Basics of Affiliate Marketing - Part 2

In the previous post we talked about what affiliate marketing is and the benefits of being an affiliate for someone else. In part 2 of the basics of affiliate marketing, we will discuss great ways to drive traffic to sites using your affiliate link and make more money online.

Tell people you know
This is a great way to get started with affiliate marketing and start making a little bit of money. Find products and websites that allow affiliates that people you know would be interested in. Tell them about the products and give them your link, and if they buy it you will earn money. This is limited to the amount of people you know, though, so you may want to branch out to other options eventually.

Search Engines
How many people a day do you think use search engines? People are always searching for stuff, coming across websites at the top results of the search engines. They either click ads or sometimes buy stuff based on recommendations on these websites. Learning how to get your site (or the site you are an affiliate for) to the top of the search engines is called "search engine optimization." Once your site is to the top of the search engines for keywords that people search for on a regular basis, then you'll have tons of free traffic coming to the site.

Basics of Affiliate Marketing - Part 1

Making money as an affiliate for someone else is a fantastic way to make money. Being an affiliate means you get paid a commission every time someone does something with another person's product (enters their e-mail, signs up for a free report, but usually purchasing the product). If you are an affiliate for Amazon, you get paid every time someone buys something from Amazon after arriving at Amazon from your link.

Benefits of Being an Affiliate
There are many benefits to being an affiliate for someone else:

• Getting paid on a regular basis.
• Not having to deal with customers.
• Not having to store any products.
• Not having to ship any products.
• Not having to do accounting (aside from cashing your affiliate checks).

And those are just the tip of the iceberg. In the next post, I will discuss ways to promote affiliate products to help you to earn money online.

Earn Money with Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing

When you search Google, you are often trying to find something, whether it be an answer to a question, a product review, or whatever. You can see the normal search results, but at the top, and along the side you see advertisements. They are advertisements from businesses. They pay only if you click on the ad. This is called Pay-Per-Click marketing/advertising (PPC).

If you already have a product on a website that converts well, then you may want to look into PPC. If you can earn more money than it costs to get people to your website using Google ads where you pay per click, then you may want to use that as a method of advertising.

Be sure to learn the ropes though, because many new people in PPC lose a lot of money fast. The top advertisements are based on an auction system, where the highest bidder is #1, but they will also pay more.

Make Money Online Filling Out Surveys

Many people want to know if they can really make money online by filling out surveys. It is possible, but there are some things to look out for. The first thing to look out for is people charging you for a list of places to fill out surveys and get paid for doing so. They found these lists by simply searching Google, which you can do too. Don't pay someone else for the list, because most of the times the lists will be outdated, and you'll just be paying for garbage. That's how those people make money online, by scamming innocent people.

Make sure you investigate a company before paying them money. You shouldn't have to pay money to fill out surveys. Type in "company name reviews" in Google, and you'll see what other people have said about the company you find, whether or not they are a scam.