When you do affiliate marketing, it is not always necessary to have a website for promotion of affiliate products or services if you a have good potential market locally to you for such sales.
Because affiliate marketing works when the principal company rewards the affiliate a commission for successful sales of products or services that are tagged to the affiliate's ID number or code, it doesn't really matter technically whether or not the affiliate uses a website to promote the product or service. However, most affiliates would prefer to market with their own website to widen their reach to potential customers unless they are able to have a pretty good customer market in their own locality where traditional means of marketing is adequate for a decent return. Click here to read more on how affiliate programs work in a website environment.
If you are into the affiliate marketing business, you have a number of options to promote the affiliate product or service.
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The more common way is to set up your own website with your own domain name and market it aggressively on the Internet. Using this method, you would be creating some relevant web page content for the affiliate product that you are promoting. The advantage here is that you have the potential to reach out to the international market IF your website is getting sufficient traffic and recognition from the major search engines, and links from other major commercial websites. This means that you would need to create a search engine optimized website with the appropriate set of metatag keywords in order to have a good web positioning on the Internet. For example, I've used the techniques which I've described in my web promotion article to get my own site achieve a Google Page Rank of 4, an average of 1000 user sessions a day, and a number of keywords in which my website would be listed in the first page of Google search results.
When you promote affiliate products or services through your own website, it is important to maintain a professional look and feel for your website. People would tend to buy from a professional looking site with a proper commercial sounding domain name instead of sites that are hosted free and have domain names that does not sound like a serious commercial website. If you really have to use a free hosting website, one way is to buy a domain name and redirect it to your free hosting URL. Alternatively, you can start a fully featured one page website for only US$99.95 a year by clicking here. This hosting service has options for you to upgrade later when you are ready to do so later. If you want to see how a one page website looks like, visit this webste at http://1playgamesonline.com
Another way is through email marketing (SPAMMING) which was said to be still effective, but you may be getting yourself into some trouble if someone complains about it. This method works by having your affiliate link embedded in your email message so that when someone clicks on the affiliate link and buys something from the principal website, you get the credit for commission. The non-spam way of email marketing is simply to put the affiliate link as part of your email signature and send your email normally to your friends, colleagues, and people whom you know. Your email content would be your normal content but the affiliate link would be displayed as your email signature.
Another popular way but more time consuming is to market your affiliate product or service through participating in forums that allows you to promote your products and services. By selecting appropriate forums to do your promotion, your chances of reaching the right target group of customers are higher and hence a higher chance for a sale.
If you want to do affiliate promotion via non-internet means, you can place your affiliate URL on your business cards, letterheads, brochures, postcards, etc. Some principal companies may even allow you to buy the product at a greatly discounted price to sell at a higher price and the difference would be your commission.
Finally, if you are wondering if affiliate marketing works, I would say YES and NO. NO, if you do not research your affiliate product / service to see if it really has sales potential. While there are many good opportunities, there are an equal amount of scams if not more. Click here to read more about real opportunities and scams. A BIG YES, if you have done your homework, start off right by getting your own website and domain name set up, keeping your costs low by not blindly signing up with programs that doesn't sell or use promotion tools that doesn't really work, and focus your energies by persistently applying the promotion techniques that work well for your affiliate product or service. Not every technique taught in the book would work for every affiliate product or service. It's something that you need to discover either by having a good understanding of the buying nature of customers for the product or service, or having a good mentor who has the experience and knowledge of these things.
As for me, my website sales from affiliate marketing is currently earning me an average of about US$400 a month as a supplemental income and gradually increasing as I continue to seek out products and services with real value to promote on my website. The thing I like about my affiliate marketing business is that even when I'm not tending to my website for a week or two, I would still get sales from my website. My target is to work towards having the website replace my monthly expenses, which ultimately means that I would be out of my rat race. Now it's your turn to decide on whether or not if you want to pursue in affiliate marketing. Alternatively, I've written a couple of step-by-step guide with resources for those who are planning to do their affiliate marketing. There are three approaches: Approach 1, Approach 2 and Approach 3 which you can read about and decide how you want to go about doing your affiliate marketing business. All the best!
