Obtain Solutions

Affiliate Marketing

August 23rd, 2007

As I mentioned before one way to develop an online business, and probably easier to get up and running with, than developing your own products is marketing affiliate products.
Affiliate sales basically boil down to getting paid a commission for selling other people’s products. In the online arena this usually involves advertising a product via an ad link or feature on your website. These links and code are usually provided by the vendors when you set up an agreement with them and join their program. These arrangements are most profitable when you have a high traffic website and target the affiliate links appropriate to the website content.
Details vary between programs in relation to the level of commission, method of payments and tracking arrangements to ensure that you get paid for the sale.
Things can get pretty complicated pretty quickly having to keep tabs on all of these details and a lot of your web real estate can get used up with other people’s ads.
Choosing which affiliate products to market can be based on your website topics, likely good product sellers, high commission levels and just simply believing in the product. I have chosen this method for certain products which to me seemed likely to sell like hot cakes. An example of this is a piece of keyword research software Keyword Elite, for use mainly by online marketers. I was so impressed with this software that I actually dedicated a whole website as a affiliate link to this product, and you can  you can have a look at this site here www.KeywordElite.uk.com.
Another novel and interesting affiliate approach is a project that I am doing at the moment which is called My Affiliate Store. I came across this at a Frank Garon internet marketing seminar in London in July 2007.
This is a subscription based system produced by two American online marketers called Len Thurmond and Bruce Safran.  They provide a vast range of products from a host of vendors in a wide range of product areas already with pre-arranged affiliate agreements. They also provide a number of web templates to allow easy construction of a website that simply needs to be populated with products of your choice. It also incorporates built in search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to help get your site ranked.
The themes and topics of the site or sites is entirely up to you. I have developed one site on this system which is in the area of gardening. This has the advantage of being a big market, but on the other hand is a highly competitive market. How niche you choose to go is again entirely up to you. Popular wisdom is that the more niche the better as the market will be easier to dominate.
A key element in this system is keeping the content original including editing the imported product descriptions. This helps avoid search engine disapproval consequences but does make the process of building the site a bit more laborious. I have worked gradually at it spending about an hour every other day and grown the site steadily, which the search engines should like. 
Traffic to the site is a major key in financial success and the founders recommend steady organic growth with a heavy emphasis on original content. As it becomes established google adsense can also be added to further monetize it. This though, has the potential disadvantage of taking the visitor away from the site so it is a double edged weapon.
Here is the result of my effort so far www.TheGardenLovers.com. I will post some updates as to how things go over the next few weeks and months.
 

John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com

Entry Filed under: affiliate marketing, search engine optimisation, business start up, small businesses, internet marketing, online marketing