How To Be Successful With Affilliate Marketing

To be successful with affilliate marketing does take a fair amount of groundwork to begin with, but once set up, affilliate marketing can prove to be a lucrative vehicle for creating a profitable online income. So what is affilliate marketing? Well, it is simply where others promote your products and you only pay them when someone who they refer to your site buys your product. It's like having your own 'commission only' workforce selling on your behalf.

Affilliate marketing is a very popular way of making money online, but also has many other benefits. The main one being that by having affilliates promote your products and services they will of course be sending traffic to your sites; so as well as making sales, you will also be adding people to your e-mail list.

So, bearing in mind that you already have a great product and an eye catching website, what's next to enable you to start seeing the vast amount of sales start flooding in. Well your first stop should be ClickBank. They offer every feature you could possibly need to help you sell your products. It is very simple and relatively cheap to set up a vendors account, (around $50). ClickBank has over 150, 000 affilliates, many of whom are professional internet marketers who are ready and waiting to enlist on your affilliate programme and start making sales.

You also need to consider the commission payments that you are going to be paying out. When selling digital products your costs are minimal, and therefore you will have a fair amount of money to play with. Within the information marketing arena 50% commission is typical. However, by being strategic with your commission structure and understanding how your business works you can actually offer a lot higher than 50%. The advantage of this being that it will encourage affilliates to promote your product therefore sending more people to your site that will join your list and buy your product. Average e-book commissions range from 50-60% and can go up as high as 90%. So, instead of thinking about how much you are giving away on your front end, look at it as you are being paid to build your list, with the big profits coming from your backend and repeat sales.

So, as stated; the higher the commissions the more attractive your affilliate offer looks. But what about the type of person you want to promote your product and how do you get to hire them?

Firstly, you need to attract affilliates who are at the top of their game, and are already successful, and then you need to contact them and start to build a strong business relationship with them. However, this can take time and effort of your part.Software is available that will search for affilliates on your behalf and even send them e-mails, but it is always far better to contact potential affilliates personally via a carefully crafted e-mail showing them that you have taken the time to find things out about them, visited their website and seen products and services they already promote.

Finally, if you can provide your affilliates with tools to help them promote your site then you will see better results. So, for example provide them with articles to reproduce, promotional e-mails, banners, buttons etc. Not every affilliate will use the tools but by providing them you are making their life easier