Looking for legitimate work you can do at home? AllaboutAffiliates.com is your guide to finding just that. All you need to become an affiliate is a computer, an Internet connection, and a desire to earn money. The rest is just details, and we'll show you the step-by-step on turning those details into a monthly check.
Affiliate marketing is the ultimate in legitimate work at home business opportunities. Unlike the Spam emails you get offering the opportunity to make 50 thousand dollars a month, true affiliate marketing is simply traditional marketing work. Like anything, what you earn depends on how much work you put into it. An affiliate sends a customer to a merchant and is paid a percentage of the sales that customer generates. The concept is simple, but powerful. All of a sudden you can sell millions of branded products or attract customers to thousands of high profile websites and be paid for it, all without running your own business, having your own inventory and product, having to pay staff, having to take orders and payments, or having to ship merchandise. None of this is your problem, you simply direct the customer and pick up your check.
Of course it's legitimate, it's just marketing. Avoiding a scam becomes infinitely easier when you understand how people are actually making money on the Internet, which we can explain to you. Yes there are a million scams in the world all under the heading of 'work at home opportunities', but that's not what AllaboutAffiliates.com is all about. We're simply here to show you what it means to be an Internet based affiliate, the steps it takes to become one, and what to look for in choosing a program for yourself.
Broadly speaking there are six methods, legitimate or not, of promoting a web site on the Internet:
Search Engine Optimization
Banner advertising - pay-per-click, pay per impression, pay per performance
Opt-in (subscription) e-mail lists
Ezines, article submission sites, and Directories
Pay Per Click search engines / banner buys
Unsolicited e-mail (spam)
Search engines provide the purest stream of traffic on the Internet. When someone searches at an engine, they usually know what they want and are a pre-qualified customer. Search engine optimization is the process of creating your website so that it is associated with a particular term, and so the search engines rank it high in their results when that term is searched for. To learn more about search engine optimization read our website marketing page.
If you are banner advertising it means you are buying space on other people's websites, just as you would buy traditional ad space in a magazine. The difference is, with a magazine you have no way to track the effectiveness of the ad. Online, you can pay just for the clicks you receive on your ad, or for the number of impressions your ad is shown for, or if you were running your own affiliate program you could pay only for customers you receive from the ad which convert.
Opt-in email lists are valuable. You can build your own by asking your visitors to sign up for your newsletter, or you can purchase or rent email lists from outside companies. Opt-in means that the receiver has chosen to receive these emails from you, and so cannot claim to have been spammed.
Ezines, article submission sites and directories are simply more places for you to put a link to your website. Ezines are like newsletters which you can buy ad space in. Article submission sites will let you post articles you've written that also have a link to your website in them. Directories like Yahoo.com list your website under a particular category. Many directories offer listings for free and some have fees. Yahoo.com requires a 300 fee to have your site reviewed for submission if it is a commercial site.
Pay per click search engines allow you to bid on specific search terms. Whoever bids the most gets placed at the top of the search engine results page, while the second highest bidder is placed second, and so on down the line. These engines charge you for each click on your ad that they deliver. Depending on your market these clicks can cost anywhere from 5 cents to 30 dollars. If you have a new website that is not yet receiving any real search engine traffic, pay per click traffic can be a great way to start getting users to your site. It is quite difficult to remain profitable as an affiliate paying for traffic though, so this should simply be part of your short term plans while you build a solid free traffic base via SEO (search engine optimization).
Unsolicited email, or spam, is quickly becoming less legal and less legal. It is also not very effective, and can be quite costly. All in all, it's not a great, nor very legitimate, traffic producer.
AFFILIATE TIP OF THE WEEK
Beware 'net' payout programs that deduct all sorts of expenses from the Gross profit before you get your cut. Demand to see the deductions itemized.
