people can work from thier home also

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Zenaida Lorenzo - The Best Known Ways to Sell Online

PART 2: Affiliate Marketing

In part one of this three-part series, we took a look a eBay ? how it worked, what it costs in to use it, and some new ways to use it to make a lot of money. In this article, we will take a look at another well-known way to sell on the Internet ? Affiliate Marketing.

Along with the cost in time and dollar investment and how to best use affiliate marketing to sell, you?ll find a rating from the list below, and a discussion as to why it?s rated that way.

 Business for the Hobbyist

 Good but Not Great

 Opportunity for Financial Freedom

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing isn?t a new idea. But Internet-based affiliates are relatively new. They?ve been around since 1998, when a company called CDNow paired up with Geffen Records to act as their affiliate. But Amazon.com was the first to become recognized for it, and it has become a model for other affiliates.

How it Works: Wikipedia says affiliate marketing is the practice of using one site to drive traffic to another. But there is a little more to it. In essence, an affiliate marketer makes commission by setting up a Web site with a particular focus. For example, you could set up a music site (like CDNow did for Geffen) and do reviews on artists and their music, do a ?Top 10 Songs? list, etc. And along with that information, you would provide direct links to the merchant that sells the CDs so the customer can click right through and buy!

Time and Money Investment: The process for affiliate marketing sounds simple, and I guess relatively speaking, it is. But if you want to make a lot of money at it, you can look forward to long hours of writing interesting new content for your site, marketing your site and searching for new products to sell. Because (if you think about that example of an affiliate music site) once you sell a CD to a customer, you either need to get a new customer to purchase that same CD, or you need to find more CDs to sell to that returning customer.

Once you find your niche (whether it is music or travel or something else) and you get really good at marketing, you will see your profits grow. But be prepared to invest 40+ hours a week for up to 2-3 years.

How to Best Use It: The best thing you can do for yourself as an affiliate marketer is to spend a lot of time learning about marketing and what kinds of marketing work on the Internet. You?ll need to understand the purpose of keywords, how to optimize your site for the search engines, how to leverage Pay-Per-Click, etc.

And the fastest way to start learning is to do a Google search for each of those ?keywords? I?ve just listed. Not only will you find some good information, you will see firsthand what other affiliate marketers are doing!

Rating: Good but Not Great

Lots of people make reasonable money as affiliate marketers. And after those first 2-3 years, the income level usually increases quite a bit. But for me, the process is too slow, the time invest too high.

Because the affiliate systems lacks a ?Sales Funnel*?, there is no easy way to create an ongoing relationship that cultivates return BUYERS. What I mean by that is that people may visit your site to read your reviews and articles and tips, etc. But because they click to another site to purchase, you never really know whether they are window shoppers or paying customers. So you end up spending the same amount of money and effort on ?buyers? as you do ?browsers?.

*Look for my next article to learn more about the ?Sales Funnel?.

To receive a FREE Special Report: For Home Business Entrepreneurs Only about how to create financial freedom, visit http://www.yourhomebusinessguru.com/.

Zenaida Lorenzo is one of the top home business entrepreneurs in the country. If you would like to contact her about this article, visit http://www.yourhomebusinessguru.com/.

You are free to reproduce this article as long as you reprint the entire article including this resource section and all links.

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