Is Affiliate Marketing Profitable?

We hear stories about affiliate marketers making hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. Is it really true? What are the chances of making money through affiliate marketing? Is affiliate marketing really profitable?

On this very blog where Francisco (ditesco) has discussed a lot about affiliate marketing, let me give you an overview of what is involved (and what to expect) when you want to make money through affiliate marketing.

Requirements

The investment required for affiliate marketing is very little or almost nil. You need not invest on the website. You need not invest in AdWords. You need not invest for web hosting. The number of working hours required for affiliate promotion is also as short as 10 hours per week. What you promote and how you promote through affiliate marketing is very important. The products that you are promoting should fall under the niche that you are focusing on.

Ability to sell

You should have the capability to sell products or services. By associating affiliate products with your products and services, your job as promoter of affiliate products is made easy. You should quote the affiliate product at the most appropriate place making it as a choice for the visitor on your site. At any cost, you should not compel them to go through the products. Compelling visitors to sign up for a newsletter or making them offer their personal information should be avoided. You will be paid for all the traffic routed from your site to the affiliate’s site. You will be paid for the downloads or sales made through your site.

Relevancy

The relevancy factor is very much important in the promotion of affiliate products. You should introduce affiliate products in a quite natural way. For example, if your blog talks about health care issues, you can promote products related to fitness equipments or food supplements. These are appropriate products. You should not place banner ads that talk about cars and bikes. You are not going to do justice to your readers by offering irrelevant products.

However good those products might be if they are not relevant to the topic that you are focusing on, your affiliate promotion will not have impact. It may give negative impact on your site as your visitors may identify you as a sheer promoter of products but not the source for the information they are looking for.

You should find the most appropriate products that solve the requirements of your audience on some of the best affiliate networks. If you are catering to blogging community, you can present tools to improve the productivity. You can suggest tools that check grammatical mistakes, spelling mistakes and tools that help bloggers present unique content on the web. You can also introduce tools to manage email lists and send newsletters automatically such as auto responder. You can introduce new applications that enhance website performance and functionality so that a blogger can better manage comments and reply back.

Support offered

You will get support from the party whose products you are promoting through affiliation. You will be provided assistance to setup their banners on your site. Affiliates guide you on ‘how to promote’ their products. Affiliates provide the resources (books, magazines, audio visual presentations).

Precautions

You should take care that the products that you promote through affiliation are quality products. Visitors will purchase the products or subscribe to services based on your reputation. You will lose your credibility by offering wrong or inappropriate products. Hence, enough care should be taken that products that you offer are not only relevant but also match all kinds of requirements as expected from a decent product. By choosing big brands which have established presence in the market over a period of time, your image will not come down (although this need not be always true!).

Other benefits

By promoting affiliate products, you will not only advise new products to your audience but also get multiple benefits through the promotion. Your search engine rank increases if your site is quoted by other websites which are doing well in search engine rankings. By associating yourself with big brands, new traffic will be generated. Your site will surface in organic search through Google and other search engines.

Conclusion

Affiliate product promotion will enhance your business provided you promote right products in right time. As you promote good quality products, your site will also get promoted bringing traffic from all corners. This is also an opportunity to earn extra income without going for any extra investment.

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