It’s become a regular line for comedians, mainly on television panel programmes, to make a joke of adverts saying ‘work at home’ or ‘make fortunes on the internet’. They have a point, there are millions of such adverts and they are very simple to find on sites everywhere. However, they are getting a poor name as they guarantee the world, easy cash for little work and watch the cash stream in! Nope, the old proverb “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is” really does apply here as what is not made clear is the same for someone setting up a website for anything is that they need to know, or know somebody who knows, SEO.
Permit me, while I declare an interest. I own an affiliate marketing site which I have built as a fishing tackle shop to sell tackle dangling gear, DVDs, books and travel goods and services for fishers. I have enrolled with many affiliate programs and have inserted banner links to lots of firms who provide fishing tackle, insurance for anglers, travel companies offering trips for anglers and other ephemera. Why? Well, because when I was learning SEO, I was looking for information on how to improve my knowledge and abilities, and very often came across affiliate marketing as a phrase, and after a while I looked into it to find out more. I’ll explain how it works.
There are many hundreds of companies offering goods and services on the internet as we know. They all have the same problem, which is attracting people to their site to buy stuff. They all have their SEO to announce themselves and their products so that people can find them on the search engines, but that sometimes isn’t enough so what they do is to join affiliate marketing programmes and offer a percentage of any sales brought about by anybody carrying their banner or link on a site to their shop. It is an effective and mode of drumming up business in the United States and is becoming more so in other countries, and of course somebody constructing up an affiliate marketing site like mine can include ads for firms anywhere in the world and still get paid.
Where the ads for affiliate marketing are ambiguous is that it is extremely simple to get the site up and the providers provide you whatever you need (you do not need any technical ability at all). The main ability is to know how to cut and paste the code for the adverts. However, the site can be built and put online in no time flat, but that doesn’t mean anything as how are you going to attract shoppers to go to your shop in order to click on the adverts to go to your partner’s online shops? You need SEO to do that, and it doesn’t work speedily.
However, during the time the SEO work is having it’s effect, then ads can be placed in the search engines which only cost when they are clicked. The cost can change as you have to bid for insertion on the search engine results pages and you have to rely on your shop being good enough to hold the visitor and that they go to your partner sites and purchase something.
So, don’t be fooled. Yes, the theory of affiliate marketing is a good and solid one, but expecting to create and then being able to take a trip to the Ferrari showroom in the next week is not really likely. You need SEO to enhance your website, get it in the search engine results and then maintain it there. The two operations complement together, SEO is the key, affiliate marketing is the money generator.
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