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Using the internet to make money
E-commerce opportunities for business are enormous. The worldwide web provides you with easy access to potential customers and with all possible tools to attract them and turn into loyal clients. And for relatively low costs too!
What is affiliate business?
In affiliate business, instead of selling products, you concentrate on promoting someone elses products. If you watch or read popular bloggers, youve probably noticed that they place various web links in their videos and texts sometimes they even make commercials. Those are affiliate links.
How does it work?
In order to get paid, you need a visitor to click your link and then buy a product or a service. Simple really. Lets use an example.
Along with other companies offering affiliate programs, theres AliExpress a huge Asian wholesaler with more than 400 thousand cheap goods and worldwide shipping. Making affiliate business with it is very popular nowadays.
Many people create online shops and place web links that look like products. They attract visitors by the means of various tools and strategies. A customer then clicks a link and goes to the actual products page. If the client purchases the item, the affiliate partner gets paid a certain percentage. In case of AliExpress, its about 3-10% of the products price depending on the type of product, the customers country, and other factors.
Not much, you say? True. But what if you get your clients buy several goods a day? And what if you have several affiliate stores each making several successful conversions a day? Some affiliate shop owners earn more than $2000 a month!
What are the benefits of affiliate marketing?
-Low start-up budget. All you need are a website, a domain name and a hosting. Joining an affiliate program is actually totally free, but investing little sums into useful tools (such as AliPlugin and other software if youve chosen AliExpress) is a good idea.
-Unlike other e-commerce opportunities, affiliate business doesnt involve dealing with actual products. So theres no headache about warehouses, angry clients, refunds, production costs and other things that cause heart attacks to the managers of big companies.
-Low risks. Since theres not much to invest, theres not much to lose in case of failure.
-No need to quit your current job. A lot of businesses require all your attention and free time. People have to quit and live in fear that someday they will get stony broke. But here you can manage your affiliate shop after work and on weekends until youre absolutely sure you can make your own living on it. Or you could just use it for additional income as a hobby.
-No more working for the boss! All the money goes into your own wallet.
Whats the catch?
The catch is such business will not work unless you put effort into it.
In fact, nothing will. Theres no such thing as free cheese or a business that brings income while youre doing nothing. In order to succeed, you will need to learn.
Choosing a niche
This is a very important, yet exciting moment when you can decide what products you will promote. The best idea is to choose something that both enjoys high demand on the market and appeals to you.
Creating a website
After that, you will need a website thatll become your affiliate store. You can either hire someone or use free and relatively simple content management systems such as WordPress. You dont have to be a programmer to do that.
Learning SEO
Learning a little bit of search engine optimization is also a must since this is the only affordable way to get into Googles top result pages.
Marketing
Since you dont produce the products in your shop and dont even sell them, you should concentrate on promoting it, which means you should learn marketing. It includes such tools as email marketing, social media management, advertising, shoutouts, etc.
In this article, you can learn how to build successful affiliate stores.
