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How Does Internet Marketing Really Work?

You should now know that there are 10,000’s of different companies out there looking to pay people like you in exchange for driving sales or leads to their web pages. These companies are often referred to as “merchants”, whereas the people promoting their products are referred to as “affiliates”. This is more commonly known as Affiliate Marketing, and is a sub-category of Internet marketing. Many Merchants are also Affiliates of other companies,but own a product or service (Like us!).

Here is a quick explanation of what an Affilliate Program is,

“An affiliate program is a system whereby you advertise another vendor’s products and services; in return you are compensated or rewarded for each sale that you broker. Many internet marketers make their living pushing different affiliate programs.

Lots of companies are looking for agents to help them sell their products,”

There are many opportunities to create your own products/services and become a merchant, but this will be discussed in later blogs. While you get started, it is ALWAYS recommended to begin as an Affiliate.

there are a number of ways you can make money online as an Internet marketer. There are many different opportunities, and it is not refined to just one technique. I will touch on these techniques during this blog, but I want to make one thing clear first. You do not need to know everything to succeed. You can implement just one technique and become highly successful online!

There are billions of dollars being spent online every year, and it is growing by double digits. What does this mean to you? Well, for starters, a large chunk of online spending goes to Internet marketers (you). Anyone can succeed online and it really comes down to whether or not you are dedicated to learning how to become an Internet marketer.You do not need any experience in marketing or on the web. I have helped members from all parts of the world create full-time incomes online without any first-hand experience on the Internet and Id like to help you too.

So what separates a successful affiliate from someone who isn’t? Ultimately YOU are the deciding factor. Treat your Internet marketing business as though it is a real business (which it is). The only difference being that you can start a business within any industry and there is very little in the way of overhead costs.

Before I continue, here is a really good resource that you should check out that will help you clearly understand the concepts behind Internet marketing and which affilliate programs can make you money online:

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Top Affiliate Networks

There are all kinds of suggestions on how to get started in making sales online as an Internet marketer, but I always like to start off by finding a product to sell. The entire process of making a sale stems from the techniques you use after you’ve found a product to promote.

When you are looking for products to promote you should start by browsing through some of the larger Affiliate Networks. These networks are composed of 1000’s of companies that host their affiliate program through the network. This means that you can go to a single location and get access to many affiliate programs. Nearly all successful Internet marketers have used affiliate networks at one time or another and most probably still do. The following networks are where you will find the BEST products to promote online.

Clickbank.com
Linkshare.com
CJ.com
Shareasale.com
Performics.com

These networks are great places to find a product to match the research that you have done. You’ll find that there are literally tens of thousands of products that are readily available for you to promote.

There is some terminology that you need to be familiar with when using these networks. Often times the payment structures of affiliate programs will vary from company to company. The main ones are Pay-Per-Sale (percentage of flat fee), Pay-Per-Lead, and Pay-Per-Click.

Pay-Per-Sale is the most common payment structure and is used within all networks. Basically, pay-per-sale is just like it sounds. You earn commissions based on “sales” that you can drive to merchant websites. These commissions will either be paid as a percentage of the overall sale or as a flat-fee. Commission percentages range from 1% – 90%, and up to $500 for the flat-fee structure (depending on the program). This can easily amount to huge commissions!

Pay-Per-Lead is less common, but is still used by many different networks. A lead is an action that takes place and is pre-defined by the merchant. For example, a lead could be a free trial sign-up or a completed form application. These will vary based on the company.

Pay-Per-Click as a payment structure is not very common these days as companies are very aware that click-fraud does exist, and many affiliates were taking advantage of this structure through outsourced click-farms. It is exactly how it sounds…you get paid for every click that you send to the merchant company’s website. Again, this structure is VERY rare and you will barely come across a company willing to pay you for every click you send them.

One of the main Affiliate networks that marketers use because of its simplicity is Clickbank. Clickbank has the largest network of digital info products, and you will find everything from dog training manuals, to e-books on how to make money online. I have dedicated an entire resource to this network:

How Affiliate Links Work

One thing that is often blurry to new marketers is how affiliate links really work, and the different types of linking strategies that we can implement as affiliates. Affiliate links are unique links that are given to you when you sign-up to a particular affiliate program or affiliate network. These links are unique to you, allowing companies to track your performance automatically within their affiliate systems.

For example, here is my affiliate link for an affilliate program called Wealthy Affiliate which I am a member of:

my Affiliate Link ==> http://www.wealthyaffiliate.com?a_aid=6ajLbyb7

Independent Affiliate Programs

As an affiliate, you are not bound to using Affiliate Networks only. Many companies serve their affiliate programs “in-house”, meaning that they do not have a 3rd party company (such as Clickbank or CJ.com) managing their program.

The common question I get regarding independent affiliate programs is “Are they safe to use?” Absolutely, and if you did not realize this already, there are many programs that do this Wealthy Affilliate”WA” an affiliate program which is operated in-house, this program is considered an Independent affiliate program.

Here is how you can go about finding affiliate programs within any industry using Google, or Yahoo:

1. Do a search for “industry_name + affiliate program”
2. Your search results will reveal related affiliate programs to the “industry_name” that you typed in
3. Go through the affiliate programs and sign-up to the ones that best suit you and your website promotions

You are really cutting yourself short if you do not take advantage of a combination of affiliate networks and independent affiliate programs.

Different Types of Marketing – Choose Your Path

There are many different techniques that you can use to make money online as an Internet marketer. Some of these techniques are 100% free to implement, while others will require some form of budget. There are positives and negatives to free and paid Internet marketing tactics,

here is some ideas on how you can start Internet marketing with NO money, and how you can build your business from the ground up using Free Marketing Techniques

Article Marketing

Article Marketing is probably the most common free marketing technique that people are taking advantage of at the current time, as it is very easy to get started as an Article Marketer. If you are just starting out online with a limited budget, then I highly suggest that you consider Article marketing as one of your first Internet marketing ventures.

So what is Article Marketing? Well, it basically requires you as the “article marketer” to write articles about various topics. This can be almost anything, but there are certain keywords that you are going to want to focus on within your articles with the intention on having your article listed in the search engines naturally.

When you have an article naturally (organically) listed in Google, Yahoo, MSN, or any other search engine, you will be able to drive traffic to your affiliate links for FREE.

There are specific techniques you can use when writing articles, and places where you should submit them, but Im not going to go into too much more depth here because I have dedicated an entire resource to article marketing.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the term that is used to describe the idea of optimizing your websites so that they are optimized for search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN.

If a website is optimized properly, it will be able to obtain natural listings within the search results (the results down the middle of the screen when you do a search) under specific keywords that the site is optimized for.

There are many different factors that contribute to a site being optimized, and this is based on the specific Search Engine algorithms.there are lots of tutorials that you could read over in regards to Search Engine Optimization.

This is a technique that you should implement with all of your websites, but it is definitely not as easy as some of the other techniques that I have or will be describing.

SEO is great because you can obtain free traffic (if you can manage to get into the search results), but it is also a very volatile Internet marketing strategy because your entire campaigns are at the mercy of the Search Engines.

If they make a shift in their algorithm, your search results (and your profits) could easily disappear overnight.

Forum Marketing

Many of you are probably familiar with forums, but are yet to realize the potential for profits that can be earned through simple “signature” lines.

There are several different ways to generate income through forums and I will explain these methods for you. Please make sure that you do not confuse forum marketing with forum spamming…if you think you can plug forums with your affiliate links without offering value, you are a spammer (this is not marketing).

As with any other method of marketing you will become more successful if you offer your audience value. Whether you are talking about making money or child behavior problems, there is potential to make money within a forum environment if you are tactful and tasteful with forum posts and your marketing tactics.

Paid Marketing Techniques (Pay-Per-Click)

PPC (Pay-per-click) Advertising is the most common form of paid marketing and is the fastest, most reliable marketing technique you can use to see “consistent” results. Rather than elaborating on PPC advertising within this blog, I would like you to take a look at this information I have dedicated to PPC marketing below.

What do You Choose? Free or Paid?

Well, this is completely up to you, but it is definitely recommended that you at the very least become familiar with writing articles as this is always a great “free” technique that you will be able to fall back on if your initial PPC ventures go wron. My recommendation is that you have an understanding of both Article, and PPC marketing. The two are often closely related and you can support a successful article marketing campaign into a PPC one and vice versa.

PPC marketing definitely achieves quicker results as your ads can be shown almost instantly with Google or Yahoo and they will show up under the keywords that you specify. You can also hyper target your audiences and certain geographic regions, something that is not easily achievable with free techniques. PPC marketing does cost money and although it is fairly easy to implement there is a downside. If you start PPC marketing without taking advantage of the learning resources that are available to you at Wealthy Affiliate, you could easily end up losing money.

The great part about article marketing and other free marketing techniques is that they are 100% free and you can “learn by doing” without having to risk your own money.

While article marketing, you will learn some of the most important aspects of Internet marketing including copywriting, creating sales pages, affiliate linking, researching industries, and how to understand your target audiences.

I suggest that if you are on a budget or do not feel comfortable with doing PPC marketing just yet, that you work on implementing free techniques like article marketing until you get a better feel for how PPC works.

Here is a great place to start your article marketing campaign and to begin building your backlinks

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Tags: How to make money online?, make money online as a newbie

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 7:04 am and is filed under Product Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.