Affiliate Marketing
How To Quickly Earn Money Online Without Your Own Product
If you want to make money online but does not have your own product to sell, being an affiliate for a merchant is one of the fastest ways to do it. Affiliate marketing or referral marketing is simply promoting products that you do not own in exchange for a commission. It is the online version of the practice of paying finder's-fees for the introduction of new clients to a business. You don't have to worry about product inventory, payment processing, delivery, and customer support. The merchant will take care of all these things. All you have to do as an affiliate is send traffic to the website of the business you are promoting and wait for your commission check.
There are three different ways of getting paid as an affiliate. One is called Pay-Per-Click (PPC) wherein you are rewarded for simply sending a visitor to the intended merchant's website. The cost per click or visitor is usually small, but if you can deliver thousands of visitors to the merchant's website on a constant basis, this can add up really fast. Since the visitor is not required to perform any action on the merchant's website, you get paid even if your visitor leaves immediately after landing on your merchant's website.
Another way is called Pay-Per-Lead (PPL) wherein you are paid whenever a visitor you delivered to a merchant's website perform some desired action that will enable the merchant to get their name and contact information, turning the visitor into a lead. The desired action may be signing-up to their ezine or requesting for a quotation. The cost per lead is usually higher than those for PPC but you are not paid unless the visitor you delivered performs the intended action.
Finally, there's Pay-Per-Sale (PPS). You are paid only when the visitor you delivered to the merchant's website bought their products or services. You are usually paid a certain percentage of the sale, for example 10%. This means that if your visitor bought $500 worth of products you are paid $50. A variation of pay-per-sale is a fixed commission structure where you are paid a certain amount, for example $20, one-time for your effort of bringing in the sale regardless of the amount sold.
Affiliate marketing is a win-win proposition for both the affiliate and the merchant. On the merchant's viewpoint, he only pays the affiliate when the desired result is achieved whether it is a visitor, a lead, or a sale. Contrast that to a media ad placement where the merchant is required to pay first and has no guarantee that the desired results will be achieved.
While some merchants run their own affiliate program, others use third-party services provider to track the traffic or sales that affiliates generate. Some businesses owe much of their growth and success to affiliate marketing.