Make Money Online With Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing involves the following process:

1. You create a website or blog.
2. You find a merchant that has an affiliate program for products you would like to promote on your site. You join the merchants program.
3. The merchant provides you with linking code. This code will build a tracking link or banner on your site.
4. Your site visitors click on either the text link or banner and is taken to the merchant’s site. A tracking cookie is then sent to the visitors computer. This cookie is as harmless as the cookies used to remember passwords or settings for sites like weather sites. But the significance of this cookie is that it will track your sale even days or months later if it has not been overwritten by another cookie or removed by some other means.
5. If the visitor from your site purchases a product and the sale is tracked (most sales made immediately are tracked), then you will be awarded a commission. Commissions generally are 3-15% of the purchase price.

This all sounds very nice, especially since the merchant is handling all of the ordering, shipping, and customer service. Your links earn you money without any effort on your part! There are a few problems however:

• Once the visitor finds the merchant site, they will go directly to the merchant site (rather than your site) for future purchases.
• You are in competition against very large shopping sites like Pricegrabber.com, Shopping.com and others that do affiliate marketing in a very big way.  These sites offer comprehensive comparison shopping features that you as an individual could never match.
• Major search engines like Google will place small affiliate shopping sites very low in the results if they only offer products and banners and little unique content. Part of the reason for this is that your affiliate product links will be considered as duplicate content since perhaps hundreds of other affiliates will have exactly the same product links. This was not always the case, but it certainly is the case now.

So, is affiliate marketing still a viable means of making money? Yes, if you do it right. And here is what you must do:

Pick out a niche that gets a fair amount of traffic, yet is something you can create an extensive content site on. Google loves putting good content sites near the top of the search heap! In my page on What Should I Blog About, I point out the example of the 57 Chevy topic. This would be an excellent topic to blog about as well as an excellent topic to promote affiliate products! That is, of course assuming you are willing to become an expert on the 57 Chevy, if you are not already one. Owning your own 57 Chevy to work on and blog about would be a big plus! (Believe me, if I had one and worked on it a lot, I would have a 57 Chevy blog or site!) You could write all kinds of content pages, get involved in auto communities, and then work in your affiliate links as text links, used in context throughout your site where appropriate. You could also create some product pages, but your first emphasis would be to create a good content-rich site.  You could find auto merchants with affiliate programs at Shareasale (my favorite network) or Commission Junction or from other networks as well. By narrowing your focus to one where you have expertise and are willing to create extensive posts on such things as repair procedures or detailing methods, you then have the advantage. And with enough effort you can be at or near the top of the search results for the given topic with your site featuring valuable content. Just remember the key word: value.

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Tagged as: Affiliate Marketing, income, make money, make money on the internet, Search Engine Rankings, search engines