How Can I Simplify My Understanding Of Affiliate Marketing?

Copyright (c) 2009 Riley West When I came to Internet Marketing and, more specifically, Affiliate Marketing there were enough new things to learn that I felt overwhelmed quite often. You wouldn't think so since I was in charge of getting traffic into specific retail stores. But I was accustomed to that work. When I was in my previous career I was proud of how well I could teach the sales, marketing, and retailing concepts to the folks I was training. I made it so simple that anybody could get it if they wanted to. In order to simplify your understanding of Affiliate Marketing you just have to know this...You need a good offer and you need a buyer looking at it. This is an even more distilled description than my old standard which is Traffic + Conversion = Sales. I used to say this was the "essence" of affiliate marketing. But look, Traffic + Conversion IS a buyer! So it holds true but an offer plus buyer is more succinct AND mentions a VERY important part of the process which is the offer. The offer COULD be "Conversion" but let's let it stand there. Why am I telling you this? Because It's my style. I like to oversimplify things because it takes me into a "zone" where I can flourish. So, if you want to boil your understanding of Affiliate Marketing down to the bottom of the pot I guess we'd have to go with this. Since you have chosen to be an affiliate, you have also chosen to sell someone else's product. So, in a way, you have the "product" thing taken care of for you. You, as an affiliate, only need to provide ONE THING. A buyer. I know. I've called them many things, but, as we put it in the biz back in the day, traffic is necessary, buyers are absolutely essential. Traffic can come and look and leave! Score - zero. Traffic can come and leave their name and leave without buying. But you have their name and another shot at them. Traffic can also come and buy! The best kind of customer buys something AND subscribes to your email, too. We don't have to go into the One time Offer and Backend here at this time. I'm trying to simplify, after all. I started the hard way and now after struggling for a year an a half with some measure of success I am coming full circle to affliate sales. I can still build a list. I can drive my traffic to a landing page and build my list there. Then I'll forward them to the offer. So, unless you are going to go "bare" (my term for direct linking) all you really need is landing pages, hosting, domain, and autoresponder with web form to collect names and build your list. If you were to go "bare" (direct linking) all you need is a customer to direct to your affiliate link. I started out by saying I like to keep it simple, then it explodes into a detail description of something simple. A bit of an irony. Still, if you want to make money as an affiliate you have to learn how to drive traffic to an affiliate's offer. I started by writing articles and using Pay-Per-Click. So, for you I recommend this. Before you get nuts over an offer or a market (the people who buy the offer) you might want to make a list of all the traffic generation methods available online to you. When you know what you want to do to get traffic, (buyers) find a market you like and an offer that's being purchased right now by that market's buyers. Then, get to work. Get traffic to that offer, over and over again. Stick with it. Once sales start to happen keep pushing, keep tweaking. If you have a good offer and you are getting your traffic from the market (group of people) that buy that kind of offer you are on the right track and you will be pleasantly surprised at how much you'll learn in a few months. Plus, your determination will cause you to make some money. That IS the ultimate goal, isn't it?