Affiliate Marketing Guide Online

The ads always sound great on paper.  ”Follow these five steps and earn $$$$’s a day!” “Make $1,000 in just ten minutes a day!” “Earn $$$$’s on your Blog”But how do you really make money with your online website, blog, or just dive into affiliate marketing?   There are many variations on these basic models for making money online.

1.  Pay-per-click marketing - you buy or bid keywords and drive traffic to a vendors site. Think of this as gambling or buying stocks. You’re hedging your bets that you can buy clicks cheap and earn big commission on sales. 
2. Natural websites / blogs - you build a website and sell or recommend products.  In this case, you’re basically a magazine full of advertisements, product reviews and recommendations. Get a big reader base, and you’ll have your own little cash cow.
3. Coupon Sites, Incentive Sites, Comparison Shopping - Cut to the chase and build a site that pre-sells product.  Here, you might list all the coupons available for internet web hosting, or compare prices for people shopping for a product. Catch consumers in “buy” mode and hook them in to your favorite affiliate’s website. 

In all cases, you can choose to fill your new blog or website with pay-per-action or pay-per-click links.  This simply means, do you want to make money every time someone clicks, or everytime someone buys something. Very few Pay Per click (PPC) networks still exist, but the biggest is Google Adsense, followed by Yahoo’s network. In a nutshell, you put adsense code on your website, and when someone clicks, you get paid anywhere from a few cents to a dollar.   The other option is to join an Affiliate network that pays per action, per lead, or per sale. In this instance, you get paid every time someone fills out a form or buys a product. Pay per action, which is known as affiliate marketing, has taken popularity, over PPC networks like Adsense, because of things like click fraud and simple return on investment.  In general, pay per action is better fit for both advertisers and publishers, because while PPC may only pay 10 cents a click on some clicks, pay per action sales may pay anywhere between 1%-50% or more commission on a sale.   To be continued….