Affiliate marketing is the way most marketers make their start online.
You don't need your own product and you don't really need your own web page even, although it more desirable to go this way than trying to learn such things as AdWords or the like at the same time.
Affiliate marketing is simply the process of promoting the products of others in order to earn a commission from those products if you are the referring party on a sale.
Pretty simple definition really, but there can be so much more to the process if you want long term success.
Making a sale once is all very well, but the object of affiliate marketing should always be to build your own list so that you can sell more products to the same people over a long period of time.
For this reason, one of the most important aspects of affiliate marketing is to promote products, but to also use a squeeze page to get people into your own mailing list.
There you go, another internet marketing term, the squeeze page! So what is a squeeze page? A squeeze page is a web page that goes between your promotion of a product and the product's landing page.
When visitors to your site click on the link to the product, you interrupt them with this page in the process.
On that page you should have a couple of things.
First of all you need a compelling offer that will get them to give you their name and email address.
By a compelling offer, I mean to offer them something for free that would be attractive to this visitor.
For example, if you are promoting a weight loss program, then offer a free report on weight loss in exchange for the email address and name of the visitor.
You know that because they are seeking to find out information on a weight loss program that they will be interested in your free report, so you have a good chance of getting them to sign up to your autoresponder.
It is also very important to have it clearly shown on the squeeze page a statement such as, "No thanks, just take me to the product page.
" or similar so you don't interrupt the sales process if people don't want your free report.
Now let me share with you what I believe to be the most important secret of affiliate marketing when building your own list.
Under no circumstances recommend rubbish to people just for the sake of earning a dollar.
You want to build a strong relationship with your visitors and those joining your list and you won't do this if you recommend rubbish.
People will unsubscribe very quickly and you will never hear from them again.
You can have 1,000 web pages, but on the internet you only have one name and once it's tarnished, it's a long road back in gaining the trust of the public again.
You should also remember that the internet is a phenomenal place of free speech and if you choose to try and trick people, it won't take long before your name is mentioned in a blog post somewhere that could damage your reputation forever.
Applying good learning strategies in the affiliate marketing area will put you in a good position to develop your own products down the track.
Once you are in this position, all the work in affiliate marketing will have paid off and you will have your own list to market to.