Affiliate Marketing

[Sapper]

Disclaimer: Although there are links in this post, none of them are affiliate links. Doesn't matter if you click on any links and buy anything, I won't make a cent from it. This is for a couple reasons. First, I'm not writing this to make money, I'm writing this to maybe shed some light on this "employment" opportunity who don't know about it, and to tell people why I love doing it. Second, if someone asked in a thread where to buy domain names or hosting, I'd probably throw out a GoDaddy affiliate link, but I'm not writing this because someone asked. So I don't feel it's right to try and profit off of it in a video game forums. Finally, I haven't looked, but I'm fairly certain it's against the forum rules, and if it isn't, it should be.

Affiliate marketing vs. Internet marketing

Some people consider these the same things, but IMO they are related, but different, in the same way all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. Internet marketing includes stuff like selling Ebooks you've written, t-shirts you've designed, and stuff like that, where affiliate marketing is just selling other peoples products and sending traffic to other peoples sites. Some people may disagree, but that's how I see it.

Why I love affiliate marketing

The very basics of affiliate marketing is to use psychology to convince, or in some cases trick, people into buying other peoples products or services. I was torn about using the word trick, but for somethings, that's really all it is. An example would be a offer off of Clickbank called Privacy Wars. The sales pitch of is is basically the government is evil, they want all your private information, and you have to buy his book to prevent it. Call it what you want, but that is using people paranoia to trick them into buying something they don't need. I've always been somewhat interested in psychology, so when I saw that I could use it to profit without having to go to school and listen to people's problems that I really wouldn't care about, I was like hell yeah, sign me up. In all reality, that's all affiliate marketing is; finding the best placement, best wording, even best color of an ad to convince people to click on it and buy it. Also, unlike most conventional jobs, the harder you work, the more money you can make.

Getting started

Unlike most business', getting started with affiliate marketing is incredibly cheap. The easiest way to get started is to pick a topic, buy a domain, buy hosting, install WordPress, and go. If you are only doing one blog, and you are inexperienced, it really doesn't matter what hosting you pick. There are differences, but most of them don't matter unless you are hosting several sites on one server, or are building sites to resell. I like GoDaddy for domain names and HostGator for hosting.

After you get everything setup, post a few blogs and find some affiliates. The beautiful thing about affiliate marketing is you can find affiliate links for basically any topic. Once I started looking, I was surprised how many sites had an affiliate program. Two that you should really setup no matter what are AdSense and Clickbank. The two work a little differently, AdSense pays you for traffic to your site and for sending traffic to other sites, while Clickbank pays commissions for selling other peoples products, of which basically all of which are ebooks. Don't limit yourself to just those two, try all different ones and see what fits your style best. Other popular ones are Amazon and Ebay.

I hope you enjoyed reading this, and perhaps for a few of you are interested in starting a website.

[Darsithis]

It's still advertising, here. You may not be making anything, but posting a guide with full links on how to take advantage of affiliate marketing in order to make money is simply not allowed.

Closing.