If you enjoy making money online by promoting products or services, then the chances of you being in affiliate marketing are fairly high. You might have signed up as an affiliate with one or more online businesses, who then give you a specific affiliate ID. Many of the online businesses that are involved in affiliate marketing might have provided you with a simple marketing package like banner or text ads and your affiliate sales page link. The only thing you really need to do now is to use these great tools and drive traffic to your affiliate sales page.

This is the strategy almost all affiliate marketers follow, but there is a problem here. Though this is a good strategy, in order for you to make a decent amount of money, you will need to have thousands of people visiting your affiliate sales page before even one product/service is sold. That being the case, you can imagine how hard it can be to actually make a $10 commission. Even if you succeed in doing so, the amount of time and effort you would have spent in earning those $10 would be huge!

Not just this, there is another problem with earning these commissions too. If you look at the terms and conditions of your affiliate marketing program, maybe they don’t pay commissions till you have earned at least $30. That means another thousand or more visitors and then, you might just have a chance at looking at those $30.

But here is something you need to consider without getting discouraged. Internet marketing is an excellent way for you to make extra cash on the side, and it honestly does not need much of an investment.

Four Step Affiliate Marketing Process:

Instead of advertising your affiliate program directly, make use of this four step process.

1. Providing value-add: Before getting down to advertising, provide something valuable to your potential customers. The simplest ‘valuable’ thing that you can provide without much effort is free information. You can provide this free information in the form of a series of email courses, eBooks and so on.

2. Give when you get: Don’t give away your free information till you get the email addresses of your potential customers. It is vital to know the name and email address of all the prospective clients, so that you can move on to the other two steps in the affiliate marketing process.

3. Earn trust: The next step in this four step process is to earn the trust of people, due to the valuable information that you have provided.

Just as you would closely monitor information provided by someone who gives you good advice on managing money, time or effort; others will start trusting you, provided your information is trustworthy. Since you have the name and email addresses of the potential customers, you can send them occasional emails with valuable information. Remember, don’t spam their mailbox. Else, they may block you and you will lose sales.

4. The actual sale: If you have been providing the potential customers valuable information regularly, they will trust you enough to buy a product/service you recommend. The sale is easier, if you can somehow make them realize that what you are recommending is worth the amount they will be spending.

In affiliate marketing, try to sell products and services that have helped you personally. This way, it becomes easier for people to trust you and you can share your experiences with them too!