By Scott H. Taylor
1 1 A long time ago (in my Father's time) companies hired employees and kept
them. They treated them like valuable assets to the company, and regardless of
hard times the company went through, the employees always came first. In
today's throw-away society, employees have become the first to go. If the CEO's
paycheck is in jeopardy, or the stockholders value was going down, they let
people go. It's unusual to work for more than 5 years without going through
some kind of layoff or '.
Because of this, and the all-around economic uncertainty of today's
world, a lot of people are getting involved in online career to help supplement
their compensation or to find a way to get out of a dead-end job that they do
not like doing. But where do you start? One of the best places to start is by
becoming an affiliate marketer. Affiliate marketing is relatively quick and
easy to start and requires very little, or no investment, in order to start
making ready money online.
With an online career you can contact just about anybody with an
Internet connection which means you have an extremely wide marketing area at
your convenience. By being an affiliate marketer you do not have to create your
own products or services in order to get started making hard cash online. The
owners, or merchants as they are sometimes called, give you the rights to
market their products for free in most cases.
Affiliate marketing has become one of the most popular methods for
making ready money online today because the products or services have already
been created for you. All that is needed is to promote, or advertise them in
order to make sells and earn sales commissions which are pre-determined by the
owner of the product or service that you will be marketing.
In a typical affiliate marketing set up the merchant provides his or her
affiliates with the tools and resources required to sell his product or
service. The affiliates use these resources, such as banners, graphics, or text
advertising to post on their websites, or to put in blogs. They can also be
sent out in emails to create sales of the product or service that they are promoting.
The affiliate then gets a percentage of the total price of the product when a
sale is made, which is usually 25% to 75% of the total price of the product.
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| Image courtesy of KROMKRATHOG at FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
You can also use an alternative method and join what is called an
affiliate network. An affiliate network is a career that hosts a variety of
affiliate programs for online merchants at one web site location. Most
affiliate networks are free and easy to join and provide a full range of
products for you to promote. Some of the most popular affiliate networks are:
Commission Junction, Clickbank, Linkshare, Cash Engines, and VIP Profits. To
find a whole list of popular affiliate networks just go and do a search on
affiliate networks or go to the site listed here:
http://www.webaffiliatesdirectory.com.
Affiliate marketing is one of the most rewarding careers that anyone could
have. Someone can literally start on a shoestring budget and work into a
consistent and very decent salary within a relatively short period of time.
Many people make thousands of dollars each month just selling products from the
Clickbank network. Clickbank is actually a great place to start as an affiliate
marketer because they have thousands of products to choose from to market and a
very good support system in place. It is also very easy to sign up and join
Clickbank. Here is their link: http://www.clickbank.com
Becoming a successful affiliate will not be all that easy though because
there is quite a lot of competition online. One of the best ways to become
successful in affiliate marketing does require additional knowledge and effort
and that you create a good content based website. You can have this created for
you or you can do your own research and learn how to do it yourself. But, it is
important to have a good content based web site that you can imbed links to the
products you are marketing within the content on your site. The products you
promote should be relevant to the content on your site which will take some
initial planning and consideration.
Using this approach you would be able to seed, or insert, several
products that you are promoting into the content of your site and then just
advertise that one web site. You can start off with just one site and then
build another site and do this over and over again over time. Before long you
will have created a multitude of sites that promote many different products or
services and that are linked to one another, which creates your own network of
inter-related sales sites. This could turn out to be extremely profitable for
you over a period of time.
If you plan you career properly you would probably want to promote
products or services that offer two-tier affiliate marketing programs. With
two-tier affiliate marketing programs you will not only get paid for your
direct sales, but you will also be paid a percentage commission for the sales
that your direct sales members make. This can be a very powerful and profitable
plan for your company and it creates what is called "residual
revenue."
Residual compensation is where each and every one of us should be
aiming. Residual revenue is where you earn hard cash from ongoing sales
regardless of how much you work. Granted, you'll have to continue to bring in
new customers as old ones will inevitably drop off, but most will stay.
One of the most important parts of your company plan should include
residual net profit. These residual profits programs will allow you to earn
multiple commissions each month from just one sale instead of having to sell
the same products over and over again to new people. Some of the most
successful Internet marketers recommend concentrating at least 75% of your time
and efforts on residual income programs such as monthly subscription membership
sites. These types of businesses bring you monthly income automatically with
just one sale as long as the customer continues their active membership each
month. When looking into affiliate programs, think about residual profits
products or services. This is one of the most beneficial methods of earning
affiliate commissions on an ongoing basis. It gets tedious selling individual
products over and over again. However, a combination of both approaches should
be implemented as many good products are a one-time sale. And the email lists
you'll get from those one-time sale can easily turn into residual total
compensation if you market your subscription service to those people.
Article Source: EzineArticles expert: Scott H. Taylor
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