You don’t need to have your own products or services.
You don’t have any customer support.
You don’t have to have high over head, it can cost very low to operate and grow in comparison with many other business models.
You usually get 50% or more for each and every sale you generate, in some cases even more than the product owner makes (because the product owner makes his money after the initial buy of the customer).

Best of all, you can automate and outsource most of it.

So what is Affiliate Marketing exactly?

Affiliate Marketing is a form of “middle man marketing” where you simply connect people that are selling particular products and services with people who are looking to buy those particular products and services.

The way you do this is by leveraging the power of web traffic to the web sites where these products and services are sold. Once you can drive the traffic to these web sites, you start using certain models to get these people to buy those products and services so in turn you can get paid your commissions.

You may conclude already that your success largely depends on the amount of traffic that you are able to generate. Conversion rates are usually 1 – 2 %. In other words, out of any 100 people you send to a sales page, only 1 or 2 will buy. But there are ways to improve the conversion rates dramatically!

There are only three ways to increase your income from your commission site’s.

1. Increase the number of customers.
2. Increase the average transaction value.
3. Increase the frequency of purchase.

To grow your business you can follow this Model:

1. Find a Market you want to get into
2. Setup a Website for that Market
3. Do SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
4. Get Traffic
5. Sell Stuff
6. Repeat this process over and over again.

There are many ways to increase traffic to your web sites. I will mention a few of them:

1. Free Traffic from Search Engines, you focus on SEO, this works well for small niche markets ( a product or service that targets only a very small specific part of the total market, for instance “stop your Labrador from barking in the night” being a small niche market in the niche “Dog Training”).
2. Banner Ads, yes they still work if done right!
3. Link exchanges, the more links from other websites link bank to your web sites, the better you are ranked in the Search Engines.
4. Pay Per Click (PPC) Traffic, you pay money for every click on your link in an advertisement for your website on for instance Google, but beware, this can be very costly and if you don’t do it right you can lose a lot of money!
5. Pay Per View (PPV) Traffic, you pay for every view on your web sites, this is substantially cheaper than PPC but you need tons of traffic to generate substantial money with this.
6. Social Media Traffic, generated via sites like Twitter, Facebook, Sokule and so on.
7. And more.

Please note that Affiliate Marketing is certainly no “get-rich-quick” scheme, if those exist at all. You need to work hard for your success, like in any business. And you need to learn things. To Maximize your efforts. To find the best ways it works for you. To optimize your efforts and web sites to get high traffic and more sales. If this is a draw back for you, remind yourself that indeed it is a big decision to start making money online that should not be taken lightly. Else you only will lose money and quit early, like so many people do.

On the bright side of Internet Marketing life, there are many great tools available that will make your efforts much easier to do, but that is subject for another post.

Traffic Generation is the most important part of becoming successful online. That is why I recommend you to have a look at http://www.nmo-easywebsitecreator.com and http://pushbuttontrafficbuilder.com/ for some tools that will help you greatly and reduce the amount of time you need to get more traffic to your web sites!

Charles van Veen / Expert Ezine Author