[dropcap]M[/dropcap]any people have heard of what’s called affiliate marketing. Perhaps two of the biggest names in affiliate marketing where entrepreneurs can get involved in selling products are Clickbank and Commission Junction.
These are both programs were you sign up to become an affiliate and then you can sell products in numerous categories from content producers and publishers — people with e-books, video courses, audio courses, etc. — all types of things that you can sell to your audience of readers or newsletter subscribers.
As an affiliate marketer you make money (commission) from the products you sell. Often times it’s anywhere from 50% to 75% of the price of the product.
Why do publishers give away so much of the sell?
While the publisher is trying to make a little bit on the initial sale, more importantly they want to get people on their mailing list so they can do multiple follow-ups with that customer to sell them additional products. So content publishers are willing to give away a large percentage of the initial sale so they can make lots more money down the road, all while continually recommending products via emails to this customer.
If you would like to get into the affiliate marketing, I would recommend a site called Share-a-Sale. They’re just like Commission Junction and Clickbank to some regard except they only offer advertising banners and links for programs, whereas Clickbank provides e-books, etc.
The Share-a-Sale site offers HTML code for your ads which you display in your sidebar area, footer/header areas or even inside your posts. Now don’t let the “HTML code” part scare you. It’s a simple copy and paste job to take the code and put it on your site — which is what I did to make the Share-a-Sale logo appear above.
In addition to the normal size banners, Share-a-Sale also has videos for some companies and products. And another neat tool is some of the vendors offer product feeds that you can incorporate into your site.
I would definitely recommend Share-a-Sale as a good way to get into affiliate marketing. One nice thing too is that they won’t drop you if you don’t make a sale, which happens at Commission Junction.
If your website or blog offers advertising space — top or side banners — Share-a-Sale would be a great way to get some advertising on your site and bring in some revenue.
You won’t be making a fortune to start with but at least it’ll give your site some credibility with ads and, you never know, folks may click on an ad and next thing you know, you’ve made a sale and a commission!
How much advertising and where you place the ads is of course up to you.
Affiliate Marketing Tip
If you’re using WordPress and start affiliate marketing, especially with the Hop links that Clickbank uses, you’ll want to get the free plug-in “Pretty Link” (the free Lite version is fine). Pretty link will allow you to create nice looking, short links instead of the long ugly links that most affiliate programs provide.
For example. Here’s my “pretty” link that I created for Share-a-Sale, followed by the Share-a-Sale provided link. Which would you click on?
Pretty Link:
https://jimperson.com/share-a-sale
Original Share-a-Sale Link:
http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=69&u=403779&m=47&urllink=&afftrack=
