Should Newbies Sell Affiliate Products

One of the great advantages of selling affiliate products is that there is no sales experience necessary. In addition, the merchant normally provides you with the marketing material needed to promote his product. This includes email letters for you to send, also a range of banners and text links. Some merchants are starting to provide video or audio clips as well.

The main expense you have as an affiliate is the cost of advertising. Yet, the risk is minimal. If the product you are advertising is not making money then you can simply drop it and choose another, there are no long-term contracts binding you to a particular merchant.

Affiliate programs really are an excellent way to make money from your web site, or even if you don't have a web site. Sign up to programs that are free to join. You'll find that there are thousands of products and services for you to choose from. You'll eventually learn how to choose the best affiliate products.

As an affiliate, you advertise the merchant’s products and earn commissions each time someone makes a purchase. Most information products pay you an average commission of 50% of the sale, and many are now paying as much as 70%. Hard goods pay a lot less, anywhere from 5% to 20% on average.

Even though I said that no sales experience is necessary, you'll obviously do much better if you do your homework when it comes to promoting affiliate products.

Marketing affiliate products isn’t always as easy as it sounds. To be a successful affiliate you need quite a few products, preferably in 2 or 3 niches, or specialties. If you find 20 products in 3 niches, that is more than enough. However it's best to start with only 5 or 6 products until you get the feel of how to choose profitable ones.

Your main responsibility as an affiliate is to advertise and create new sales for the merchant. Remember that you are doing all the work for the merchant, and all he does is deliver the product, and pay you your commission. Of course, he also has customer service to take care of.

So do you see here, the main disadvantage with affiliate marketing? That customer is not yours, he gets added to the mailing list of the merchant. So you can't follow up in the future and sell to this customer. There is a solution for this, but not many affiliates use it.

You can direct your prospect to your landing page, where you ask him for his first name and email. Only after this do you send him to the merchant's link. This method is quite controversial, as there is a danger of losing the sale if the prospect doesn't like the idea.

I suggest you give the client the choice of signing up to your email list, and send him to the sales page, whether he signs up or not. You can also consider offering the prospect a free gift (ebook or video) to sign up to your list. This incentive is used by all successful affiliates growing a big list.

There is really a lot you can learn to improve your chances of succeeding as an affiliate. And that's at my web site at Visit Here to Learn where you will find lots of free information that will help you.

Fred Farah