Are Affiliates in Demand?

Is there a demand for affiliate marketers today? Yes, there is a huge demand. One of the challenges faced in the affiliate marketing industry is that it sometimes sounds too good to be true: advertising that's guaranteed to work or it's free! Newcomers wonder if it's possible, and skeptics claim that the cost effective prices of affiliate marketing lower the bar for online advertising. But there is a good reason that affiliate marketing has experienced steady growth throughout the ups and downs of online advertising—it works. And affiliate marketing has evolved to become a reliable source of sales for a wide range of marketers.

Affiliate marketing has evolved from the early years when some touted it as the future of online advertising, and others claimed it was the downfall of the medium. It's now a sophisticated channel that generates anywhere from five to 25% of online sales for many of the world's biggest brands.

Almost all major multi-channel marketers have an affiliate program of some kind. The important thing to remember is that affiliate programs now come in all shapes and sizes. The concept of a wide-open affiliate program with an unlimited and uncontrolled number of affiliates is a thing of the past. Nearly all marketers agree that affiliates add value to an online marketing effort, but the program must be tailored to meet the marketer's objectives.

Affiliate marketing did not bring an end to other, higher priced forms of online media advertising.  The success of the affiliate marketing in delivering sales cost effectively by way of a pay-for-performance model paved the way for other forms of performance-based advertising, such as CPA-based search and portal advertising, to create acceptance among direct marketers. Affiliate marketing has evolved, with affiliates and marketers becoming more sophisticated and programs more integrated with other forms of online marketing.



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Basic Tools for Affiliate Marketing

In this article we will take a look at some of the basic tools you will need to be successful with affiliate marketing. Just because you are not creating your own products you are still running a business and need to treat it as such.

Blog or Website

As a business owner you need to have a home base to run your affiliate business from. This should be a blog or website. It is very easy and affordable to set up a wordpress site for your business. While there are free options it is recommended to buy a domain name, your blog address, and use a hosting company, this is where your site runs from. The total cost for these two things is around $20 and the monthly fee for hosting is less than $10.

Autoresponder Service

As an affiliate marketer you do not want to waste your time sending people to the vendors offer. Instead the smarter practice is to direct them to the affiliate offer on your own blog. On your blog you will have an opt in form to capture the email addresses of your visitors. This provides you with the opportunity to mail your list for days, weeks and years to come.

Now, you may ask why this is important? Most affiliate marketers will tell you that most prospective buyers do not always make a purchase the first time they click on your affiliate link.

If you send these buyers directly to the vendors site and they don't purchase, you have lost the sale. How can you connect with them again and find out why they didn't purchase - you can't.

On the other hand if you send them to your blog and they opt-in to your list you have their contact information. You can easily send out emails to them and provide them with more information or ask why they didn't purchase.

You are collecting and building your own data base of leads for all your affiliate marketing efforts. While a person may not like one product they may happily purchase others.

Using an autoresponder services allows you to mass mail people at one time. Plus you can schedule emails to go out while you are at work or out shopping.

Two of the most popular autoresponder services are Aweber and GetResponse, both have introductory trials for the first month.

While there are other tools that can help your affiliate business these are the basic ones that you should start with. Then as you become an experienced affiliate you may want to use tools that create landing pages and track who clicks on your links and how often.

How to Make Money with Affiliate Links

The concept of affiliate marketing is very easy, you put up an affiliate link for people and when they purchase through it, you get paid. As with anything, there is a right and a wrong way to do this.

What is an affiliate link?

When you sign up or register for an affiliate program you are given a link. This link will track your sales, it is basically the way you will get paid. As people click through your link and make a purchase the sale gets credited to your account. When commissions are paid out you receive funds via a check or into your PayPal account.

Masking Your Link

An affiliate link will look something like this:

http://productname/?id=34598

The id portion is the part that identifies you as the affiliate. Now if you use this link as is you are leaving your link open for changes. Unfortunately there are people who will take your link and add theirs to it. They get credited for the sale and you lose out.

There are several ways around this. You can mask or hide your affiliate link by using software. A popular one is Pretty Link which actually works on your wordpress blog. Other link shortener's include bitly, ow.ly and even Google has its own link shortener.

The benefit of this is that your link is effectively hidden and ensures that you will get credited for any sales. Now please be aware that some affiliate programs do not track any links that are shortened. So look into this before doing so.

Hyperlinks

Using a hyperlink is another way to mask your link to a certain extent. You have no doubt seen hyperlinks as words or a string of text that is clickable. When you click on that link you are taken to an affiliate offer.

Here's how to do this:

If you are doing this in Microsoft Word or inside your wordpress blog it is very easy to hyperlink text.

1. Copy your affiliate link.

2. Highlight the words in your post that you want to link to.

3. Click on the icon at the top of your dashboard that looks like a link, it often has a picture of a globe with it.

4. A pop up box will appear asking you for the URL to link to.

5. Paste in your affiliate link.

6. You have just created a hyperlink.

This is often the best way to share your affiliate links and you can usually add hyperlinks in your emails as well. If you post images on your blog don't forget to add your affiliate link to those as well.

This will give you more exposure and more possibilities for making money with your affiliate links. Enjoy!