So What is Affiliate Marketing?

An affiliate marketer promotes the products or services of an online merchant. The affiliate benefits every time one of the merchant products being promoted by the affiliate is sold. When this happens the affiliate gets a commission payment from the merchant for the sale.

The merchant also benefits as there could be many affiliates all trying to promote and sell their products on the web. This means the merchant will sell many more products and make more money too.

This is affiliate marketing in its simplest form. But your ability to promote merchant products and convince visitors who see your promotions to buy the products are key to making money online in this way.

If you are a good at affiliate marketing you can make a decent income from your online business.

How Hard Can It Be?

Well it can be hard. Be under no illusions here. If you cannot promote well or convert visitors into buyers you are probably going to struggle. You need to learn the right skills to become an affiliate marketer.

However, if you follow the basic principles carefully you should be alright. Just make sure you do your initial research correctly. Also get some basic training if you can before you start. And of course plan what you are going to do before you do it. Not as you do it!

Are there Tools to Help Me?

There are many good affiliate marketing tools available and also some bad ones too. Do research or get advice from a professional on what you need for your business. One or two good tools to help you get started will make a big difference to your progress.

One very useful tool is Affiliate Elite as it will help you find the most profitable products for you to promote from the Clickbank Marketplace. Affiliate Elite also helps you analyze what your competitors are doing so that you can learn from them. If you only buy one affiliate tool to start with this would be the one to get.

Selling Clickbank products is also a great place to start for a new affiliate marketer as Clickbank is easy to join and simple to use. Clickbank literally have thousands of digital products for you to promote in many different niches.

What about Affiliate Datafeeds?

Once you have proved that you can promote and sell products online you may want to consider setting up your own web site store to sell all or a large selection of the products from a single merchant.

In this case the large number of products involved will mean you need to get your product information in bulk. This is done by using an affiliate product datafeed from the merchant you wish to promote. Not all merchants do this, but most of the bigger ones and some smaller ones do.

Software and systems are available to help you do this. Many merchants arrange provision of an affiliate datafeed through the affiliate network company that operates their affiliate program for them. A good affiliate network to join for access to many affiliate datafeed options would be ShareASale.

With a bit of effort you should be able to setup a good looking online affiliate store and with your new promotion and conversion skills your new online business will soon start to make money online for you.