Affiliate marketing is something that has been the backbone of the internet since the dotcom bubble.
Affiliate marketing is not a new concept. The idea has been around for hundreds of years. However, the internet really lent itself to the whole affiliate business model.
One of the reasons for this was the ease by which individual sales could be tracked.
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What Is Affiliate Marketing?
At it’s very basic level, affiliate marketing is selling other people’s products. Very often, the actual customer service and fulfilment is taken care of by the product creator, and the marketer has no interaction with the customer at all, beyond displaying their ads to them.
The benefit for the product creator is that they do not have to do the marketing.
The benefit for the marketer is that they do not have to create a product or manage customers.
Every product creator and marketer will however, still need quality financial services.
Where To Start
If you want to make a go of affiliate marketing, you are first going to have to decide what nicheyou will be selling or what niche you will be selling to.
This is crucial. In order to have a business that has any focus and direction you will need a niche. Only the very largest of companies, the Amazons of this world can go into business and target the whole of the market.
Now, once this is done you can move onto your next step.
Find Your Audience
Once you have your niche defined, you will need to find your audience. This really will be niche dependent.
Perhaps they prefer social media.
In which case, you are going to have to find out which platform they prefer. Different audiences and demographics can be very specific about which platform they prefer. In addition, different niches lend themselves to different platforms.
You may find that your audience is active on several different channels.
If this is the case then you will have to build a strategy that effectively covers each of these channels.
For instance, you may want to create a blog, and associated with this have a YouTube channel. If your audience is very art based, then Pinterest may be better suited to go alongside your blog.
Get this right now, because there’s no point in shouting from the top of the hill if there’s no one there to hear you.
Find Your Product
Once you have your audience, you can choose your product.
Check with the product website to see if they have an affiliate program. If they do, great sign up.
If not, then you can go and sign up with one of the many affiliate marketing websites. These sites offer thousands of products, each with an affiliate program.
You sign up to the website and it allows you to market all of the products.
You’ll need to choose a select few and carefully market these to your new audience.
Good luck.