Affiliate Marketing

Unless you've just crawled out from under a rock, you're probably aware that:

banner ads
internet reviews (as on this site)
much of the flamboyant direct marketing that passes as Internet Marketing &
a fair percentage of Google Adwords & Google Adsense

...are driving the surfer towards the purchase of a product not produced by the site owner. The site owner is an affiliate of the firm providing the services and receives a commission if the surfer:

buys (the model for about 80% of affiliate marketing schemes) or
merely visits the main site (the model for about 20%)

This Affiliate Marketing model was exploited for a while as Google Arbitrage Marketing, in which cheap Google Adwords were purchased e.g. @ $0.05 and were sent to land on pages that might pay a $0.10 affiliate commission.

This process has mostly exhausted itself because of the increase in the cost of Adwords...but some canny site-owners still use it, having done extensive keyword research.

Affiliate Marketing first appeared on the web in late 1994 but it was Amazon in 1996 which really brought it to the public's eye and it's now an integral part of many real world businesses' websites. I've created this section so you can see the tools that I have used for my business:

1 The Super Affiliate's Handbook by Rosalind Gardner. This was an excellent introduction to Affiliate Marketing by its first superstar, who earned close to half a million during one financial year and wrote a best-selling book about it.

2 Build A Niche Store is an excellent way to utilize eBay RSS feeds and reassemble them as SEO-friendly (i.e. get FREE traffic) pages for your own site or a stand-alone one.

3 Amazon There are only a few products for webmasters to maximize their affiliate marketing Amazon businesses and presently, I've only reviewed one, Amazon Hunter, an excellent piece of software that was designed to work for Google Adwords campaigns...but I use as a research tool

4 An introduction to Clickbank still the major source of downloadable digital e-books & software on the internet and a significant source of income for many. There are reviews for some great software that can really help your Clickbank biz, too.

I'll be adding considerably to this section of the site during 2008, when I've finished conducting some marketing experiments involving Clickbank products with very cheap advertising services. I'll keep you posted!