Affiliate Marketing - The Truth!

Affiliate marketing is fast becoming the most popular work-at-home option. Put generally, it involves setting up links on the web which direct prospects (potential customers) to websites. If the prospects make purchases, the person who set up the links (i.e., the affiliate) will be credited with the sales and will therefore receive a commission for each sale.

The allure of affiliate marketing is the apparent simplicity of the whole procedure and the prospect of making a generous, home-based living through such simplicity. Affiliates dont have to deal with customer enquiries, credit card processing, postage and packaging, refunds, or anything of that nature. All of that hassle is the responsibility of the business or website owner (otherwise known as the merchant). The affiliates only task is to send traffic to the merchant website and collect the resultant commissions. But is affiliate marketing really that simple?

The Hardships of Affiliate Marketing

The simple answer is No. Affiliate marketing is generally very difficult. As such, most people who venture into affiliate marketing give up within a few months. The main reason for their giving up stems from a consequence of their having a low level of understanding of the profession. In order to make it as an affiliate marketer, one must learn how to advertise effectively on the web, and this is where most people fail.

The Tedious Free Methods of Affiliate Marketing

Advertising on the web can take many guises. Forum marketing involves setting up links to products on relevant forums which direct prospects to merchant sales pages. Classified marketing is concerned with doing the same, except setting up the links on a classifieds website. And article marketing involves writing about a product, including a link to the product, and posting the article on an article website. These methods, along with setting up links on your own website (which is not an option for many affiliates), are the main free methods of affiliate marketing.

The free methods of affiliate marketing can work; however, they require a lot of work and even more patience. In my experience, setting up links on forums and internet classifieds was almost a total waste of time. At most, I could expect to make a few sales per month if I done everything correctly. Article marketing worked a little better, generating between fifteen and twenty (and sometimes up to thirty) sales per month. However, this was hardly enough to merit quitting my job. Moreover, the only way that I could achieve such a level of sales was if I wrote at least three articles per day, each of which had to be very persuasive, and each of which had to be written in such a way as to pull in maximum organic traffic by exploiting the high-ranking and frequently spidered nature of the article website. This required knowledge of keyword research, optimal keyword densities and general search engine optimization (SEO). If such parameters were not met, the whole article would be a waste of time and effort.

Another headache inherent to article marketing involved the stringency by which articles were monitored before being accepted by the article websites. The articles could not be blatant or even subtle promotions of products. If so, they would be rejected.

The Difficulties of the Paid Methods of Affiliate Marketing

The paid methods of affiliate marketing can also be very difficult. More importantly, failure at using such methods not only costs time and effort but hard-earned cash.

The easiest paid methods of affiliate marketing include paying to have your ads displayed in newspapers and ezines. These require an ability to write effective sales copies despite being bound by strict word limitations. Another, far more effective (yet also more difficult), paid method is to use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. This involves setting up short ads on search engine PPC services which are displayed to search engine users if they conduct a search using a keyword which you have bid on. Every time someone clicks on your ad, you are charged a small fee (hence pay-per-click), the amount of which depends on how much you bid on the keyword. Therefore, if one wished to make money using this method, they would have to make sure that they made more money with the sales than they lost with the clicks and this is where the difficulties come in.

PPC advertising can accurately be described as a mass murderer of affiliates for the simple reason that it generally takes a lot of time to get even close to being able to use it proficiently and in a cost-effective manner. Before affiliates get to this kind of level, the PPC service usually eats them up and spits them out! Even so, affiliates flock to PPC services, spurred on by the prospect of mastering it and consequently making large sums of money, each and every day.

The potential of PPC advertising truly is profound, so the stimulus which drives affiliates to using PPC advertising is totally justifiable. PPC is by far the most effective advertising strategy on the planet. If mastered, financial worries can certainly become a thing of the past. There is no other advertising strategy on Earth which gives you the ability to laser-target prospects from all over the world, who are specifically looking for what you are selling.

So, is it even worth Getting into Affiliate Marketing?

This depends on you. In order to answer this question, you will have to ask yourself whether you are willing to invest the necessary effort and time into learning the skills that are necessary to make it as an affiliate marketer. If you are not partial to a challenge, affiliate marketing is not for you. However, if, like me, you are not fazed by such a mission and deem the benefits of becoming a successful affiliate marketer as over-riding, then you should definitely give affiliate marketing a try. Thats exactly what I did, and fast-forward one year, I am currently making a respectable living, just by promoting products on PPC services from my bedroom. I work whenever I want, for as long as I want. I even make money while on holiday, as my campaigns run on autopilot while Im away! It was difficult in the beginning, but all my efforts have paid off. Maybe the same can happen to you!

Edward Lord is a full-time affiliate marketer, freelance researcher and writer. He has devised an absolutely free affiliate marketing course for beginners and intermediates, specifically intended to address all the hardships inherent to achieving affiliate marketing success. You can sign up for his course at

http://www.affiliate-basics-course.com

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