Affiliate marketing is a way of making money online by promoting someone else’s products.
As an affiliate, you’re essentially a commission salesperson for the products you’re promoting: You earn a commission for every paying customer you send to the merchant selling the product.
It’s kind of like being a real estate agent: You don’t own the home you’re promoting, but you get a nice commission for promoting it and finding the right buyer.
Here are the 4 reasons that make Affiliate Marketing stand at the top
1. It’s easy to get started
As an affiliate, you don’t have to create the products you’re promoting. You just promote something that already exists. This is a lot easier than building and selling you’re own physical or digital product:
- You don’t have to spend time and money on building the product
- You don’t have to buy stock to sell or store it anywhere
- You don’t need to figure out how to run a shopping cart
- You don’t have to handle customer support
You basically get many of the benefits of having your own product, without all the annoying parts. And the best thing is… you can even end up earning MORE than the product owner for each sale! Commissions of 70% are quite common.
2. It’s easy to grow
One of the best ways to make more money is to add new products to your lineup. When you’re selling your own products, it can take months to develop a new product. But as an affiliate, it’s as easy as putting up a new advertisement or writing a few paragraphs talking about the new product.
3. No special skills are required
You don’t need any particular skills or experience to get started as an affiliate. Most affiliates start out with no knowledge and just learn as they go. Of course, having a background in web design, writing, graphic design or marketing doesn’t hurt, but it’s not necessary. Some of the best affiliates we’ve seen started completely from scratch.
Here are the things you actually DO really need to succeed:
- Basic computer skills and an internet connection.
- Determination and perseverance.
- A willingness to learn new things.
- Patience: It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme!
4. Low, Low start-up costs
One of the biggest benefits of affiliate marketing is that you don’t need to invest a lot of money to get started.
Imagine buying a brick-and-mortar business: You’d probably spend tens of thousands of dollars on it before you’ll make a single cent!
But for a bare-bones affiliate website, your initial costs will be tiny: Just $10/year for a domain name, and around $50/year for web hosting.
You can do pretty much everything yourself without spending any more, but a lot of affiliates choose to hire people to do things like write articles, design graphics, etc. It can often be a good investment to stop yourself from getting stuck on things you’re not good at.
So what are the steps involved in building your own money-making affiliate website? Which we are going to show you in the next article.