If you’re brand new to the concept of making money online, you may be wondering just exactly what “internet marketing ” and “affiliate marketing” are and how they work.

Internet Marketing Explained

While “internet marketing” can take different forms depending on the particular context or industry, the fundamental premise of internet marketing is the same as traditional offline marketing – it involves the matching of consumers with products.  If you have your own product, then your internet marketing efforts would involve driving targeted traffic to your web site in order to sell your product.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

“Affiliate Marketing” is a sub-category of internet marketing.  As an affiliate marketer you promote someone else’s products rather than your own.  Most people don’t have their own product to sell (especially when starting out) and therefore, affiliate marketing  accounts for the lion’s share of  work from home online businesses.  Most work from home affiliate marketing involves the promotion of downloadable products such as Ebooks, audio and video programs and software.  The topics for these products  include just about everything from  “how to cure bad breath” to “how to become an internet millionaire “.

As an affiliate marketer, you do one of two things – either you drive traffic directly to a vendor’s website to purchase a product OR you create your own website to promote the vendor’s products and drive traffic through your own site.    And there are literally tens of thousands of vendors hungry for people like you to promote their products in exchange for a commission on each sale (usually ranging from 50 to 75%!).  Why?  Because it’s much more efficient for a vendor to have an army of affiliates doing the bulk of their marketing for them rather than trying to do it all in-house.   As a vendor, having a thousand affiliates working for you gives you the ability to reach a LOT more potential customers than you would be able to on your own.

How are Affiliate Sales Tracked?

When you sign up as an affiliate to promote a product, you are given a unique “affiliate link” which you will then use to send visitors to the vendor’s web page.  This link is unique and identifies you as the person who referred the visitor.  If the visitor then makes a purchase, you earn your commission.  These affiliate programs include web based tracking software that allow you to log in and see how many visitors you have referred, how many sales have been made and what your commissions are.

There  many different techniques that you can use as an affiliate marketer to make money online.  However, you don’t need to master or even know all of them in order to get started and be successful.   In fact, when starting out, you’ll be better off focusing on one or two affiliate marketing techniques rather than diversifying your efforts too much, particularly if you have work or family obligations and  a limited amount of time to devote.  Becoming a specialist in one or two areas will result in a much better income than becoming a generalist in all facets of affiliate marketing.

There has never been a better time to get involved in affiliate marketing.  The sale of online information products is growing at such a rapid rate that there aren’t enough affiliate marketers to keep up with demand.   Although results obviously vary, with the right educational resources and some hard work, it is not unrealistic for you to expect an income of $100,000 + per year.  In fact, it’s not unusual for an experienced affiliate marketer to earn $1000 per day!

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