Is Affiliate Marketing Easy?
I often get asked how easy it is to get started in affiliate marketing and will it make money.
The answer is yes and no.
Yes – you can get started easily and No – if you make it complicated in the beginning you could get lost.
Yes – you can make money and No – if you don’t follow some basic guidelines you may lose out.
Okay, I guess that is even more confusing but lets break it down a bit more.
When I first started with affiliate marketing, I got carried away with the excitement of it all and spent weeks signing up to promote lots of affiliate products. I should have settled on one or two and then gradually developed my portfolio.
When you sign up as an affiliate, you are entering an agreement to promote a companies product. If you don’t do that in a reasonable amount of time, you could find they get fed up and decide not to let you promote their products.
I felt so disappointed when this happened to me. I took it as a personal insult. I was wrong and now I am keen to show people how they can best build up a good working relationship with their chosen affiliate partners.
If you have a website and feel that adding some complementing services to it might enhance your visitors experience, then just take it slowly and add a couple of products to the site. Use email to get your existing customers to revisit your site, maybe if the affiliate deal allows it – use adwords. Then sit back for a little while and watch what happens. Monitor your click throughs and purchases. See if one ad works better than another.
You’ll soon see what works for your visitors and what doesn’t.
Next thing to remember is that you need to adhere to the rules of the affiliate company. if you don’t you could be losing hard earned cash. They only pay if the person you send to their site actually fits the criteria you have agreed to.
Ensure all links work effectively – check regularly as they can break. This not only loses potential income but also frustrates the person clicking on the link. They may get fed up that your links don’t work and use another site.
One last thing for today – cloak you links as well as you can. I have written some articles on hubpages.com about this.
