So what is affiliate marketing?

Posted on October 9, 2008
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing - basics |

Well there’s a question. Wikipedia has this to say:

Affiliate marketing 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.

So there you go. End of post!

But hold on just a minute. There’s much more to it than that. You have to get to know all kinds of complicated things like understanding search engine optimisation (SEO), Pay Per Click advertising (PPC), google algorithms, writing good content, designing effective landing pages and the list goes on and on and on.

So how did I find out about it?? Well, as I’ve said before my husband runs his own business, BlueSquareImages.com (what’s the point in having a website if you can’t big him up every now again) and therefore he has had to learn how best to promote his website. An awful lot of of the stuff he was getting was based around the following: create a newsletter, build an email list by getting people to subscribe to your newsletter, then write an ebook and flog it to your email list for the lovely price of $27. Better still then create a squeeze page website, write a long sales letter, use all kinds of brightly coloured text, start the price at $97, strike that through and sell it for a special offer limited only price of $47.

We gave serious thought to trying this as a way of earning extra revenue, but I was really put off - I would have been ashamed to have been associated with a website like this. I wouldn’t buy anything from a site like this and don’t know many people who would.

But we did have a closer look at E-book selling - and Ebay seemed a really good place to start. Ebooks were selling on Ebay for £1.99 each and one guy selling a book with tattoo designs was making £10 a day minimum selling something he hadn’t written, and the process was all automated too!

However I still felt really uncomfortable about it - and somehow or other - whilst doing all this research I came across the Affiliates4u.com forum. And that was it - I was sucked in good and proper!

I haven’t launched my first site yet, but I’m optimistic that this is something I could get good at - eventually. There’s loads of information about - but I probably spend too long reading about it and not enough doing.

If you want to find out more, these are the places I go to most often: