October 16th, 2009:

Beginner’s Guide Part 1: What is Affiliate Marketing?

If you’ve landed on our site you are obviously looking for a way to make money online and you’ve likely heard of affiliate marketing.  You may or may not know that it is a way to make money online from the comfort of your own home.  If you are already a member of our network then you’ve taken the first step to becoming an affiliate – however if you’re not please go signup at http://www.affiliatefleet.com.

We’ve decided to help you as much as we can so we will be writing a lot of tutorials on our blog so make sure to keep checking back.  This first tutorial will be in several parts and will be an introduction to affiliate marketing and how you can make money with it.

Introduction To Affiliate Marketing

As an affiliate myself I’ve been asked the question “What do you do?” many times – so writing this part of the tutorial is funny to me.  I’ve tried to explain just what affiliate marketing is in so many ways yet it never seems to stick.

Affiliate marketing is an extremely simple concept really.  Companies out there run their own ads and their own marketing of course – but who wouldn’t want more sales?  Affiliates, as we are known as – are like a free sales force driving sales to you.  What we do is drive the traffic to a specific product using our own tracking links and if any of that traffic completes the action desired then we as an affiliate get paid for sending it.

There are various types of offers that you can promote.  The two most dominant are CPS and CPA.  CPS means cost per sale – you are paid when you said a qualified sale with your traffic.  CPA means cost per action – you are paid when you send a qualified lead with your traffic.  Leads can be only an email submission, a full page of contact information etc.

The advertiser knows that you sent the sale because you will be assigned a unique link to send traffic with.  You won’t send traffic directly to their homepage but you will use your own link.  You might have seen affiliate links before – they tend to be really long with a lot of numbers to tell the advertiser who sent the traffic.  These types of links aren’t clicked on very often because they look strange to most users – so we’ll teach you how to make them look like normal links.

What’s An Affiliate Network?

Affiliate Fleet is a network – we’re one example of the many networks out there.  Affiliate networks exist because there are literally thousands of affiliate programs out there that you can promote.  Almost every company is starting an affiliate program nowadays and having relationships with every company you wanted to promote would be tedious.

So this is where affiliate networks come in – they deal with the connections to the advertisers and handle paying all of their affiliates.  Affiliate networks are also able to negotiate much faster payout terms than just one affiliate trying to go directly.  In the CPA World it’s pretty easy to get on weekly payments with a quality check – something you could never do if you went directly to the merchant.  In CPS payments are typically sent out on net 15 which is still a lot faster than you could get alone.  Net 15 means you are paid 15 days after the end of the month in which you sent traffic.

Why Should I Be an Affiliate Marketer?

There’s a lot of reasons to be an affiliate – it’s up to you to find your reason.  I figured I’d explain my personal reason to you though.  Affiliate marketing allows me to be my own boss – and not have to worry about anyone telling me what to do.

Another reason I am an affiliate is simply for freedom.  I am free to work wherever and whenever I want – the more work I put into my business the more money I will make.  I make my own hours, my own salary and I decide my own income based on how much effort I put into it.  I can also work from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.  If I feel like living in Spain for a year – I can.

Affiliate marketing also allows you to have multiple streams of income coming in.  You can build sites that make you money without any work on your part after you get them where they need to be, and you can continue to build more sites.  The old sites will still make you money if you bring traffic to them properly.

What Affiliate Marketing Is Not

Affiliate marketing is not a get rich quick scheme – it is a business and much be treated as such.  As you research more and more you will find plenty of places that claim they can teach you how to get rich with affiliate marketing overnight for the low price of $1997(just an example).  Don’t buy into this hype.  At the end of this tutorial I will post a few websites both paid and free that you can use to help you learn affiliate marketing – none of them are a very high cost and none of them claim to make you a millionaire overnight.

You have to work hard in this industry – it takes time, money and dedication to get going.  You need to balance all three, if you have more money you can spend less time working but if you have less money you need more time.  Dedication needs to be there no matter what.  Most affiliate marketers fail – they give up after only trying for a few weeks or even a few months.  If you want to be truly successful you can’t be one of those people.  Never give up and you will make money – we are here to help you.  We’re going to be honest with you and help you as much as we can.  The more money you make the more money we make and there is no hiding that so jump on board and let’s get started.

Continue onto the next section of this guide as it becomes available.