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Internet Marketing |
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Copyright © 2008 Profit 2 Day All Rights Reserved |
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Internet Marketing Background
What is Internet marketing? IM has been around for years (since 1996), but has recently gained more exposure because of the huge opportunity it provides for anyone who wants to start an online business. If you could make some money from the comfort of your home, perhaps just bring in a little bit extra that would help pay the bills, this would be great wouldn't it? Internet marketing allows you to do this. IM is a growing occupation as more and more people take it up full time and earn $100,000's every year advertising other people’s products and services online. The concept is similar to any regular job. You go to work and make money for the company that you work for. It’s exactly the same with IM, but you are your own boss, you get to choose your own hours, work as much (or as little) as you want to, and the company you are working for is yourself. This way you get to keep all the money and not just make someone else rich! There are 10,000's of companies online that are willing to pay you a performance-based commission if you can drive sales to the websites promoting their products and services. To do this you join the "affiliate programs" run by these companies. Your job as an "affiliate" is to align online consumers with the products that they are looking for. Affiliate marketing is a fantastic opportunity because billions of dollars are spent online each year and a large percentage of that goes to affiliates. Internet marketing is a broad term and there are many different ways of making money online. Some methods are free, some are paid, some require more work, some require less; but the fact of the matter is that anyone can make money online and there are hundreds of different ways you can accomplish this. Your office is the Internet, and you can do whatever your mind will allow you to! There are unlimited opportunities and the amount of money you can make within the Internet marketing world is endless. We're sure you’ve heard the term "Affiliate" before and many of you probably know what it means, but for those who don't we are going to explain exactly what an affiliate is. In the Internet marketing world, you will likely take on the role of an Affiliate unless you own a product, in which case you would be called the Merchant. Affiliates and merchants have a direct relationship and it is very important that the relationship is a good one. The term "affiliate" stems from the fact that you are "affiliated" with a company, and are working for them, though you don’t usually have a contract. At any one time, you may be working as an affiliate for many companies, promoting a large number of different products. Affiliates work for merchants by bringing customers to the merchant’s front door (in this case the website) and earning money in the process. If you are an affiliate of a company and you send a visitor to the merchant website through your special link, you are now eligible to be credited for anything that the visitor buys while at the merchant website. When a visitor buys something, the merchant will pay you a commission ...sometimes up to 75% of what the item costs. So, it’s simple; as an affiliate, it is your job to get web surfers (traffic) to visit the merchant site. Why are affiliates important to merchants? If you are a merchant and have a product that you want to sell online, you may not have the expertise to advertise the product online, so you have partnerships with affiliates who will do this for you. You pay your affiliates a percentage for every sale that they generate. As a merchant, you’ll get less overall return on investment (ROI), but you will reach potential customers you wouldn’t have been able to attract otherwise. Many companies rely completely on their affiliates to bring them business and they are more than happy to pay them for that service. The relationship between affiliate and merchant is very important. As a merchant, you must provide your affiliates with as much support and as many promotional resources as you can to help them publicize your product. You must also be sure to send out your payments on time. The fastest way to lose affiliates is to not pay on time.
Advertising Now you know what it means to be an affiliate and how an affiliate relates to a merchant. Since you are likely to start your business as an affiliate, you are probably wondering what your main role is. It must be simple to just send traffic to a website and make money from it- right? WRONG! This is the role of Wealthy Affiliate: to help affiliates learn how to send traffic to their merchant websites and how to turn this traffic into buyers. There are a number of ways to generate traffic, but the fastest way to get results is to advertise. When you visit www.google.com, and do a search for something, you’ll most likely see a list of boxes on the right-hand side of the screen. These boxes are called sponsored listings, and advertisers are paying Google to put their ads there. There isn’t a set cost to have an ad placed, as your cost depends on how many people click on your ad and the quality of your ad campaigns. This is called "paid traffic", and is also known as "Pay-Per-Click advertising" (PPC). When a web surfer does a search and clicks on a sponsored listing, it costs the advertiser money. How much depends on the amount the advertiser is bidding on the term that the surfer typed into the Google search box. Wait a minute, so what do sponsored listings have to do with me, the affiliate? As an affiliate, it is your responsibility to get people to visit the merchant site. Advertising in Google is a great way to do this. This is the world of Pay-Per-Click advertising. You sign up with Google Adwords (their advertising network), and create ads that will be shown in the search listings. You will pay Google every time someone clicks on your ad and is taken to the web page of your choice (usually a page that you create, and in turn links to the merchant site). Google Adwords isn’t the only place that you can advertise online. It isn’t the only search engine out there. Another big PPC network is Yahoo! Search Marketing. It works in a similar way to Google Adwords in that you pay for your ads to be displayed within the Yahoo search results. We’re not going to get into the specifics of Google and Yahoo advertising here because both techniques need more explanation than we can give in an introduction.
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