Affiliate Marketing For Your Business

Affiliate Marketing

For both business owners and work at home entrepreneurs.

Three Reasons To Use Affiliate Marketing

Imagine if you received a commission every time you told someone about a product or service you we excited about. We do this all the time with our family and friends.

That is what affiliate marketing is basically. Thousands of retailers, and yes some of the biggest names in retail, selling all manner of products and services, will pay you a commission for referring customers who buy those products and services! 

If you already have a great business idea or if you are looking for a product or service to sell then affiliate marketing could be your ticket. It works for businesses that want to sell more products and services as well as business owners who are looking for a product and/or service to sell.

Looking For A Product or Service

Amazon was really the pioneer in affiliate marketing when it started it’s associates program in 1998. Now there are millions of Amazon associates selling products on their personal or business websites. Simply put if you have a website you can go to the Amazon website, click on “Associates” and join their affiliate program, put links and banners on your site and hopefully collect commissions.

Having said that you are competing with millions of other Amazon associates for a sale. But used appropriately and in the right locations on your site you could make some commissions. If it’s the Amazon way you want to go then great. Learn as much as you can about using that program to make you money.

However, there are thousands of companies using affiliate programs just like Amazon does. For example let’s say you love guitars and want to start a blog on Vintage guitars. The big guitar selling site of Reverb has an affiliate program and once you have a site up and running you can apply to Reverb for an affiliate account and feature vintage guitars they sell for a commission. Just a little more focused than selling thousands of products. Yes you can sell without a website but that’s not my expertise and a different animal altogether.

You may want to try a third party affiliate service such as Shareasale. These companies run affiliate programs for companies and affiliates go to the third party company looking for products and/or services they can sell on their site. A word of warning. These third party affiliate companies are full of rabbit holes. Stay focused and don’t get sucked into applying for programs that are not in your business model. 

Once you have applied and have been accepted for a program you will be given links and banners to place on your site, anyone clicking on that link, and makes a purchase (not counting returns), will earn you a commission.

For Existing Businesses – Supplement Your Bottom Line

If you have a business and you want to supplement your bottom line you can sell products and/or services for companies that fit your industry.

For Existing Businesses – A Ready Made Sales Force

If you have products and services and want to sell more of them then affiliate marketing may be just what you need. Third party affiliate programs, such as Shareasale, handle all of the link generation and affiliate recruitment. Some of these companies have thousands of hungry affiliates just waiting to sell your products and services on their websites. This is basically a free dedicated sales force putting your goods front and center in front of millions of people.