August 31, 2021
The Internet has become a virtual world. There is nothing that you can do in the real world that you cannot do in the virtual world including buying and selling products. This has been a known fact for some time, and when you promote products on the net it is called Internet marketing. There are a number of websites that sell products and a few large organizations that dominate the market.
Companies like Amazon and eBay are some of the most commonly known names although there are a few others as well. While Amazon and eBay sell products, they do not actively advertise for them. Considering their sales volume and growth – Amazon grew 16% last year when compared to 2.4% for retail sales, it is possible that they feel that they do not need to advertise. Yet everyone knows the value of advertising.
This gave birth to what is called the affiliate websites. When you are selling a product, and someone comes to you and tells you that they are willing to promote your product, they are vendors. When they do this online, they are called affiliates. Affiliate marketing works because it is a win-win situation for both parties. The affiliate takes it upon themselves to promote his website.
He toils hard and puts in a lot of effort to increase his ranking on Google. The result is that any product that he is promoting for you will also get the increased exposure, and you have not spent one dime, or one minute of your time to do this. The affiliate is paid a commission that can range anywhere from 4% to 30% on profits depending on the product that they are marketing.
He is paid only if any person who he directs to your site makes a purchase. You may miss your profitability per product here, but your overall profits will increase because of the increase in sales volume. You keep track of who comes to you through whom by giving each of your affiliates a different cookie. This cookie has a definite expiration date and is installed in the system of any person who visits the affiliate site.
When said person comes to you, the cookie in his system will tell you who has sent him allowing you to keep track of both the number of people he directs to your site and the number of sales made. Most of this is automated and it is a system that works for everyone. If instead of being the person who sells the product you are the affiliate, the process is the same, but in reverse. You contact the seller, get his cookie, and you are set.
All you need to do is to put in the legwork to increase your web traffic because it is the basis of all conversions and ultimately the amount of money you make. Because you go to such lengths, investing your hard-earned money and time into promoting a product, you need to make sure that the product that you choose is the right one. There are millions of products being sold online, but not all of them will give you what you are looking for. Then there are the scam artists who are out to cheat you.
This being the case you need to be careful how you choose the product that you want to market. There are a few ways to do this and we will discuss them in detail below.
Where do you stand?
This is the first thing that you have to think of. Either you will be creating a completely new website or blog to market a said product, or you will be integrating it into your already existing site. There are pros and cons to both of these.
Promoting products on an already existing site
If you already have a site or a blog up and running, you are lucky in that you would already have a certain ranking with Google. You can focus your attention on your one site and over time you can get quite a high ranking with all search engines.
The advantage of this model is that you already have a certain amount of traffic that you are getting on a daily or weekly basis, which means that the chance of you getting a sale quickly is higher.In addition, if you have more than one product in your site, even if you put in activity promoting one product, all the other products will reap the benefit. You just have to concentrate on improving the ranking of your one site so that you increase traffic.
Once you do this, if you have made a good choice on the products and if you have designed your web page well, the sales will come.The other side to this is that you will have to pick and choose the kind of products that you can promote. For example, if you have a website that reviews dishwashers, you cannot start selling air conditioners there. You can take your pick of any dishwasher to promote, but you are pretty much limited to only one product category.
Of course, you can try to work around this by creating a generalized website where you can promote anything you like. The problem with that is that such sites have no focus at all. If you want to sell home appliances, beauty products, herbal medicines and books all in the same place, you will have to choose a name that is very general, like “Amazon.com” for example.
Unfortunately, it also takes that much more work to bring it to the notice of search engines first and then to the notice of the public.When a person is looking to purchase anything online, he or she is apt to click on the link that carries the name of the product that they wish to buy. For example, if you name your site www.xyzreview.com people will realize that your site is providing reviews about the product xyz.
If on the other hand you name your site www.purchaseproductsonline.com nobody knows if you are connected in any way to the product xyz and will not click on it. Furthermore, even the search engines will lower your ranking because they tend to give the highest ranking to those sites that carry the search string in the site name itself.
Building separate sites for different products
This is the second option open to affiliates. They can choose to create different niche websites and then actively push their product online so that over time they get a good ranking with search engines, consequently resulting in increased sales. This tactic is a good option in that everything about it is a positive. You can choose a site name that carries the keyword in the name of the site itself.
As mentioned previously, sites that carry the keyword in their address not only have a good chance of getting high up in the rankings, but are also the ones that are clicked on more frequently. You will be targeting a certain product and can focus your attention on that single product, helping you build a good site, one of the prerequisites to getting traffic. Consumers online will only remain and read what you have written if the site looks nice and if the content is worth reading.
By focusing on a single product, you are able to provide targeted content, what people are looking for. This increases your conversion ratio. On the other hand, you will have to create a different site for every product that you promote. This will increase your work a hundred fold because instead of having one site where you can sell five different products, you will have one site selling one product.
This means that if you want to sell a total of five products, you will have to create five different websites, and work on all of them so that they all start becoming income streams for you. It is a little difficult to decide what to do, and many people prefer to go the latter way, creating different sites for different products, because even if it is more work, it gives you more returns. This is the most common advice that you get with regards to affiliate marketing.
Focus is everything and if you do not target one thing, a niche or a product, you cannot hit anything. Yet, this is not always the case because if you create a generalized site but are willing to work on it for some time, you are creating a brand, and over time people will start to recognize the brand. Once this happens, the sky is the limit on what you can promote.
Amazon.com is a simple case in point. The company was started in 1995, but did not show any profit until the fourth quarter of 2001. At that time profits were a modest $5 million on a turnover of nearly $1 billion. Now, just nine years later, it is growing at a rapid 14% while retail sales are struggling to post 2.5% growth. Their profits have grown to more than $2.4 billion, and are still growing. Yet, it is important to note that it took six years for them to become profitable.
