The explosion of growth in the World wide web during the past few years has led to a number of money making possibilities that didn’t previously exist. One of the more successful is affiliate marketing, where the seller of a product offers monetary incentives to others to promote his or her products for them. If a customer buys, both the seller and the promoter, called an affiliate, make money. A quite successful niche of the affiliate marketing industry is the marketing of the industry itself, with quite a few books released every month fashioned to help you make money in affiliate marketing.
Some of these Internet marketing books are well thought out, and others are created to take advantage of the novice marketer. Frequently it’s tough to tell the difference. One trendy subscription program claims to simplify affiliate marketing. For a monthly fee, the customer gets a membership to a website that offers to assist them make money selling a number of different products. The creator of the site claims to offer everything necessary to help the member make sales – a product list, a set of ready-made e-mail messages that members can mail to consumers on their mailing list, and even ready-made Internet pages that members can use to sign up new customers. The website boasts that “all the tough work has been done for you” and the member just needs to sign up, pay monthly fees, and start cashing checks.
At first, the program seems like an excellent idea. With all of people promotional materials at hand, how can anyone not make cash? The answer to that is easy – making money takes traffic. You can have great products and great promotional materials, including nice Websites, but if no one sees them, you can’t make sales. To create sales, you need to bring traffic to your Internet sites so those customers can see your products. Many consumers who are new to affiliate marketing fail to realize that finding ways for people to discover your products is about ninety percent of the work. You need to find ways of attracting customers, but you must do so while competing against hundreds or thousands of other individuals who are trying to do the same thing with the very same products. Signing up for a membership site that offers “everything you need” to make sales is a successful idea. Regrettably, it’s just profitable for the person who is collecting the membership fees.
There is no “easy way” to generate traffic. It’s difficult work, and it takes time. There are a lot of ways to bring traffic to your Website, but there is no “automatic” way to do it, and no one can do it for you. Prior to signing up for an affiliate program, make certain you understand that you can’t make sales without customers and that you have a few idea as to how you’re going to get those customers to find you. If you don’t know where the customers are going to come from, you can’t make cash, even if someone promises to “do all the work” for you.
