A common way to make money online is through affiliate marketing. But actually, what is affiliate marketing?

Let’s explore this topic

There are basically two ways to make money online with product sales. You can sell your own products or sell or promote someone else’s products and get paid for doing it
In this post, we’ll tackle affiliate marketing, and there are 3 basic steps in affiliate marketing.

1. You recommend a product or service to people that read what you have to say

2. A percentage of those people purchase the product or service based on your recommendation.

3. You get paid a commission for those purchases made by people who purchased through clicking on the personalized link you provided.

How does affiliate marketing work?

1. You have an email list, blog, or website or some other online presence like social media where people listen to what you have to say.

2. You partner with the company that sells a product or service you’d like to recommend. As their general, you are their affiliate. It goes by different names such as associate, partner as well. You recommend or market their products or service to your followers or readers. You could do this by writing a blog about it, placing one or two ads places on your site, or talking about it in your email newsletter or on social media networks. You include a special link to the product or service so followers can check it out for themselves. This is called an affiliate link. It has a special number, a unique affiliate ID, which is assigned to you.

3. A reader of yours uses (by clicking on) your affiliate link to check out the product or service and they actually purchase it. Then, when their purchase is complete, you earn a commission. This commission is usually in the form of a percentage of the purchase price. Bigger affiliate programs are going to have smaller percentages to offer. The smaller affiliate programs can offer a 50% or higher commission on when you promote.

4. You receive a total payment of your all your earnings after a specified period of time, or when you reach a certain threshold.

Here are some tips and tricks to get you started.

1. Always tell your readers when you are using affiliate links. It is illegal and in generally a bad practice to try to trick your readers into clicking affiliate links.

2. Only choose products or services you can recommend without the money. This means only recommending the best products available, and being honest in your reviews. You want your audience’s trust. You can’t get that if you are pushing bad products to them for your own profit. Try out the services yourself. There isn’t a more quality review than that.

3. Choose products or services that are actually relevant to you. Having random ads or posts on your website makes you look like a spammer. It lowers the possibility that anyone would trust your opinion. If you look like you are in it just for the money, and not to provide a service to your reader, then you will surely lose your audiences, test, then test again. Test out with different networks, kinds of content, ad designs, links and images, placement on your page, and all things of this nature. Sometimes there truly large differences in revenue when small changes are made.

4. Always know the Terms of Service for the programs in which you are participating.

If you are not informed of exactly what you are getting and exactly what you are reciting you are putting yourself at a huge disadvantage. No one wants to be taken advantage of, and the easiest way that could happen is if you do not know it’s happening. Also, you do not want to break your affiliate partner’s rules. They, most likely, have the right to discontinue your account with them with out without notice. Breaking the rule unknowingly is a fast way to get kicked out of an affiliate program and be confused as to why.

Affiliate marketing is just one way to monetize your website. There are also many affiliate marketing programs to choose from. It is important to know and understand your options in order to find the best ones for you. Often, we pick the newest option that we have learned because it’s the newest. This isn’t a good enough reason for choosing a particular marketing strategy. So just take a deep breath, slow down and weigh your options.