Affiliate marketing is one of the most appealing business models for earning money online. Why? Simply because it allows you to potentially earn a lot of money from home without sacrificing your time. Affiliate marketing is not easy, and anyone who believes otherwise is in for a rude awakening. Similarly, it is not a "get rich quick" scheme, and it does require a significant amount of work. However, once you've established your affiliate marketing business model, you can earn a consistent stream of passive income - potentially indefinitely. Passive income simply means that you will earn money while you sleep and while on vacation. While the initial setup required some effort, it eventually becomes self-sustaining to the point where you can stop working and continue to sow the seeds of your labor for years to come. And, while affiliate marketing is not easy, it is far easier than many other business models. That is, it is simpler to understand, simpler to get started with, and simpler to execute. While there may be some trial and error, the initial stages are frequently nothing more than copying and pasting existing businesses! Affiliate marketing could be the solution you're looking for. The only caveat is that you must go in with realistic expectations and be strategic in your approach. You can hack this setup and start earning a lot of money very quickly if you have the right knowledge and access to the best marketing ‘secrets.’ That's where this book comes in: keep reading to learn about the effective strategies you can use to get the most out of affiliate marketing.

The Basics 

Before we continue, let's quickly review what affiliate marketing is. There's a good chance those reading this eBook/report already understand the concept, but for those who don't, this basic explanation of the business model will tell you everything you need to know...

The Setup:

Being an affiliate marketer is similar to being a commission-based salesperson. In other words, you are paid a portion of a product's profit as an incentive to assist the product's creator in selling it. This is similar to a door-to-door salesperson, but the main difference is that you'll be selling your products online. This gives you the ability to reach a much larger audience of buyers and sell a much larger quantity of products. So, instead of selling Sky TV to three people per day, you can now sell an eBook to 10, 20, 100, or 1,000 people per day, depending on your skill level.

At the same time, selling digital products such as eBooks (which are frequently used in affiliate marketing) means that the product creator has no overhead. There are no manufacturing costs, storage requirements, packaging, or delivery... That means you're getting nearly 100% of the sale price to split between you. Furthermore, because digital product manufacturers can easily scale their operations, they are frequently willing to offer 40, 60, or even 75 percent of their profits for each sale. They may even offer their marketers the use of marketing materials they have already created, such as e-mails, blog posts, landing pages, and so on. They are delighted to do so because any victory for you is also a victory for them. This is how you can start an online business by simply 'copying and pasting' someone else's! As an affiliate marketer, your job will be to find products to sell, which will be found on affiliate networks like JVZoo and Click bank. Following that, you will be given a referral link that you can use to recommend the product to others. If someone purchases the product through that link, they will be redirected to a page that will store cookies on their computer, and the sale will be attributed to you. You can then withdraw your money whenever you want. The ability to reach the right audience and make the product sound desirable is the skill of an affiliate marketer and what will allow you to thrive. This will eventually be accomplished through the use of PPC (pay per click advertising), SEO (search engine optimization), email marketing, social media marketing, and other similar techniques.

What to Expect from Affiliate Marketing  

The first and most important consideration before you get started with affiliate marketing is to know what you want to get out of it. This may sound like the ‘boring stuff’ and perhaps you just want to get stuck in as quickly as possible; in fact though, not knowing your goals or having the wrong expectations can be a huge setback if you don’t take the time to think this through. It’s no exaggeration to say that this is a big part of why a lot of people fail at affiliate marketing. Largely responsible for this issue, are all the adverts that flood Facebook telling you that you can earn thousands of dollars a day by just posting a few ads. Then there are people like Tai Lopez, telling you that you can earn millions like them and be a genius billionaire by following their course. This sets up unrealistic expectations and leads to people going into affiliate marketing underprepared and with a lot of false hope. It also leads to some serious mistakes

• In theory, you can make money as an affiliate marketer by following four very easy steps

•  Find an affiliate product to market on JVZoo or Click bank

• Create a landing page flaunting the benefits of said product and including your link

• Pay for highly targeted PPC ads through Facebook

• Profit!

Easy right? Facebook ads are PPC which means that you only pay if someone clicks them. So if you set-up an advertising campaign that’s entirely ineffective and everyone ignores… it won’t cost you anything! If your landing page is very good then you can expect to convert a fair amount of visitors into buyers and with a decent digital product, you should be able to earn about $30-$50 per purchase. Considering that you’ll only be paying a few cents for each customer – who has already shown an interest in your product – that means that you can almost guarantee a decent ROI from those advertising campaigns. The longer the ad runs, the more you can earn and the more you can reinvest to scale your products. What’s more, you can target the ads to show to precisely the right people using the information available on Facebook. Got a book on how to plan a cheap wedding? Great: just target your book toward people who are engaged on Facebook! Meanwhile, you can build up your own direct audience through a website and through a mailing list so that eventually you won’t even need to pay from advertising and you can sell over and over again to your list that puts their trust in everything you say and recommend. This is the promise of affiliate marketing and it sounds like a simple, fool-proof way to make money. But there are some catches that very often get overlooked by the people selling the online courses and the eBooks for $1,000. One of these catches is that there are hundreds of other people trying to sell eBooks on making money. And there are hundreds of other people competing for the advertising space on Facebook. Facebook ads show based on who has the larger advertising budget and the result is determined by an automated ‘bidding process’. In other words, you need a fairly large budget in order for your ads to be seen, meaning that you can actually end up spending 50cents to several dollars for your ads to get clicked. This now means that you can still profit, but in order to do so, you need the perfect landing page and the perfect product for the ideal audience. These are a lot of factors that you’re frankly unlikely to get right the very first time. As a result, it’s not uncommon to end up sinking huge amounts of money into PPC before you land on a good set-up with the right targeting, the right ad text, the right product etc.

As for building your own audience, this can often take years before you’re at a point where you don’t need PPC. If you thought you’d be the top blogger in your niche within months, then you unfortunately need a reality check. Rather, you can expect it to take you a year or more to get to this point. And far from doing nothing, this will have to involve writing regular content and doing lots of promotion – almost to the extent of it being a full time job. And while you’re doing this, you won’t be getting paid for the work you’re doing. A lot of us just can’t afford to put such a big investment into something that isn’t paying out yet. And when you had gone into this, expecting that you would be a millionaire by month two, it’s very easy to get disheartened and to just give up.

The Right Strategy 

So, what can you do about it? Is it a hopeless case? No, there are thousands of people who have made affiliate marketing work for them and earned millions of dollars doing so. JVZoo's elite program requires a monthly income of at least $10,000, and there are plenty of members. The key is to be realistic and devise a strategy for balancing your current lifestyle with your affiliate marketing goals. The first key to success is to stack the deck in your favor by understanding how affiliate marketing works and what you can do to make it work for you. This eBook will teach you how to avoid common mistakes and find products that sell quickly and cost you less to advertise. The second key - and this is critical - is to start with modest goals. Don't aim to be a billionaire. Instead, aim to supplement your current income by $50 per week. That may not seem like much, but it's very easy to achieve, and once you get there, you'll be making $200 per month and $2,400 per year. That's a significant raise, especially considering you won't be taking on any additional responsibilities. You'll be able to take an extra vacation every year or dine out with your family every month without feeling guilty. What about getting that slick new computer you've been eyeing? And once you've reached that point, you'll be able to begin investing more time and money in order to expand your business even further. We'll look at how to scale a successful affiliate marketing business model later, and you'll see how quickly you can progress from here to internet dominance!

Finally, pick a niche that you enjoy and are familiar with. If you can sell products in a niche that you enjoy and understand, you will be able to turn writing about those topics into a hobby that you enjoy. This makes a big difference in your overall success because it allows you to take your eye off the goal and not just see these activities as a means to an end.

Product Selection 

Before you begin, the most important factor in your success is product selection. This is what will help you ensure that your product has an audience and will dictate what you write about, who your target demographic is, how much profit you make, and other factors. To begin, make a list of all the niches you'd like to write about and in which you have some experience. This will not be relevant right away, but it will make a significant difference when it comes to promoting a blog and building your own audience later on. What we're looking for right now is a niche that isn't oversaturated with digital products and affiliate offers. We'll start with a digital product because it will yield the highest profit per sale, allowing you to generate more revenue from a smaller number of buyers. Later on, you may be interested in selling physical products, which have a much wider appeal - you can read the full Affiliate Marketing Secrets eBook for an in-depth treatment of that subject. When you look at the digital products on a network like Clickbank or JVZoo, you might notice something right away: they're almost entirely in the'make money online' niche. In fact, if you look at the network 'WSO' (Warrior Special Offers), you'll notice that it's entirely made up of products in that niche. I want you to resist the temptation to make this your first niche. Why? Because, as you can see, it is already a highly competitive field. If you try to sell a product in this niche, you'll be competing with nearly every other affiliate marketer and product creator on the internet. As a result, you'll pay significantly more for each of your ads to appear on Facebook, Google AdWords, or wherever else you choose. Furthermore, you will find it difficult to stand out to that audience. This audience is very web savvy; they probably understand how the affiliate marketing business model works, and they've probably come across some really bad products in this niche. Even if you've chosen a genuine high-quality product, your offer will be viewed cynically, and they'll assume you're only looking to make money. They've been burned before, they're inundated with such offers, and selling to them requires a lot more marketing.

However, selling something to a much smaller niche means you can pay significantly less for your ads and reach an audience that hasn't seen offers like yours before. You can potentially offer them something that solves a real problem they've been dealing with and promises to make their lives easier: this is how you make money. A splendid example of this is deciding on a career. This is an extremely specific niche that you can target both directly and indirectly through Facebook and Google AdWords (AdWords ads are ads that appear on Google searches). Pat Flynn is the founder of 'Smart Passive Income.com,' and he shows how this can be applied to his 'food truck' niche. He has a website dedicated to food truck drivers, and he uses it to sell a digital product that can help them make more money from what they do. This is ideal because there are millions of English-speaking food truck drivers around the world who are not constantly targeted with these types of products.

We talked about the wedding planning niche earlier. For a few reasons, an eBook on how to save money on wedding planning is a perfect niche:

• It is not oversaturated with similar digital products.

• The book promises to save money, making it an investment

• The book promises to save money, making it an investment. It's easy to target - people post their relationship status on Facebook and conduct a lot of predictable searches when planning weddings.

• The audience is young and thus likely tech-savvy enough to be interested in digit

• The demographic is constantly changing in other words, people are getting engaged all the time, so you'll never saturate the market and run out of people to sell to.

Another excellent option is to sell a product to a segment of a larger audience. The fitness niche is another extremely oversaturated area for digital products, right after making money online. There are numerous books on how to get abs, build muscle, and lose weight. However, if you choose a specific area of fitness to target, you can still make this work. How about preparing for a marathon? What about adolescent bodybuilding? What about fitness for people over the age of fifty? Again, these are specific niches that are constantly replenishing and provide you with a large number of potential customers. Furthermore, these areas allow you to later branch out with future products, allowing you to make more money from your market in the future.

Route to Market 

Your 'path to market' is another factor to consider. A marketing route is simply a platform through which you will reach your specific target demographic. If you have an eBook of knitting patterns, your marketing options are as follows:

• Knitting forums and online communities 

• Knitting magazines

• Knitting clubs and societies in your area

• Knitting websites

When determining your niche, consider your potential routes to market. And, as with the niche itself, the key here is to find a route to market that will not be flooded with competition. If your eBook is the only one aimed specifically at this audience, it will have a much better chance of selling.