Thursday 19 April 2012

Making Money Selling Other People's Products

By Rui Ludovino


A lot of people are now getting into online businesses and online marketing either to supplement their "real world" income or for it to become their primary source of income. Why? Because online marketing just provides them a lot of benefits!First, you can reach just about anybody in the world who has Internet access if you market your products online. That means a wider market for you, which can translate to larger profits. Second, setting up an online business requires only a fraction of the cost required to set up an actual business establishment, which means a lot of savings for the business owner.

Another aspect that has attracted a lot of people towards online marketing is the fact that one doesn't have to have his own products to get started. In online marketing, one can start making a lot of money just by selling, or even by just trying to sell, other people's products. And getting started with this kind of marketing strategy is actually quite easy. All that one needs to do is to set up an agreement with an online retailer or merchant, and after everything is settled, one can immediately start making money by selling the merchant's or the retailer's products.

Incidentally, the most popular and the fastest growing method of selling other people's products online is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing, in its simplest definition, is a relationship between an online merchant or retailer, who has products to sell, and his affiliates, who are willing to promote the merchant's product on their website.

In a typical affiliate marketing set up, the merchant provides his affiliates with banners and text ads that links to his site. The affiliates will then get these ads posted on their website and they get paid whenever traffic or sales is directed to the merchant's website. Affiliates are often paid on commission basis, although other online merchants would opt to pay a fixed fee for the affiliate's compensation.

Some affiliate marketing programs are two-tier programs, wherein the affiliate is also allowed to recommend other affiliates to the merchant. In such affiliate programs, the affiliate would not only be paid for the traffic or sales that he would direct to the merchant's site but also for the traffic or sales directed by the affiliates who signed up with the program through his recommendation. Yet another way of earning more profits with affiliate marketing is through residual affiliate programs. Residual affiliate programs are affiliate programs where the affiliate gets paid a number of times for as long as the merchant keeps the customer the affiliate has referred to his site. One form of residual program gets the affiliate paid a commission every time the referred customer purchases something on the merchant's site. Another form of residual affiliate program gets the affiliate paid a percentage every month for as long as the company keeps the referred customer.

When you sign up with an affiliate marketing program, you are usually required to fill out a form containing information about yourself. Some affiliate programs may also require you to present the URL of your website and describe its contents. This will allow the retailers to verify that you actually have a website with contents that are relevant to their products. Some affiliate programs, however, won't require you to have a website. After filling out the form and all, you are then allowed to choose the affiliate programs you want to promote.




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