Find a job - What is Affiliate Marketing?

While being affiliated with any company (which can refer to a network marketing contract as well) qualifies as “affiliate marketing”, here we are specifically talking about the commonly understood concept of online promotions for a product/service.

Two other related terms are “internet marketing” (which is a bit broader as it refers to the act of marketing anything online but this could be your very own product… so not necessarily an affiliation), and “direct response marketing”. Direct response marketing can also be a post card or letter that arrives in the mail and prompts an individual to buy or take action based on the offer in the letter.

Online, however, it often refers to the use of a sales letter (miniwebsite) to have a web surfer take action (buy product, register for a newsletter, call a phone number, etc). If you spend any time on the internet, you will see many examples of direct response marketing (mini website sales letters).

But let’s go back to the simple concept of affiliate marketing. Consider the example of Amazon.com.

If you aren’t familiar with Amazon.com, it started as an online bookstore but they now sell a long list of consumer items. When they were first launching promotions for Amazon.com, they approached other webpage owners and let them know of an affiliate opportunity they were offering. This marketing strategy would allow any webpage owner to place a link to a certain book or a category of books or any other entry page to Amazon.com… and if the visitor that clicked through from this third party website onto Amazon.com ended up buying something, the referring website’s owner would receive a part of the commission.

Imagine you had a website dedicated to gardening and it was often visited as it was well known online (and offline) that you are an expert in all topics related to gardening and your webpage has quality content. Amazon.com would have approached you (or you would have seen the affiliate opportunity on their website) and you would have learned that by providing links to the same 10 books related to gardening that you recommend to anyone and everyone (because they are the top authority books on the topic of gardening), now if your visitors simply clicked through from the link on your website to the Amazon.com affiliate link which took them to a summary of those books, and they ended up buying… you would receive a commission (7-15% of the sale is most common with Amazon.com… but there are some affiliate programs now that pay up to 83%).

These commissions are profits for you. They are a new revenue source and yet you did not write the books, you do not warehouse the books, you don’t maintain an inventory and you don’t even have a bookstore business. But because of the simple affiliation, you are able to earn from the money that others are already spending (in this case, on gardening books).

Today, such affiliate opportunities are rampant on the internet and rightfully so. Think of why it’s such a win-win-win for everyone involved. In the case of the gardening example, the gardening website’s visitors get easy access to some of the best resources on their topic of interest (gardening), the website’s owner has a new income stream which allows them to further grow their website (or invest as they choose) and Amazon.com just received a hoard of new customers without spending a penny on advertising. They simply offer a piece of the “profit pie” right back to the affiliate. Win-win-win.

Again, they were one of the first to pioneer such affiliate marketing but now there are countless such opportunities… some of which have extraordinary payouts, for example, a marketing software that sells for $597 and yet allows the affiliate to keep $500 per sale. It can get very lucrative.

Consider Overstock, a website that’s very quickly growing in popularity (especially around shopping seasons such as Christmas).

This "online mall" sells just about every consumer good imaginable: Home & Garden, Jewelry, Sports & Toys, Electronics, Apparel, Entertainment, Gifts and much more. A lot of their products have deep discounts and allow the online shopper to save up to 80% off the retail price every day. They even offer discounted shipping or $1 shipping at times. It's a shopper's (or busy parent's) online buying fantasy. Prices that are the guaranteed lowest anywhere online (which is typically already lower than in retail stores) combined with the convenience of shopping from home through a secure online system (and plenty of "under $10" clearance bins!).

Overtock, as many other websites, also offers an affiliate program. When a new visitor to their website arrives from an "affiliate link" and decides to buy (let's say a DVD at half the retail price), the referring affiliate earns a percentage of that sale as the computer tracks this purchase back to their "affiliate ID". Best of all, such affiliate programs are absolutely free to enroll into giving the everyday employee yet another opportunity to create a new income stream (another example of "the money in marketing").

Yes it’s true, you could become an “internet millionaire” but that requires the appropriate amount of work and effort. If that’s your ambition, study the recommended resources, get involved and work towards it. For everyone else, an extra $2000 per month is more than feasible.

I have yet to find a better book or course that provides specific internet income producing strategies without fluff and hype as what is offered in the The Rich Jerk book. It’s short and right to the point. No theories, no nonsense. And it’s one of only a handful of books that I suggest as essential for any alternative income seeker’s library.