First and foremost it is a business and should be treated as such.
Wikipedia says it is a type of performance based marketing in which a business rewards one(the affiliate) for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.
Put more simply the affiliate builds a business by promoting other people’s(and their own) products and services and getting paid a commission when a sale is fulfilled.
There are literally thousands of so called programs available on the internet to get one involved as an affiliate marketer. The problem is that many of them are scams and you have to be careful that you don’t get duped into spending money on schemes which don’t actually work.
How does it work?
Basically you set up what is called a “link”on your blog or website. This is your personal link which links to a product or service. When someone clicks on that link and then subsequently buys that product or service then you earn a commission on that sale. Commissions can vary from 4% to even as high as 7%.
Amazon has an affiliate marketing program which pays from 4% to 6%. For example you put a link to a product from Amazon on your website and someone uses that link to get to Amazon, it doesn’t matter what that person buys from Amazon you will get a commission.
Some companies have their own affiliate programs while others use what is called an affiliate network i.e. a third party to run their programs for them.
Beware of scams
I once received a video link by e-mail and decided to watch it.
You see the host drive up to this very expensive home in a Ferrari, which makes me suspicious from the start. He then proceeds to tell you the background to his very special code which he has developed.
He then explained that as a special favour he was going to give me the code absolutely free!!
It went on for about 45 minutes during which time the host demonstrated his ‘special code’ which would generate over $1,000 per hour just by pressing 5 keys on your computer. He met one person in a bar and showed him that by just pressing 5 keys on his computer it would be set up. During the time it took the two of them to drink a beer this person had made He repeated many times that the code was absolutely 100% free. Towards the end of the video he explained that in order to get this code I neede to pay $99. He then went on to justify this by saying that $99 was a very small amount. So I stopped the video and closed the page. Bit back came the video but this time with the price reduced to $47. He explained that because there was a money back guarantee that made it free.
So, what is not a scam?
Wealthy Affiliate is a very comprehensive website which I am certain contains all you need to do to succeed in affiliate marketing.
It is free to join and this gets you the fundamentals like explaining how it works and how to build a website. There is a video explaining how to build a website in 30 seconds!
However in order to progress you have to pay to become a Premium member and this gives you access to everything. One might think at $47 per month this is a bit on the expensive side, however when you consider what you get for it it is good value.
It is a very structured program with the training set into groups of lessons.
For example the basic start is a group of five modules each containing ten lessons. Each lesson contains videos and script and a task list at the end. realistically each lesson takes about a day to complete.
Also after each lesson you are encouraged to enter a discussion on it. You can use the discussion platform to ask questions.
The founders/owners of Wealthy Affiliate are Kyle and Carson and they actively encourage this discussion part of the program. This means that when you ask a question it is answered by another Wealthy affiliate member. So in effect it is all one big team working together and helping each other.
