Living Frugal
Affiliate Marketing
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is performance based marketing where a business rewards their affiliates for each visitor or customer brought to them by the affiliate's marketing efforts. It's a great way to make money from a website. It's how most people make money with the internet. Think of it as a billboard on your property - your website.
There are 4 players: the merchant, the network that has offers for the affiliates to choose, the publisher which is you if you are the publisher and the customer who clicks on the ad or buys a product from the merchant from your affiliate link on your website.
How do I make money with Affiliate Marketing?
You have your own website with great content where visitors come to visit and learn more about a topic in which they are searching. You publish ads from marketers on your site. If a visitor to your site clicks on an ad or buys a product from the marketer after the source is the traffic is from your site, you get a commission.
You basically share the revenue with an online merchant. You'll place the advertisements on your website to sell the merchant's product or to send potential customers to their site.
There are several different ways to earn money. You can earn money from the merchant with pay per click, pay per sale or pay per lead. We'll talk more about those and how they work in another article.
If you're a website owner looking to earn extra money without actually having to do anything, affiliate marketing may be your ticket. There's no selling or promotion tasks of any sort. You place the merchant ads on your website and wait for the money to roll in.
Don't worry, the merchant also reaps plenty of benefits. By partnering up with website owners, the merchant attracts consumers and from all over the Internet. The merchant doesn't have to pay unless results are achieved. The more affiliates a merchant has, the more advertising they can do for their products or services.
Before you decide to become an affiliate, make sure you do your homework and research the merchant prior to agreeing. Make sure you read their terms and conditions very carefully as you don't want to provide advertising to a merchant that refuses to pay you the agreed upon commissions or goes out of business without informing you. It's uncommon for this to happen but it never hurts to check out a merchant that you've agreed to partner with.
