Affiliate marketing allows you to make money selling products you do not own. These products created by someone else in the form of software, ebooks, digital rights, etc, or some type of service are all products you do not own rights to but do have an agreement with the owner or rights holder to market for a percentage of the sale price.
The affiliate marketer simply produces a sale, gets paid, and is done. However, the product owner has to maintain all aspects of delivering the product(s) , returns, warranties, etc. Marketing products in this manner makes it possible for one to reap the benefits of owning a product without actually owning the product. Simply make a sale and get paid for it. No customer service email or contact has to be done by the affiliate marketer in any way.
Some product owners handle their own affiliate program from start to finish. In this case normally the affiliate would be given a special Id which would be used behind the main site url to track sales like www.somesite.com/?myid. In addition they would also handle the payment to the affiliate.
Perhaps a more commonly used approach these days is to use a 3rd party vendor to handle the tracking and payment to the affiliate like Click bank, or one of many others. Using a service like Click bank the affiliate gets paid automatically when a sale is made and their commission gets deposited into their PayPal account. In this method the money is available almost immediately. This is the preferred method for most affiliate marketers.
Good advice is to make sure if you are considering affiliate marketing is to select products that have a proven sales record or products that have popularity and appeal to a niche market. A good way to find out what is a good product to market is to use the search engines and select products that rank high in the results for a particular keyword.
For example: If I were considering marketing a product for "Internet marketing" I would go to www.google.com and type in "Internet Marketing" and review the first 5-10 results. Go to each website and find out what product they're selling. Then I would go to www.clickbank.com and do a search for those products and signup to promote them. Doing it this way you know that if a product owner has a high ranking for a particular keyword they are really getting a lot of traffic to their site which means their product should be well branded or established.
Keep in mind it's much easier to sell a product that your potential customer has heard of before. It's also a good idea to only sell items that you are interested in buying. If you are trying to sell an item that you would personally never buy that's a good indication of an item you should drop. If the item does not inspire you or you do not get excited about it then forget about it and find one that does.
If you are going to be a successful affiliate marketer you need to only promote products that you would either purchase or create yourself.
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