SEO In Plain English

Very basically, affiliate marketing involves you getting leads or sales in exchange for money. Think of a lead as you leading a potential customer to a sale or service. For example, having them enter their zip code or cell phone number can be considered a lead. In a very basic sense, this is how it works. You sign up with an affiliate marketing network and then login to your account. You can then browse the available offers. You get information about the offer, such as how much you will be paid per lead, the landing page and available banners and text-link ads.

Follow along with this example. Later below, I will explain how you can do this if you don’t have a site. You have a site where you review different Internet service providers (ISP). Your site is getting popular and you are looking to make some money. You browse your affiliate network website for an offer that will appeal to your demographic group. You stumble upon one offer for 6 months of free Internet. This seems perfect for your audience; People coming to your site for information on ISPs are likely to be interested in this offer than in ringtones or ipods. You click the campaign to view more information on it.

There is an offer for a company called “Earth OnLine” (EOL). It is an Internet service provider that is looking for customers, and will pay you $2 per lead. The lead is just a phone number; The fancy landing page asks for a phone number and offers 6 months of free Internet to anybody who signs up. You know you are getting paid $2 every time somebody enters their phone number on the landing page and hits “submit.” What EOL does with the phone numbers, or whether or not the user goes through the whole process and gets 6 months of free Internet isn’t your problem.

You place a banner for EOL on your site, a paper weight on the F5 key, then light up your pipe and sit back to watch your account balance increase as your screen is refreshing. At this point, you know that traffic = money, and might use SEO to raise your Google rank, to raise traffic to your site. This is the basic idea, except…

You don’t have a popular website, how would you make money via affiliate marketing? OK! So you understand where your money would come from now, but you’re missing one thing: A popular site–more specifically, traffic. It doesn’t matter how you go about it, you need hits! You can put the affiliate offer in an email and spam it to millions of people, you can try to convince everybody you know to go to your offer landing page directly and put in their info, etc. (Note: Don’t waste your time with spam or fraud.)

These ideas could work, but are impractical and not worth the hassle. There’s another way: Paying for traffic. If you had a product or a site, how would you market it? One way is Pay-Per-Click (PPC). You create an advertisement (banner, text link, etc) about your product or site, and then pay to advertise it. You have neither a product, nor a site, so what are you advertising? The campaign itself. You act as a middle man between potential consumers and the company looking for leads.

You sign up for an advertising network like Yahoo! Publishing Network (YPN) or Google AdWords. These let you create ads based around certain keywords. Your ads are viewed on the sides of a search engine’s results page under “sponsored ads” or similar label, if somebody searches for the keywords you chose to use in your ad. You have to pay every time somebody clicks your ad. How much? It depends on the keywords you use.

Let’s use the EOL example again. You want to promote the EOL offer but do not have a site. You log into your advertising network and begin finding keywords you want your ad for EOL to show up under. You find out that “ISP” and “free isp” have a lot of competition because they are popular: $5/click. If somebody clicks your ad (-$5) and signs up(+$2), you’d still be down $3. You settle for the keyword “free internet provider.” Not as many people search for that term as they do for “free isp” (this is all off the top of my head, I haven’t researched ISP keywords). Due to far less competition, it’s only $0.02/click. Somebody clicks (-$0.02), and signs up(+$2.00), and you just pocketed $1.98.

It turns into a numbers game. It doesn’t mean much if you’re making $10K/day when you’re putting down $11K/day for marketing. You’re accumulating a $1K debt everyday. You have to look at your ROI. It’s not uncommon for ringtones to offer ~$15/lead, for example. The problem? ringtones are a saturated niche. The competition is too much for most people to compete with these days. At $15/lead, you’d only be making $1.00 if you’re paying for $14/click keywords. Actually less because many people who click the ad won’t complete the campaign. As with most types of marketing campaigns, it’s important to understand the numbers. A lead that pays low might not necessarily make you more money than one that pays you significantly more. You have to take into account the level of competition for that particular niche, the market, and so forth.

Just the fact that you have to invest some money into affiliate marketing before you see a profit will eliminate a large number of people from ever trying it. Another large number of people will quit because after trying it a few times and losing money. The people who persist - and more importantly, learn from their mistakes - are the ones that eventually prosper. It’s an art.

Thanks to amuk2006 for the photo.