Why become an Affiliate? To Get Paid for Doing What You Love!

I love the con­cept of affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing.  Why?  There are sev­eral good reasons:

1. It makes it pos­si­ble for you to pur­sue your pas­sion (for me, find­ing out ways to make non-job income) and get paid for it.
2. Unlike a reg­u­lar job, with affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing, the harder you work, the more you get paid.  (I know there are caveats to this since you do have the poten­tial for pro­mo­tion in a reg­u­lar job, but there cor­re­la­tion between hard work and job pro­mo­tions is unre­li­able at best and more based on who you know).   The more traf­fic you gen­er­ate on your web­site, the more clicks you get, the more affil­i­ate sales you should receive.
3. Like a reg­u­lar job, with affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing, who you know improves your chances for suc­cess.  Net­work­ing with other sites improves your search result place­ment on sites like Google and expands your web­site expo­sure so that you affil­i­ate links get clicked on more often, gen­er­at­ing more rev­enue for you.
4. With affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing, you do not sell your own prod­ucts so there is very lit­tle risk to you.  You do not have to main­tain an inven­tory, you do not ship any prod­ucts, and, in fact, you have no inter­ac­tion with the end cus­tomer since the mer­chant han­dles all of this for you.
5. Becom­ing an affil­i­ate requires lit­tle or no invest­ment.
6. Affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing is rel­a­tively easy to set up.
7. Affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing is a good way to make pas­sive income (pas­sive income means that you make money with very lit­tle effort to main­tain that flow of money; it orig­i­nates from the real estate idea of earn­ing  rent income on invest­ment prop­er­ties, but applies more to affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing since even less effort is required than with rental prop­er­ties).   It is sim­i­lar to the con­cept coined by Ronco: “…Set it and For­get it”.
8. It is poten­tially a good way to build your website’s rep­u­ta­tion since your web­site brand can be asso­ci­ated with the qual­ity prod­ucts (hope­fully!) you recommend.

So what is affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing?  Wikipedia defines it as a type of rev­enue shar­ing or pay­ing com­mis­sion for referred busi­ness.  Although Amazon.com was not the first to use affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing to sell its goods, it is prob­a­bly the most well known mer­chant to use it.  I have had per­sonal expe­ri­ence using Amazon.com and have found it to be easy to set up and use.

I have heard peo­ple com­plain about affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing because the sales com­mis­sions can be lim­ited.  My answer to that is any amount of money I can earn for expend­ing so lit­tle effort to acquire it is wel­come to me.  It’s kind of like pick­ing up addi­tional div­i­dend checks from stocks I have invested in or find­ing money on the ground when I am not really look­ing that hard to find it.

And, again, the more read­ers that are view­ing your web­site, the more affil­i­ate income you earn while you are pur­su­ing the niche you really enjoy.  It sure beats doing tasks you don’t enjoy to make every dol­lar you make!

I highly rec­om­mend books writ­ten by Scott Fox to gain a bet­ter under­stand­ing about affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing and e-business in gen­eral.  He has gar­nered a lot of expe­ri­ence and is one of the pio­neers in the field, con­sult­ing  and build­ing web­site pres­ences for lumi­nar­ies such as Bill O’Reilly.   I have per­son­ally read two of Scott’s books thus far, and have learned a lot of infor­ma­tion from them:

• Inter­net Riches: The Sim­ple Money-Making Secrets of Online Millionaires

• e-Riches 2.0: Next-Generation Mar­ket­ing Strate­gies for Mak­ing Mil­lions Online

Among other ways of cre­at­ing income on the Inter­net, Scott dis­cusses affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing and gives exam­ples who have used it suc­cess­fully as well.

Another good resource for affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing is Allen Gardyne’s site.   He has affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing tuto­ri­als geared for the begin­ner through advanced and he has A LOT of addi­tional qual­ity mate­r­ial about affil­i­ate marketing.

If this arti­cle has helped you, please send me a com­ment.  I would love to hear how affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing has helped you!