• Salesperson gets to earn a basic salary as well, where an affiliate does not
• Most salespersons have to sell physically, meeting customers face to face – most affiliates work things out online

Any affiliates you know who are making lots of money, they are all pure hard work.

All you have to do is to provide a banner or text link of the merchant on your website. When a surfer clicks on that banner or text link, and makes a purchase at the merchant’s website, you earn a commission.

When it comes to commissions, you can promote both physical products and digital products. However you usually get fairly low commission rates selling physical products, because of its cost of producing one extra copy. For digital product, most of them cost nothing to produce an extra copy, hence, the merchants of digital products can often at least 50% commission rate to affiliates. Some even give 75% commission! Hence it is advisable to promote digital products or both, work as complements.

• no admin work
• you don’t have to create your own product
• it gives you ideas of which market to serve
• earn money simply by promoting
• cost you nothing to join
• low risk
• good for developing your Internet marketing skills

One of the best way to promote an affiliate product is to pre-sell and not to sell. Why? Because the merchant’s side will have its own sale effort and all you have to do is to take any aspect of the product and promote its goodness, of how this product can help the buyer to solve her problem.

Before you start, maybe you can do some research based on your own passion / interests. This will help you to en joy along the process, as you learn. When you do research or work on things you are passionate about, you won’t feel it like a work, but a pleasure doing it.

You need to find out what market you can serve. For example, if you passion is traveling then do your research based on this field. Bear in mind that you do not have to serve the whole travel market. A single niche market will do. A niche market is simply a market within the market.

Let’s see. Travel is a huge market and I am sure there are hundreds of thousands of sub markets within this big market itself, that you can serve. Maybe you can target on a group who is planning a trip to Tokyo, Japan. Hence you may get a merchant that sells ebook like “A Traveler’s Guide to Tokyo Japan”. I assure you if you target this ebook to the right niche market, it will sell like hot cakes. If the ebook is about USD$47 and the merchant is paying you 75% commission, you earn USD$35.25! You’ll be happy even if you get paid for 50% commission.

Affiliate marketing works, provided you are using the right strategy.  Of course it will be difficult when you are just starting out, but the time, money and effort you invest in it, you will reap them with great joy on due time.

With Love,

Clement Chee