Affiliate Marketing – Internet Marketing Newbies Launching Pad

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For Internet marketing newbies fresh off the starting blocks, affiliate marketing is the fastest way to start making money online.

So what exactly is an affiliate program?

An affiliate program is a system where a creator of a product enlists other people or companies to help sell the product. Those other people (called affiliates) who helped sell the product get a percentage of the sale proceeds and gets paid automatically after the sale has been made.

Not all affiliate marketing programs are the same. But good affiliate marketing programs should not charge for affiliates to join. After all, affiliates help create sales and the vendor only pays the affiliate only when a sale is made.

With no products and no subscribers list (or opt-in list) to start with, affiliate marketing provides the means by way of products, website and payment system already set up and running. All that needs to be done is driving traffic to these affiliate product websites by a variety of methods.

But that may not be the smartest way to go about doing it. Like all internet “gurus” who says, “The money is in the list”. What is this list they keep talking about? This list is actually a list of names and email addresses of people who signs up or subscribes for a free gift or newsletters.

So what a smart internet marketer would do is set up a website that describes the benefits of a particular product and at the end of the description to have a means of allowing an interested reader to fill in his or her name and email address to either, receive a free gift (report, eBook or software) and/or to sign up for a newsletter. This single page website is known as a squeeze page or landing page.

The function of a squeeze/landing page is to describe the benefits the product would bring to the reader and get them interested enough to fill in their names and email addresses in boxes (known as opt-in boxes) and then send them to the affiliate product website.

So the basic idea is to drive as much traffic (known as suspects at this stage) as possible to the squeeze/landing page and get as many suspects as possible to submit their names and email addresses (which would turn them into prospects) and send them to the affiliate product website. And let the scintillating sales page on the affiliate product website convert as many prospects as possible into buyers. And if its done successfully, you’re on your way to financial freedom!

Depending on the method the traffic is driven or generated, the squeeze/landing page could take on a more complicated form. A reader searching on the internet for a solution for a problem or answer is initially looking for information. If your squeeze/landing page contains relevant information besides opt-in boxes, the reader would tend to stay longer. In between your pages of relevant information, there are simple links that contain your affiliate information (known as affiliate links) which the readers click for more information. This would bring them to the affiliate product website and this would increase your conversion rate of turning the suspects into prospects and then to buyers.

Yes, the internet marketing newbie still do need to build a simple website in form of a squeeze/landing page. To enable this squeeze/landing page to be put up on the Internet, a domain name and a web-hosting account is required. This can be obtained from web-hosting companies like An Hosting, Netfirms or Hostgator.

A domain name is the web address or the URL (Universal Resource Locator) that you type in the box at the top to go to a website. A web-hosting account is an account you opened with a web-hosting company to store all your website information (design, layout, contents of your website). These web-hosting companies stores your website information (among many others) on computers commonly called servers, that runs 24/7 so that anyone on the Internet can access your website at any time.

To build a simple website, a software that can create and edit a webpage is used. Frontpage, Dreamweaver and NVU can be used for creating and editing a webpage. Of course, if an affiliate marketer finds all this beyond his/her capability, website building can be out-sourced.

Therefore affiliate marketing is one of the easiest, fastest and low-cost way for an inexperienced internet marketer to start making money online.

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