Affiliate Marketing - what is it?
If you’ve bought anything online or surfed the web, you’ve probably come across Affiliate Marketing in some form, but you may not have realised it.
Affiliate marketing is where a merchant (eg. a retailer) rewards an affiliate for a customer, lead, visitor or sale thats been generated through their efforts. For those of you in the UK, if you’ve seen or heard of the financial comparison website called MoneySupermarket.com, then that website is based around affiliate marketing.
While browsing or comparing credit cards, mortgages, insurance or any of the other products on that website, when you click through to the bank or financial body providing that particular service, MoneySupermarket.com get effectively a commission from you doing that. If for example, you complete an application for a credit card, MoneySupermarket.com get something in the region of £30 or more. As they generate so much leads, I would expect they can demand higher affiliate commissions - probably closer to £50 or more per lead.
There is very big money to be made from affiliate marketing from the affiliate’s perspective. One blog that I regulary read since discovering it earlier this year is Keiron Donoghue’s blog. Keiron has been running several successful websites for a long time (well back to the early part of this decade) and uses PPC marketing to generate traffic to his websites which then convert to affiliate sales. There is one page that stands out on one of his sites and that talks about how he got to where he is - which is probably one of the most successful affiliate markers and PPC’s in the UK.
Keiron generates his income from a variety of successful websites which he regulary updates (by hand too it seems). I can definately recommend his blog for something to stirr your enthusiasm.
