In our last discussion on affiliate marketing, we talked mostly about the advantages of affiliate marketing and why it’s so popular. For this discussion let’s take a closer look at just how affiliate marketing works.

To be successful in affiliate marketing you need to get off on the right foot. And getting off on the right foot by and large begins with selecting a good product.

So what is a good product?

The better affiliates look for high quality products that deliver a solution to a need in the marketplace. We talked about this in an earlier discussion on how to go about selecting your niche when it comes to affiliate marketing.

An important factor in the personality of a product as we look a little deeper into this is to best determine what your problem rate of return for your efforts will be if you decide to market this product as an affiliate.

One of the first aspects that I look at is that I go to the advertisers website or the possible product’s sales page. Beyond that of course you want to check out the price of the product, and the percent of commission you will receive by referring sales of that product.

Finally, as your first pass over looking at a possible affiliate product, you’ll want to check out how much support and creative is available for you to effectively market that product. In other words, how good or bountiful are the advertiser’s marketing tools that are available to you.

Once you’ve decided upon a good product in a good niche the only thing left for you to do as an affiliate (assuming that you’ve already got a website) is to devise effective ways to drive traffic to your site and ultimately refer that traffic to your affiliate product.

In its most basic form that’s really all there is to affiliate marketing.

As an affiliate marketer as you begin to advance your techniques you will probably operate on a slightly more complex level. You may decide to supplement your marketing strategy with variations of different models. For instance, you may choose to direct your traffic to some type of intervening page that would offer a sign-up for a free report based on the product or niche that you are trying to penetrate.

This type of model enables the affiliate to have the chance to capture a potential customer’s name and will also give the affiliate marketer a chance to do a more effective job of pre-selling and even leveraging their growing list for revenue to be made on the back end.

But with all of that said… and will certainly get into more detail as we progress… here it is in a nutshell about affiliate marketing… choose a product… then drive traffic.

Coming up in just a bit we’ll take a look at actual product creation and what that’s all about in affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing’s popularity these days is quite high and there are good reasons for it. In a previous discussion on affiliate marketing, I mentioned that affiliate marketing is well accepted because it is so simple to not only implement but maintain as well.

But, beyond that, as we learn affiliate marketing, let’s look at some other factors that have brought affiliate marketing to the forefront.

First off, affiliates don’t have to go about long labor intensive process of actually creating a tangible product or service. As you might imagine, this takes a bit of time to either created the product yourself or the expense of having outsourced. And if you’re just starting out, then outsourcing probably isn’t even an option for you at this point.

Even on a good day, product creation takes time and energy… time and energy that you could spend on marketing an affiliate product.

Technically… as an affiliate you don’t have to go niche hunting. Now you may say… wait… you have to pick out a niche with an available affiliate marketing program. And yes, this is true… but the advertiser has already done the niche research and have presented a product for the niche… you need merely explore the possibilities as to how this niche fits you.

As you learn affiliate marketing it doesn’t take long to appreciate the fact that with affiliate marketing, you don’t have to worry about the product delivery and support pipeline. For those just starting out in the business this is a big advantage. Affiliate marketing gives you the chance to learn about the business of Internet marketing and various niches without the personal risk of time, energy, and money that creating a product would.

And since you aren’t involved in the delivery of the product, you aren’t involved with customer support or customer satisfaction issues. This alone is the reason that many of us gravitate toward the affiliate marketing model with a least a portion of our business.

As you learn affiliate marketing you can see that structurally speaking the affiliate marketing model is very easy to implement and that’s why it is so attractive to many Internet marketers… both new and experienced.

Let’s talk more about how it all works next time.