Here’s some of the essential things you’ll need to know when you’re getting started in the Affiliate Marketing world.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing, for our purposes, is the process of promoting a merchants products or services either through a website or via email marketing or some combination of the two.

The affiliate marketer’s (AM) job is to simply recommend or PRE-sell a merchants product - the merchant has the responsibility of generating the order, getting payment, product fulfillment, customer service and all the rest of the details that the customer demands.

How do affiliates get paid?

Affiliate marketers can be paid in several ways:

* Pay Per Sale (PPS) - Probably the most popular option, here the affiliate marketer receives a percentage of the sale (revenue share). This percentage can either be one time –on that product or order only or may be for the life of customer
* Pay Per Action (PPA) – Under this scenario, the affiliate is paid once the customer takes some action as described in the agreement. Actions may include, entering their email address or submitting a survey.
* Pay Per Lead (PPL) – Here the merchant is trying to get new leads for their product or service, often times these programs will require the customer to fill out a form.
* Bounty – This is popular in certain niches where new customers often become on-going – ie Poker players. Here the affiliate marketer is paid a flat fee for sending a new paying customer to the merchant.
* Pay Per Click (PPC) – This is not very popular any longer, under this plan the affiliate marketer gets paid for simply sending a visitor through to the merchant. Typically, payment is a penny or two per click.
* Other – some programs are hybrids, for example they may offer both PPA and PPS or they pay out a percentage of the sales for some length of time say six months.

Important: Always read the fine print of the affiliate program terms and conditions (T&C) –you need to know exactly what is expected of you before you start promoting a merchants products.

What are the essential tools I’ll need to get started?

First you’ll need time! Being an affiliate marketer is tough, it’s NOT the get rich overnight scheme that many will have you believe. If you’re serious about becoming an AM you first need to do a bit of research to see what other marketers are doing. I’d recommend finding some Internet marketing forums read through the old posts, you’ll learn a lot! Here’s a few free downloads to get you started:

Download these now and save them to your desktop –so you don’t forget

* Affiliate Marketers Master Course
* Netwriting Masters Course
* Make Your Content PREsell

Extra Credit! Get The Free Authority Site Guide Click Here! - We’ll be starting to cover that in the next chapter!

(I’ll be adding additional chapters to to this in the near future, subscribe to my RSS fee to keep update!)

Posted by David Olsen - Owner/Editor

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