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Make a Fortune Promoting Other People's Stuff Online
There is a lot of money potentially to be made by forming affiliations with other businesses on the Internet. In its simplest form, affiliate marketing can be defined as making money for your own company by 'helping to generate online sales of products or services from other businesses'. For instance, I might decide to electronically direct a person to a site that sells software, and if that person subsequently decides to buy a software application from that site, I then earn a percentage of the purchase cost, which could be 5%, 10% , 25% or maybe even a higher percentage. So you can probably already see that affiliate marketing could be a fantastic way for your business to start earning passive income, all without having to outlay significant amounts of your time or money.
Affiliate marketing has many attractions, with one of the major ones being ease of set up. You simply only have to let individuals know about Web sites where they can purchase other business's great products or services.
You do so by providing a link for those individuals to go to the Web site in question. Best of all, with affiliate marketing, your business doesn't even have to worry about dispatching the product being purchased or fulfilling the service that is wanted by the customer or client.
The reality is that your business gets paid a percentage of the purchase costs when individuals buy products or services from the Web sites that you have directed them to. So, in effect, all your business is doing is telling people about those goods or services that they are already interested in, and then helping them to get to the appropriate Web sites where they can make their purchases.
With affiliate marketing, there is no hard-sell involved, and as most business people will readily acknowledge, it is sometimes easier to promote other business products than your own. That's because your ego is not dependent upon making a sale!
The other major advantage with affiliate marketing is that you don't have to physically or electronically collect money from any would-be purchasers. It is the responsibility of the company selling the particular product or service to keep track of the percentages of sales that you help generate, and then to pay you that amount on a regular basis.
It all sounds simple enough. And in reality it is.
But as with all things in life, it takes both commitment and, of course, the right amount of knowledge, to get things set up correctly, and then to ensure that your affiliate marketing strategy continues to work as smoothly as possible with the least amount of interference or ongoing tinkering from you or your staff on a daily basis.
It pays to learn from the experiences of others when attempting something new, like affiliate marketing. So if you are keen to learn about all the 'ins and outs' of affiliate marketing for your business (and why wouldn't you, given the potential extra income that affiliate marketing could generate for your business), I can think of no better person to recommend than Rosalind Gardner who is the author of the book 'Make a Fortune Promoting Other People's Stuff Online'.
The content of Gardner's book has been divided into fifteen chapters, plus a glossary of affiliate marketing and Internet terms, along with three useful appendices.
By reading this book from cover to cover, the sorts of topics that will you soon master include the following:
The basics of affiliate marketing.
How to brainstorm the different aspects of affiliate marketing.
How to conduct market research.
Finding and choosing the products and services that will form the basis of your affiliate marketing campaign.
Researching the competition.
Planning your Web site, developing content for your site, and the steps involved in building and implementing your site.
How to choose, and then join, affiliate programs.
Marketing your site.
Strategies for increasing your profits with affiliate marketing.
Learning about the pitfalls associated with affiliate marketing, and most importantly, how to avoid them.
And very importantly, how to become a super affiliate marketer!
The glossary that Gardner has included in her book contains explanations of words, terms, phrases and acronyms that you are sure to encounter as you delve further into affiliate marketing, Here's just a small sampling of the sorts of entries that you will find in the glossary: affiliate program manager; affiliate solution provider; co-branding; Cost-Per-Acquisition CPA); Cost-Per-Click (CPC); Cost-Per-Thousand (CPM); doorway page; keyword density; Multilevel Marketing (MLM); Pay-Per-Lead (PPL); Really Simple Syndication (RSS); social bookmarking; super affiliates; a two tier affiliate program structure; and viral marketing.
The three appendixes in 'Make a Fortune Promoting Other People's Stuff Online' provide invaluable information.
The first appendix lists the details of the most popular affiliate networks for you to consider joining (in fact, I believe that the information contained in this section of the book alone justifies the book's purchase price), while the second appendix contains the details of additional affiliate networks that you will most likely want to investigate for yourself as well.
The third, and final, appendix lists the details of some additional resources that Gardner recommends, with one example being a software application that writes the sorts of headlines that are more likely to catch the attention of visitors to your company's Web site.
In conclusion, I am of the firm opinion that 'Make a Fortune Promoting Other People's Stuff Online', by Rosalind Gardner, is indeed the book to read if you want to learn not only how to become successful with affiliate marketing, but how to excel with it as well.
To purchase a copy of 'Make a Fortune Promoting Other People's Stuff Online', click the following link: Make a Fortune Promoting Other People's Stuff Online