Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

There are tons of affiliate programs you can join on the Internet. Each offers a wide variety of products you can promote and each has its own strengths and weaknesses.

An affiliate program allows anyone to sign up and promote other people's products. For each sale that is made, the affiliate earns a percentage of the overall price.

These systems are great because they offer you the right to sell a product, which has already been completed and set up by someone else. You only work is to focus on selling the different products.

The two most popular affiliate programs right now are Clickbank and Commission Junction. Each offers thousands of products across a wide area of topics.

Clickbank, which is the program I first started with, offers only digital products. This meaning that they can be downloaded online and requires no moving of a physical product. Their categories vary from pet training to personal finance.

Clickbank operates as the broker between you (the seller) and the product creator. You are given a unique link for each item you wish to sell and if someone follows that link and makes a purchase, it is processed by Clickbank. Then the producer receives their percentage of the sale price and you get your commission, with a small part taken out for Clickbank.

Most of the products offered on Clickbank give the seller a commission on the high side of 50%. With products ranging in costs from $15 to $250 that means a great deal of commissions paid out.

Commission Junction works on the same principle as Clickbank except they also offer tangible products. They handle all the shipping and handling for the products sold.
These are not the only two affiliate programs available, but they are the two best. If you look down at the bottom of most web pages you will see a link that says affiliate. A lot of companies have affiliate programs to help boost their sales, since they only have to pay when a sale is made.

These programs are able to pay such high commissions because there is very little overhead involved. They have thousands of affiliates working for them but they are all seen as independent contractors. So, they do not have to pay any benefits or taxes on them.

I recommend checking out joining one of these affiliate programs but do not think you are going to start making sales right off the bat. It will take a lot of studying on your part to find the best way to promote these products and become profitable.