made, the commission volume can be huge. If you deliberately target such products, affiliate marketing may just be a great way to get your slow selling and less popular inventory off the shelves. At times what such products really need to sell is a little extra promotional attention and incentive. That means deliberate and specially targeted marketing efforts for such products. So, any which way you can use to push your slower-moving products unto the spotlight through affiliate marketing can be really great for your business.

Run Influencer Campaigns

If product merchants can effectively partner with Influencers, the results can be astounding. Marketers can thus use influencer campaigns as very effective form of affiliate marketing. By running a well-coordinated seasonal or long-term influencer campaigns, such collaboration allows your brand to utilize affiliate links as the right incentives. You can therefore start a profitable and mutually beneficial affiliate marketing campaign by simply partnering with one or more influencers to promote your products/services.

Making Money with SFI

As an affiliate, you can make money with SFI in a multiple of ways. In this lesson, however, you're going to learn about the three basic ways you can earn commissions* in the SFI program.

1. Direct Commissions (DC)

✔ Every time one of your personally referred members (PRM) purchases a product at a Zing Network site (Flexxity.com, Rewardical.com, TripleClicks.com, for example), you earn up to 50% of what we call the "Commission Volume" or "CV" for that product!
AND...

✔ Every time one of your personally sponsored affiliates (PSA)* purchases a product at one of our sites, you earn up to 50% CV for that product.
 
Earnings Example: An order is placed by one of your PRMs that has $28 CV. You can earn a $14 Direct Commission (50% of $28).

Now, what's CV, you ask? It's simply the maximum amount of commissions paid out on a given product/service. Every qualified product/service for sale at a Zing Network site has a CV amount attached. To view each product's CV information, just log into Flexxity.com, TripleClicks.com, etc, go to an item's details page, and click the SFI tab.

And once you sign up a member or affiliate, they become your customer for life!* SFI takes care of all order processing, product shipments, and customer service at no cost to you, and pays you up to a 50% direct commission on every order placed by your members and affiliates for life*.

What's more, SFI makes generating sales as easy as possible. One simple method you can use right now is to simply start referring your friends, associates, and family to the TripleClicks (TC) store using your TripleClicks Gateway. This link will drop off your prospective members at the main TC homepage and ensure you get credited with any signups and purchases:
https://www.tripleclicks.com/12177280/

We will be covering other sales methods and information in the LaunchPad lessons just ahead. Note that many of the methods are 100% FREE, can be done entirely on the Internet (no face-to-face selling), and can be put into action within minutes!

*You can continue to earn commissions so long as you remain an active SFI affiliate.

2. Co-Sponsor Commissions (CSC)

Similar to a Sponsor, a Co-Sponsor shares in the financial benefits and support responsibilities of the affiliates to whom he/she is the assigned as Co-Sponsor. And as such, you can earn up to 10% of the CV on all purchases made by your Co-Sponsored Affiliates (CSAs). You can begin receiving CSAs each month once you attain the rank of Level 5 Builder. Learn more about CSAs HERE.

Monthly Earnings Example: You have 50 CSAs. Their combined orders for the month are worth a total of $600 in CV. You earn up to $60 in CSCs (10% of $600).

3. Generation Override Commissions (GOC)

GOC lets you earn lucrative commissions on persons that the affiliates in your group refer! This is a unique feature of SFI and lets you earn up to 5% CV overrides on up to a whopping TWELVE generations of affiliates in your team—BOTH on personal purchases and the retail sales they generate!

Monthly Earnings Example: You have 400 affiliates in your group sponsored by your own PSAs. Their combined orders for the month are worth $3000 in CV. You earn up to $150 in Generation Override Commissions (5% of $3000).

To summarize, there are the three BASIC ways to earn in SFI:
1. Direct Commissions
2. Co-Sponsor Commissions (CSC)  
3. Generation Override Commissions (GOC)

But your SFI earnings power doesn't end there! We'll reveal even more SFI income streams and methods you can use to BOOST your commissions in upcoming LaunchPad lessons—so be sure to read on!

TIP: To get a jump on becoming an SFI pro, take a little time to review these essential "getting started" resources and SFI's Getting Started FAQs. And for more FAQs, customer service, and other HELP…visit the SFI Affiliate Support Desk.

*IMPORTANT! You must have a valid postal address and working email on record prior to collecting commissions.

Article Source: SFI Basics