What is affiliate marketing and how do I get started?

When I first picked up the book Affiliate Millions by Anthony Borelli and Greg Holden I was new to affiliate marketing and the book provided a great starting point. They outline what affiliate marketing is and how to get started. In this post I thought I would do a bit of the same but provide a overview of affiliate marketing and some of the tools to get started. On a side note, I plan on keeping this post pretty basic and just an overview but will expand on many of the subjects in future posts.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing according to Wikipeida is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts." Seems pretty simple...I send people to a business and they pay me, sign me up! Where do I get started? The real trick is doing it and making money, which we'll get to later on.

It's also important to distinguish between Search Marketing and website marketing. Programs such as Google AdWords will allow you to link directly to the merchant sites or to a your website. If you are linking directly to a merchant than this would be considered direct search marketing, if you linking back to your own website where you have set up a dedicated "Landing Page" then it would be considered website marketing.

The Skills required to jump right in
Let's start with the skills required to get started. If you already have:

• Web design skills
• Web development skills
• Internet marketing skills

You're well on your way. If you don't, not to worry. This stuff can be outsourced so don't stop reading and leave. Come back for future posts and I'll continue to share what I've found.

Some of the Tools required to succeed

Other than website design and development tools like Adobe Photoshop CS3, Adobe Fireworks CS3 or Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 you'll need to find the affiliate programs, get familiar with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising models and understand a bit about copy writing.

Below are a few of the basic tools you'll need.

Affiliate Programs:

• Commission Junction
• LinkShare
  

Search Marketing:

• Yahoo! Sponsored Search (Sign up now and get a $25 credit)
• Google AdWords (
  
  
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That's all for now, next time we'll start to explore some of the different markets and how to select a niche.

Chris