I’ve been doing a little affiliate marketing and my first campaign with eBay is doing great so far. I would like to share what I’ve come to learn to save you all the time and money in starting out in affiliate marketing.

Find A Merchant

As for example, eBay, they have an in-house affiliate system that lets you earn money per sale of item. A percent of the price of the item is given to you as a commission.

You may come and apply as eBay’s affiliate by signing up, its free, but you’ll need a website to apply. Payment are sent by Paypal with minimum of $5 per month. Payments are sent every 25th of the month.

Not all merchants have their inhouse affiliate system. This is what Ad Networks do. They have the system, the tracking and the merchants, all they need are internet marketers or affiliates to help them promote the merchant’s product.

Money are made differently with these type of networks and will vary from merchant to merchant. An example is a Mortgage Company, they will pay you if you get a visitor to sign up and fill up a valid form. This is called Pay Per Lead. If the merchant offers CPA, they want sales, and they will pay you for every sale, its called CPA, Cost Per Action. The thing I’m doing with eBay is CPA.

An example of an Ad Network is PepperJam Network, I’ve been using them and eBay is also advertising on PepperJam. There are tons of ad network around like Commission Junction, Azoogleads, but personally, I say that PepperJam Network is the easiest to get into. CJ needs legal papers that you have to fax them and Azoogle doesn’t accept applicants from the Philippines.

Get An Affiliate Site Up

Buy a hosting and a domain this is by far the best way to start in affiliate marketing. So when you mess up a site and its reputation, you won’t mess up your main site. But if you have your own way to promote products or give a review on your personal blog, that’s your choice.

After you found a merchant. you can go talk to your affiliate manager on how to go about promoting the merchant’s product. But you can also go on ahead and build a site around it without telling them. If you are going to make a site around the merchant’s product, keep in mind that you should have the 3 important pages that Google wants in a site. It is, Privacy Policy, Terms of Service and the Contact Page. An affiliate website should contain this pages so not to regard you as a spam site when visual inspection happens.

Some affiliate call this a landing page. But years have changed that google doesn’t allow landing pages anymore. Landing pages today is a mixture of a 1 page with sales pitch and a blog or a review of the product. Making the site as legit as possible in the eyes of Google.

Promoting Your Affiliate Site

There are 2 ways to promote affiliate products.

• Organic SEO Traffic - Traditional link building and optimizing of pages for organic search engine results. Most people prefer this one because its free. The only drawback with this kind of internet promotion is that it takes a while before you see results.
• PPC, Paid Search - Most of the big time affiliates invest in PPC or Paid Search internet marketing. The benefits of this is that you can see results instantly. The only drawback is that it costs money to promote. And sometimes will cost you even more when you messed up. I suggest not to mess with PPC or Paid Search unless you know what you’re doing.

Other Way

• Social Media Promotion - I think to best describe this is an A list blog. When an A list blog make a review of a product, you know that a percent of his readers will buy that product. There are no drawbacks and the promotion is free.

Tracking Your Sales

PepperJam Network has their own tracking system. You can track the # of clicks and the amount of money you earn. And by using other programs like Tracking202 to track the clicks and the keyword they used to arrive at your site, the percent of conversion, you can easily scale your campaign to a larger profit.

Scaling Your Affiliate Earnings

Scaling is the last part of affiliate marketing and is the make it or break it part in this industry. For example, if you can earn $400 this month, be sure to scale what you’re process of obtaining that $400 per month and SCALE it to make it to possible $500 per month. Know what makes your earnings and scale. An example scenario is that an affiliate marketer has been promoting in MSN. Earning $500 per month. He decided to scale his campaign, went to Yahoo Paid Search then in Google Adwords, he netted from 500 to $5000 per month.

Affiliate Marketing has a huge potential and many people are silently earning millions of dollars per month at home.