Be a Businessman without any Products

Affiliate Marketing is something I should have paid more attention rather than only concentrating on PPC advertising. As, I am having enormous success with affiliate marketing, I thought I should let you all know little bit about the Affiliate marketing techniques. A lot of information is already available of affiliate marketing over the internet already, so I would just give you the introduction that would get you started with the universe of Affiliate marketing.

What is the secret of Affiliate Marketing?
There is no secret in successful Affiliate Marketing. The most important thing about anything you do online is – “be honest”. Be honest to yourself and build your sites with some truthfulness towards the service you provide. Do not care about your Search Engine Ranking. Think about some of the sites you visit on daily basis. Why do you visit those site? Why do they attract you? Start from the basic question in your mind. Write honest unique articles and supplement the articles with products that are related to your posts and which your readers may find useful. If you are writing an article about Search Engine Optimization, do not put product links to Woman’s apparels. When you are writing articles about a movie, do put related product links on DVD sales from your affiliate marketing program. Simple is it not?

Common Types of Affiliate Marketing:

There are different types of Affiliate marketing schemes available today. You can you some or all of them as you need.

1. SEO-Search Engine Optimization: SEO is important. You definitely wish to have lots of traffic coming to your sites naturally. They are invaluable asset of your site. You are not paying anybody to build the traffic for your site. You are working hard yourself and let the search engines decide how good you are making your site useful for the internet users and customers.
2. Paid Search Engine Marketing: Paid Search Engine Marketing works great if you have your own store where you actually conduct the monetary transactions and ship the products you sell to your customers. However, many of the users of Affiliate Marketing schemes does not have their own products. For example, I promote Amazon products. I do not own any of the products from the Amazon. I only recommend and review products that I believe useful to our customers. When you click on the Amazon product and go to Amazon website and buy some stuff, I get a small percentage on the total price. But, for many such advertising program there are some problems too. First of all Amazon not does not count for the “paid search traffic”. So, if you are using Google Adwords to gain traffic to your site, you may be able to get traffic from Adwords, but Amazon may not consider the sale to be valid from your site if they come from Google Adwords paid search. However, there are other affiliates who considers the Paid Search Traffic to be valid. So, do some basic research before you choose your Affiliate Marketing schemes.
3. E-mail Marketing: Email marketing is another great way to promote products.However, I have bad experience with Email Marketing. even before I started using any Affiliate Marketing program, I used to send occasional emails about news and updates of my sites to the registered users (>7000 people) who accepted our terms and conditions about receiving emails. But they tend to forget what they did during the registration period. Last month many of y users reported to hosting providers that I am sending SPAM emails. So, I have updated my email schemes to be incorporated with Feedburner now. I would recommend that you open a Google Group for your particular site and let people join the google group. Then start sending emails from the google group to your group users. That will keep your hosting providers happy and you may not have to deal with SPAM email issue at all. In case you are using E-mail Marking method, do not send too many emails to your subscribers. Try to send the least amount of emails possible.
4. Display Advertising: This is very similar to traditional PPC advertising. The only difference being you are not paid for the clicks, you are only paid for the sale. You can use various different sizes banners, links, flash slides to promote a product.
5. Product Review: Product review is yet another type of Affiliate Marketing scheme where you would be reviewing products. Say you have a website on Apple Ipod. You can write your own reviews about various different Ipods, latest releases, accessories of Ipods and so on. Many people are looking for good and honest reviews on products. They will come to your site, read your review and if they like, they may buy the products you are promoting.

Remember that when you are using Affiliate Marketing programs you are going to SHARE your traffic to the Affiliate Marking website you are using. In my experience, I have seen sudden drop of page views and traffic when I started using Affiliate marketing program. But I am still using it because I am having success with the program. Someone is always buying something everyday from my sites.

The history of Affiliate Marketing is well organized in WIKI and you can read it at your free time.