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What is affiliate marketing? Plain and simple, affiliate marketing is the ultimate business model of all time. And it’s a legitimate business too!

Typically, you earn a percentage of the sale which can be incredibly high. Sure, there might be some costs involved in placing ads, for example.

But, compared to traditional business models (I talked about a restaurant in my last post for example) those costs are a drop in the bucket.

What is affiliate marketing?

Many people, including myself, have suffered at the hands of MLM, or other similar business models. And many people mistakenly think of affiliate marketing has somehow shady, it’s not.

Most companies are not out to take advantage of affiliates, they need their affiliates to make money and to scale their business.

And there’s certainly nothing wrong about getting paid a commission for connecting a company with the new customer.

Many businesses operate this way, if you’ve ever bought a car for example, you might have dealt with a commissioned salesman.

The same is true for furniture salesman, real estate agents or any other individual who brings a customer into a company for a commission.

The only difference with affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to do any of the selling if you don’t want to. The website you are promoting for can do all the selling for you.

Here’s how I feel marketing works.

Let’s say I develop a training product for business owners who want to learn how to create their first website and start collecting leads and it’s priced at $997.

They’re more than happy to pay for it because if they implement the strategies that I teach in this training product…

They will be able to generate thousands of leads for their business, which could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So $997 it’s a no-brainer.

That’s where you come in, you become an affiliate for my business by joining my affiliate program and your role is simple, to bring in potential customers to my website, that’s it!

Once they are my website, I can sell him or her my course.

If they buy it, I agree to split the $997 with you. After all, without you, I wouldn’t have made the sale in the first place, only seems fair right?

So how much of the $997 do you get paid?

Different affiliate programs will pay different amounts to those who close the sale, some pay 10% commissions others pay up to fifty percent.

Now, let’s come back to your role of getting people to someone’s website.

How you do this is by using an affiliate link that is unique to you only.

Then you can place your link on Facebook and other websites.

You could go on Facebook right now post a link to someone else’s website and have someone click that link in the next 30 minutes.

That is what driving traffic is, sending people to a website.

So how much traffic do you need to send to a website in order to make your first commission?

That depends on the people who make up the traffic and how good the website is at making an irresistible offer that gets people to buy.

Now you may be wondering why these business owners who have a website just don’t place your own ads?

So they can generate their own traffic without having to pay affiliate commissions.

Well actually most do, but the internet is so enormously large and vast that they can get additional traffic from affiliates, because they can’t reach it all on their own.

So that’s the basics of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is by far the easiest way to earn money online, but there’s still a learning curve.

Luckily it’s not a steep one, and it’s entirely possible to be earning money within a few hours if you take action.

There’s a lot of shortcuts to make in your first commission and programs like Clickfunnels are built to help you take advantage of them.

Just about everything is done for you.

Even if you don’t know much about computers or navigating around the internet.

You can still get started with the basics.

If you need help, I can help you with things like getting a website and domain name.

And how to set up an email autoresponder so you can follow up with leads, and know how to start generating traffic.

You see, some companies don’t offer much for its affiliates.

For example, no websites, no lead capture page, no coaching or assistance at all.

Your pretty much expected to hit the ground running, knowing how to do it all yourself.

I can tell you from my experience that I didn’t hit the ground running.

You could say I did a tumble, but I got up, brushed myself off and kept going.

It took some time to learn how to build my business, from the tools already available to me.

The first thing you should do when you start any new businesses is to focus on bringing in cash.

Sounds obvious right? Of course you should focus on getting some customers and making some cash.

But so many people waste their time creating logos, business cards going out and buying stationery.

And doing busy work that doesn’t directly bring in the critical ingredient you need to grow, cash.

Don’t spend days watching videos and reading books and blogs without implementing the things you’ve learned.

In other words, stop getting ready to get ready.

A good rule of thumb is that for every hour you spend learning go spent 3 hours doing.

Learn as you go and don’t be afraid to make mistakes.

If you feel like there’s too many things to learn.

Then focus on the things that are bringing in money right now.

Learning to generate traffic is a lot more important than learning how to design a logo.

Remember that as an affiliate marketer.

Your job is to find a great offer and put people in front of it.

That’s all it comes down to.

You become an affiliate for that offer, get an affiliate link and get the right people to click it.

When they buy, you get paid your commission.

Next Post: What is an Affiliate Link?