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    It all begins and ends with Affiliate Marketing. There are multiple ways to make money online, but almost ALL of them come down to affiliate marketing.
     
    What does affiliate marketing mean? When you send a visitor elsewhere, and they in turn make a purchase, then you will get a commission. If you are the creator of a product than it also includes collecting ‘affiliates’ to sell your product for you, offering them a percentage of sales.
     
    The first, and most well known, online affiliate is Amazon. Perhaps you dont remember or didnt pay attention to all those times that you would search for a product and find yourself on a particular site, only to be funneled into Amazon to finalize the purchase.
     
    The concept is soo fantastic for both sides playing the game.
     

     
    First lets take the side of the non product owner. I want to make some money on the web, but I have nothing to sell… hmm, what shall I do? Well I create a site on a topic that I know a lot about – like babies or whatever, and then I just write product reviews about these products. Each product review sends the visitor via a link to sites where the items on review can be purchased. Bam! You make sales. This is the explanation in the most simplest form, but whether you are pursuing email marketing, pay-per-click marketing, etc., your success results in receiving commissions on a product sold (that someone else created!).  You just have to search for the highest commissions. At Clickbank, you can get up to 75% commission since the products are all digital, requiring no shipping, and little overhead costs. Definitely worth looking into and signing up for free.
     
    Now lets take the side of the product owner. If you knew that you could get an army of people visiting your site and potentially making a purchase - by giving away a %age of your sales - would you?? The answer seems like a No-Brainer to me! Have you ever wondered how to get FREE TRAFFIC?? Get an affiliate program! Then you have affiliates using THEIR resources, at THEIR expense to send you traffic, and all they get in return is a %age of a product that is SOLD.. so this is win, win for you!
     
    Of course, if you really know what you are doing, the best way to win is to purchase a product with Resale Rights (meaning you can sell it and keep 100% of the profit), and create an affiliate program. If you continually purchase these, you can have a constant stream of products coming in, without doing the creative work, and you just have to make available the information for your affiliates to make sure they continue to promote for you. We will get to Resale rights next..
     
    Be Well,
     
    Andrea
     
    PS – Taken From Wikipedia..
     
    The following abbreviations are commonly used in affiliate marketing.

    • AD – Advertisement, text, banner, flash, video etc.
    • CJ – Commission Junction (Network)
    • CPA – Cost per action
    • CPC – Cost per click
    • CPL – Cost per lead
    • CPM – Cost per mil (mil/mille/M = latin/Roman numeral for thousand)
    • CPS – Cost per sale
    • CR – Conversion rate
    • CTR – Click through rate
    • DRM – Dynamic rich media (type of Ad, technology). It has nothing to do with DRM as in digital rights management
    • EPC – Earnings per click / earnings per 100 clicks
    • LS – Linkshare (Network)
    • OPM – (or APM) – outsourced (affiliate) program management
    • PFI – Pay for inclusion
    • PID – Publisher ID (Affiliate/Affiliate site ID)
    • PF – Performics (Network)
    • PFP – Pay For performance
    • PPA – Pay per action
    • PPC – Pay per click
    • PPCSE – Pay per click search engine
    • PPI – Pay per impression
    • PPL – Pay per lead
    • PPS – Pay per sale
    • ROI – Return on investment
    • SAS – ShareASale (Network)
    • SE – Search engines
    • SEM – Search engine marketing
    • SEO – Search engine optimization
    • SERP – Search engine result page
    • SID – URL parameter the affiliate can pass to get tracked with sales and leads

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