Affiliate Marketing What Is It And Why Use It?

Affiliate Marketing is having Affiliates do your Marketing for you. What I mean by Affiliate is someone who tells people about your product/service and you pay them for a desired response, such as a purchase.

Affiliate Marketing is one of the best ways to get the word out about your product/service.

The best way to pay Affiliates is pay per sale. This means that you only have to pay your Affiliates when they actually make a sale. This reduces your advertising costs dramatically. your Affiliates take on all the risks so you don't have to worry about wasting your money on advertising which may not produce any results.

Using Affiliate is a very cheap way to advertise, however it is very effective. The software required to start up your own Affiliate program can cost only about $50 per month.

Then after that just wait for people to start promoting your product/service for you.

Please remember that 5% of your Affiliates will do 95% of the selling. What I mean by this is that most of your Affiliates will just sit there and do nothing. This can be countered if you teach them what to do, exactly how to do it and providing everything for them so they have to do as little work as possible.

To find out about teaching your Affiliates please see the "How To Super Charge Your Affiliates" article

You don't have to use this form of advertising just to sell your product or service. You can also use it to grow your opt-in mailing list. This is discussed in another article.

How Much Should You Pay Your Affiliates

How much you pay your Affiliates really depends on how much your product/service costs, its profit margin, how much you're willing to give up and what action you want to take place.

Lets say that your product is priced at $100. Lets also assume that it cost you $10 to make it. This leaves you with $90 profit.

How much of this do you want to give away to the person that made this sale possible?

Personally, I believe that you should give a rather high percentage of the profits back to the affiliate (Depending on how many sales they regularly generate), because without them, you wouldn't have made that particular sale at all, so reward them for it.

A fairly decent reward is about 50% of the revenue generated. Your product is priced at $100 so a $50 commission is quite generous. It really depends on your other costs (such as a mortgage) you have, which would help decide on a fair commission to both you and the Affiliate.

Another factor which plays a part is how much additional advertising you do, such as pay per click. For example, if you rely solely on your Affiliates to Market for you, then you may want to reduce the commission you pay to them to help you survive. However, you may want to pay them more, to encourage them to send more sales you way. It really is a judgment call.

On the other hand, if you advertise in other ways effectively, then you can afford to pay higher commissions, because you're not putting all your eggs in one basket.

In the end it's all down to how greedy or generous you are. The best advice I can give you is to pay the affiliate what you think he/she deserves. Hopefully that way everyone is happy and earning their fair share.

That is the key to a successful affiliate program.

By Stephen Warren, the creator of http://www.marketershandbook.com, the completely FREE guide to marketing online, with useful articles and links.

Affiliate marketing offers earning opportunities, making it as one of the fastest growing industry in the World Wide Web today. It produces billions of dollars worth of income yearly. That is why many people are getting involved in it.

However, most of them are just getting into the jive of earning money without a concrete plan. You will have no strategies to be implemented, no guidelines to be followed.

In case that you are planning to get yourself involved in affiliate marketing, bear in your mind that it is a serious work. Though it is one of the easier ways of earning additional income, it still requires effort, perseverance, and a clear plan of action from your starting point up to the finish line.

An affiliate site that I highly recommend, that trains you and helps you get a clear plan of action is SITE BUILD IT (SBI). Why?

Here's why.. Many major universities (ex., University of Arizona), and colleges and even MBA programs include SBI! in their curriculum. No other online busineness building program has gained acceptance by the educational sector like SBI!

In addition to universities, stellar companies such as Clickbank and AdBrite recommend SBI! to their hundreds of thousands of affiliates and publishers. The reason is simple. SBI! makes them more effective online.

Only SBI! has garnered this type of support. Because only Site Build It! actually builds online success.

I speak from experience because I'm an owner of an SBI site myself and I can't believe how profitable this site can be. I love the traffic that I get from SBI. Everyone knows that traffic is the lifeblood of any online business. Only Site Build It! (SBI!) delivers the holy grail, traffic. Targeted traffic. Motivated, interested, warm, willing-to-buy visitors. That spells SUCCESS!!!