This article is guest posted by Melvin from MelvinBlog.com
Affiliate Marketing has been in the business since the late 90’s (or some would even early 90’s) and it has just continued to thrive and grow bigger and bigger as of today. For those who don’t know, affiliate marketing, in the simplest way, is a person promoting other people’s product or offer in exchange for an affiliate commission when a sale or lead has been generated.
I would say affiliate marketing is the most hardcore way of making money. Although its probably risky because its easy to lose a ton of money in it, once you get the proper stroke you could start really making big sort of income faster than what you could imagine.
But how? Well I believe affiliate marketing is a broad topic and today I am going to give you different types of business models for affiliate marketing. Without further ado, here they are:
PPC Affiliate Marketing – This is what most “behind the scenes” affiliate marketers do. The process is simple. They pick an offer from an affiliate network, do a landing page (or some just direct-link) and then go to major pay per click networks like Google Adwords, MSN AdCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing to purchase traffic. The main challenge here is to do a lot of testing and tweaking. Most people lose big money at first, but then as soon as they find the right keywords, best ad copy and whatever, they start raking in really a big amount of revenue.
“Bloggers-style” Affiliate Marketing – Most of the well known bloggers do well by using this style. Basically this happens when two bloggers have a business relationship and decides to do joint ventures. One blogger would actually write a review of a product of the other blogger and when someone buys under him, the blogger would get compensated. Popular bloggers like Yaro Starak, John Chow and Darren Rowse are the ones that benefit from this the most. Not a lot of people become successful with this because in order for one to make a considerable amount, he/she must first have a huge influence and following
Social Media Based Affiliate Marketing – Have you seen those IQ Quizzes and Tests? How about those free downloads? This is what I call social media marketing. The idea here is to pick an offer that would entice a certain demographic in social media sites like Facebook, MySpace and etc. Since weight loss and male enhancement offers don’t suit that much with the people in these social sites, affiliate marketers opt to run quizzes types of offers and it has proven to really give a good return for them.
Incentivized Affiliate Marketing – If you’ve seen people offering something in exchange for making a purchase under them, that’s incentivized marketing. This one can fall into the “bloggers-style” marketing, but I prefer to have them separated because there are huge number of websites (they are not bloggers) doing it . Those get-paid-to sites are usually the ones who are thriving for it because of their huge member’s list.
Note: Most offers don’t allow incentivization so make sure first to confirm this with them before trying to incentivize.
What’s the best method? As like anything, it depends. Depends on what type of business you are, how much start-up loss you could handle, and what can suit you the most. For me, I would say the PPC Affiliate Marketing is the one I like the most simply because it’s the one of the first things I’ve done online.
So what’s your say? Is there still something to add on the list? Or am I missing something important? Let me know what you think by using the contact form below
This guest post is written by Melvin Dichoso. Melvin is a young internet marketer and blogger who’s been doing online business for more than 2 years now. He blogs at MelvinBlog.com.You can follow him at Twitter as well.
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