Is Affiliate Marketing Right for Your Small Business?

Over the last few months, I’ve been contacted by  a number of potential clients who were interested in ways to make money from their website…fast.  One common question was how does affiliate marketing work and how could I help them use it to generate revenue from their websites. So, first off, what is affiliate marketing? In short, an "affiliate" commits to promoting an advertiser’s product or service via a banner or link on their website. In return, the advertiser pays a commission to the affiliate.

Now, about those potential clients. They were putting the cart before the horse, because the only way you will make money with affiliate marketing is if you already have a website that gets enough traffic to attract partners and generate a LOT of click through traffic. Just think of it like traditional advertising. Why would someone pay you a lot of money to advertise in a newspaper that reached 30-100 people a day?  They wouldn’t, and this is the same in the affiliate world. If you’re like some of the people I have been talking to, and have a brick and mortar business but no web presence to speak of, then you need to raise your company website’s profile before you have any hope of making money with affiliate marketing. Of course, there are plenty of ways to speed up the process, but most of them require using somewhat suspect SEO tactics and also won’t provide long term value as a result of search engines penalizing the related sites.

There are plenty of examples of bad websites with no “there” there, just a lot of links that will often lead you in a circle to more pages with nothing but more links. Sure, I am positive they get a lot of traffic, but there is almost nothing of value to readers who end up on these sites and you surely wouldn’t ever go back right? Well, “returning visitors” is one of the ways that Google, Bing, etc. measure whether a website is relevant to searchers or just a marketing scam. No matter how many affiliate links you have on these sites, at some point the value and visibility inevitably decline as search engines adjust their rankings.

So, remember, business online is fundamentally like business in the “real world”. You need to have an actual product or service that people want and which they can find before you start trying to make money directly from your website. So, as the old adage goes, “You have to spend money to make money.” But, if you happen to have the luxury of time, serious effort can substitute for money as long as you are aware that the results make take a long time to see.

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