IndexHow to Choose a Good Affiliate NetworkHow to Start Selling as an Affiliate MarketerAmazon Affiliate ProgramFind a Good KeywordQuality ContentBacklinksMistakes to AvoidNot Providing Any Good ValueLink TrackingThe field of affiliate marketing is probably the fastest developing way to make money online. After all, billions of ordinary people use the Internet every day. Affiliate marketing gives you the opportunity to reach potential customers regardless of their location in the world. For this reason, it is not surprising that a huge number of people earn a significant amount of money through advertising and affiliate marketing. Many experienced affiliate marketers end up earning more money in this field than their previous job, and so some of them even quit their regular 9-5 job and go into affiliate marketing full time. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Now that we have a little idea about the capabilities of affiliate marketing, let's dive deeper and discuss what it really encompasses. The simplest way to describe affiliate marketing is when you help another business sell their products online and then get paid a commission for every sale you make to them. If you are promoting a product priced at $200 and the company pays you a 10% commission on the sale, you would earn $10 for each sale. However, how do you report sales? You can start promoting your seller's products on your website, which receives targeted site visitors in the same niche as the product you are advertising. For example, if you have a website that sells cosmetics, you wouldn't advertise health insurance, but you might promote makeup-related products. Every time one of your website visitors clicks on your affiliate link that was provided to you by the seller, you will be paid a commission. How to Choose a Good Affiliate Network One of the biggest mistakes new affiliate marketers make is becoming a member of almost every affiliate network they come across. This is undoubtedly considered a totally incorrect technique. This is due to several reasons. First and foremost, being an affiliate marketer is a feat that requires a lot of awareness. So, if you try to work with many affiliate networks at the same time, it is likely that none of your ventures will go as planned, and as a result, none of them may be very successful. Secondly, focusing on one or a few products will undoubtedly allow you to research them thoroughly before you start promoting them. This method also helps you refine your strategies, making necessary changes and thus making your marketing much more powerful. An effective approach will produce better results and reward you for your efforts and time. Thirdly, make sure you do some research on the affiliate network as there are some networks that will only pay you once a month and may not work for you or worse, may not pay you at all. I'm not saying this to discourage you from being an affiliate marketer, but instead I want you to be able to find the correct network and products to market and earn your commission. There are affiliate networks that resort to “shaving”, a very common exercise in affiliate marketing where the networks show a discounted number of sales compared to the one you refer, consequently paying you drastically lower commissions. Therefore, to avoid being a victim of this action, I suggest you join well-known affiliate networks andreliable. In any case, the only way to be successful with a network is if you feel comfortable with it and the products you are promoting. How to Start Selling as an Affiliate Marketer Getting straight to the point, some affiliate marketers use social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more, to do associate marketing, others decide to develop their own site. Having your own site is a great approach to affiliate marketing because it gives you control over everything. So from now on we will focus on affiliate marketing using your site. The first thing matters, as mentioned above, you will want to find an affiliate network that you feel comfortable with. This includes being knowledgeable about the products you are promoting so you don't sell products you know nothing about. Amazon Affiliate Program That being said, many marketers consider the Amazon affiliate marketing program to be one of the best. It is perhaps the most reliable network and has a large inventory of products to promote and earn your commissions. This gives you the ability to promote almost any product on the market or choose a niche with low competition and you could be earning commissions in less than a week. Finding a Good Keyword This is considered one of the most difficult parts of marketing. You simply can't blindly choose a keyword and expect to start making sales quickly. One of the reasons many affiliate marketers fail is due to using the wrong keyword. If you are new to affiliate marketing, you will want keywords with low competition. Start your keyword research by finding long-tail keywords with low search volume, which means a lot less money, but not really with those that have great competition. You can test the top 10 and 20 results and do some studies to find out if they might outperform them. Examine the keywords used by your competitors to determine if they are using identical keyword phrases that you are trying to target. If they are, and they have a very authoritative website in that niche, I would advise you to stay away from that niche and go for a brand new, less competitive site. Quality Content This is significant. If you think you are making a lot of money by creating items that do not help visitors in any way, you are very wrong. Although your goal is to earn money by referring visitors to the offer, you will have to offer them something important. By simply posting your hyperlinks along with boring sales pitches like “this is a wonderful solution, buy this product via my personal hyperlink and get a discount”, and so on, you could only be headed for disaster. If you decide to opt in to Amazon affiliate program, you could write an informative article on your home page and include your primary keywords and some secondary keywords throughout the article. You could have the buying guide and write your short opinion about each product that you are marketing. Remember that the higher the cost of the product you market, the higher the commission. Backlinks We realize that this is probably the most complicated method to achieve unless you are an SEO guru and posting guest posts on these sites is a very well-known means of getting great backlinks. These great backlinks, along with guest posts on related sites in your niche, will get you ranked on the first page of search engines as long as your chosen keyword. has very low competition. However, even when your site doesn't reach the first page, as long as you've posted on a number of.