Dec
What it Takes to Become an Affiliate Marketer
In a couple of my previous posts I stated that I would be starting a series of Affiliate Marketing posts. This is to be in conjunction with the launching of Novel Concept Studio’s Affiliate Program later this month. I’ll try and write a daily post regarding the topic, as there are a lot of things I want to cover with regards to Affiliate Marketing. I am in the process of a major project, and also have clients that I need to attend to, so I cannot guarantee daily posts, but it will be frequent! So with that said, let us begin on this fascinating topic!
Getting Started
We all have our own interests and hobbies. Some people love sports. Others love books and movies. There are those who love gardening, others who love spending time with their pets and some enjoy traveling. These are all interests and hobbies that help us to relax and get more out of life. They’re an escape from every day problems and/or troubles. Having said that, not everyone has a hobby that makes money. Unless, of course, you consider your job a hobby and truly enjoy it.
Having a money producing hobby could open a lot of doors for you. It would obviously allow you to spend a little more lavishly. It could also allow you to eventually quit your current job. The ladder is why many of us today go online to start a business; either to supplement their income or to gradually replace their current income from their job. Affiliate marketing is a great way to start earning money online. Thus, making it a hobby you might want to pick up. 
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing, as described by Wikipedia, is an internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. In other words, it is a revenue sharing partnership between a web merchant the affiliate. The affiliate is paid a commission for referring clicks, sales to the merchant. Referring sales is the most often used in affiliate programs. This type of system allows you make money in a business where you don’t have upfront costs of creating your own product. You also do not have to worry about any bookkeeping, e-commerce, or customer support as those are the merchant’s responsibility.
Do You Have What it Takes to be an Affiliate Marketer?
Before you begin your venture into affiliate marketing, you first need to choose which niche market you’re going to be affiliate with. What businesses and products do you know the most? Which products can you do the best job of selling? Once you discover your specialty, you are going to need to come to a realization. The realization is that you are going to need to remember the three P’s.
Three P’s of Affiliate Marketing
Persistence
Patience
Perseverance
These three qualities are one’s you should possess in order to be a successful affiliate marketer. Too many online business owners fail because they become impatient. You have to know what your strengths are, the things in which you are good at and your capabilities. It’s also important that you have a strong desire to succeed in affiliate marketing.
Notice that sales skills are not listed in those qualities. Why are sales skills omitted? Because, it’s the merchant’s job to ultimately make the sale. You can recommend them, you can give your own personal experiences, but you don’t need to be a hard nosed sales person to be a successful affiliate marketer. I am not going to say it does not help, but it’s certainly not required.
It’s not an easy task to become a successful affiliate marketer. You have to learn the techniques of marketing the products you’re sponsoring. You shouldn’t take up every affiliate marketing opportunity that presents itself. I would suggest that you start by promoting a product you know, perhaps even used or purchased yourself. This gives you that first hand knowledge of the product and you can feel more comfortable supporting it.
An important aspect of being an affiliate marketer, is actually being successful at internet marketing. Most affiliate marketers have their own website. It’s important to know how to effectively draw traffic to that website so that you can further enhance your chances of a sale. It’s possible to be an affiliate marketer without having a website. This is done by Pay Per Click ads (something I will discuss in another post). However, having a website and promoting a product or service within that niche will be a better long term solution.
It is also beneficial to have knowledge on how to “upsell” your visitors for the more expensive services. This helps to portray you as an expert in your niche, and will go a long way to improving your sales. There are affiliate marketers that think just having affiliate links on their website will bring them good profits. This can have some truth to it, but the more successful marketers still believe that making use of strong marketing campaigns is still important. Affiliate marketers will find more success when they treat their customers or online visitors as friends, not necessarily as just consumers or customers. Make a commitment to establish relationships with your customers and especially with visitors to your site.
Being creative doesn’t hurt your chances either. Another key to being successful with affiliate marketing is to create a quality content based website and incorporate your affiliate links into your content. You have to provide your prospects with good, quality information to keep them coming back to your site.
Stay tuned, as I’ll be devling into several topics with regards to affiliate marketing. Have other thoughts that you think might be beneficial? Any acronyms you use in relation to affiliate marketing? Let me know what you think by commenting!
Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.
