Many internet marketers use affiliate marketing as an online business model. Let’s discuss the key success factors for this to work well.

Let me first explain what affiliate marketing means.

Affiliate marketing refers to a form of internet marketing and selling products online whereby you effectively only focus on the promotions and marketing of the products and when the target audience is interested, they click on affiliate links which will bring them to the actual vendors’ websites.

You get pre-determined commission fess if there is a successful transaction.

The products here can be both physical products or digital products.

There are many benefits of affiliate marketing:

• you don’t have to create your own products
• no client handling
• you don’t need to worry about inventory and shipping
• you don’t need an e-commerce engine and deal with payment

Clickbank is a platform where you can source for many affiliate products to sell.

Of course, you can also become an affiliate of Amazon and you know they carry a wealth of products for you to select from.

It is important to note that affiliate marketing is not all that rosy while there are many benefits as stated above.

First up, many vendors offering affiliate programs are quite scammy. Second, especially if you are selling physical products, the commission percentage may be very low.

So, should we even attempt affiliate marketing?

I want to first reference back to How To Make Money Online.

It is always important to view an online business as what it is, a business venture! You need a business plan, you need to do the market research, know your target audience, understand where they hang out,  you need a solid plan to launch your business, get awareness, build your brand etc.

With this in mind, if the products you are selling so happens to be affiliate products and you have enough profit margins, then so be it.

There is a great website that carries primarily Amazon’s products thisiswhyimbroke.com, check it out. And I leave it to you to read up why they are successful. It is branding, standing out, knowing how to drive traffic through social media and so on.

There are many other affiliate sites which are successful, so affiliate marketing works, period. What happens behind the scene, you have to stick to the basics of marketing.

Let me list down what I think are some key success factors:

• a well defined niche area
• a differentiated value you are providing to your audience
• branding
• traffic generation (both paid and organic traffic)

I wish you will have great successes starting an affiliate marketing site.

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