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admin said:

I think Julia B also posted a great note on the basics of affiliate marketing. I want to give her credit, and her post is: What is Affiliate Marketing. We webmasters work hard to deliver internet visitors to our website, join some affiliate programs, put up links, and after a lot of hard work, hope to make some money!

I found this picture on Wikipedia, and it said it was under the creative commons license for reuse, so I am taking the liberty of illustrating my post here.

1. Brand or Seller has a product/service/message to deliver. They start an affiliate program. These programs could be in-house, or they could be managed by a network of affiliate programs.

2. An affiliate is usually a website owner. This could be an individual or a company. They join the affilaite program and promote the seller in hopes of making income in the ways that JuliaB described (i.e. pay per click, pay per sale, etc.)

3. Of course, customers are the key asset. Visitors to a website may be interested in the product or service or message being displayed, click through to the actual sales page, and then perform whatever action will make the actual affilate money.

These actions are tracked because each affiliate will get a unique tracking code they use to link to the seller. They will usually have some sort of statistics page they can log into so they can keep track of how well they do.

I think that those of us who do this business every day think this is obvious, but most casual web surfers do not really understand this process at all.

Hi Readabook,

Welcome. I think that most us who do affiliate marketing spend a very large percentage of our time researching keywords.

One simple and free keyword tool you can use is freekeywords.wordtracker.com – It does not have a huge sample size, and the results will be much smaller than Google's, but that also makes it simpler to use. And since it does not return as many results, I find that the results it does return tend to work better.

If you want the granddady of free keyword tools, you can use the Google extrenal adwords tool. It returns results that are based in Adwords (Google's paid advertising) system, but you can use it to brainstorm for anything. The link is here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

If you want your visitors to perform an action, the best keywords are related to that action. So if you want your visitors to Buy Something, it is great to rank for a buy phrase. However, other terms can work too, and they may be easier to rank for.

Of course, the best keyword tool, has has been said so many times, is your brain. What would you search for if you were looking for something? Use that as the starting point for all other research.