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A Newbie’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing
If you’re fairly new to affiliate marketing you may have noticed that some of the terminology can be somewhat confusing. I thought I’d do my best to demystify some of the language for you.
Affiliate marketing itself is the business of marketing other people’s products and services in exchange for a reward – usually money!
You can be an affiliate directly for a company who offers their product or service or you can get registered with some of the various affiliate marketing networks. These affiliate networks have made a business of matching up advertisers and publishers.
The advertisers are paying the publishers a commission to go out and market and sell for them. The publishers are those who specialize in the advertising and marketing of products and services on the internet.
This gives the advertisers a huge pool of publishers to introduce their products to and it give publishers a place to search for products and services that they would like to market online. This way you can search for products that are a good fit for your website and/or your target audience.
Whether you are working directly with the product company or through a network make sure you understand the terms of service before you get started. You will be required to get registered with them – providing your personal information including your social security number. Some companies will have you also fill out a W-9 upon registration so that once your commission reaches $600 they can send you a 1099 for tax purposes. Remember, you are not an employee for any of these companies so you will need to keep track of your income for tax purposes.
Each program should clearly state what and how you will be paid to perform certain tasks.
You will usually be paid per sale, per lead and/or per action. A sale is a completed sale of a product. Per lead is basically where you drive traffic to an opt-in page and your referrals sign up to find out more about the product or service. Per action is where your referral performs a certain action such as: filling out a survey, applying for something like a credit card offer, or signing up for something like a singles site. Some of these per action offers are free and some of them require your referral to pay something … like maybe a free learning CD but they pay the shipping cost.
You will get paid a flat sales commission rate, a percentage of sale rate, a recurring/ongoing sales commission, or a fee for a specific action. There are all kinds of variations of these too. You might be paid a flat sales commission and a recurring commission for every month that your referral remains a monthly subscriber. You might make a certain fee if your referral fills out page one of a form, another if they advance to page two, and so on. It’s important to get familiar with the different methods of payment rewards and understand them completely.
Another way to earn with your affiliate marketing business is to refer other publishers to the affiliate program or affiliate marketing network. An example of this is PepperJam Network is currently paying their publishers a $7.00 referral commission (normally $5.00) and MarketLeverage pays their publishers 5% commission on all of their referrals’ commission earned. For instance, if you were to use my link and sign up with PepperJam Network to also be a publisher I would be paid $7.00 (right now you would also be paid $10.00 ~ just for signing up!). If you decided to use my link to get signed up with MarketLeverage I would be paid 5% of your total monthly commissions and you would get the same for your referrals. Pretty cool huh?
I would love to answer any questions you have about affiliate marketing so just ask away!
Are you an affiliate marketer? Do you prefer working directly with the product company or working through an affiliate network? What are you favorite affiliate networks? Do you market products, services, CPA’s or what? I’d love to hear from you in the comments section below. *SmiLes* Suzanne
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