Benefits of using other people's products or services

1. You can immediately generate income based on the work of someone else has done; that is known as leverage - you don't have to create your own product, write your own sales page, design your own website, develop marketing materials, or set up the ordering, invoicing & delivery system.

2. The business is kept simple because there is no back office functions to manage; the Merchant deals with the customer support, the billing and answering technical issues.

3. Risk is minimized because you can select the products that are already selling; find those that pay well and importantly ensure that the commissions you can get are paid promptly.

4. It is easy to switch to other selling products because you have not had to pay out for all the costs of developing and supporting the products.

5. If you promote membership sites then you can benefit from an on-going commission all the time the buyer keeps paying the site membership fee.

It is clear from this there some great benefits from online affiliate marketing, very simple to start and at affordable to begin with.

To be successful at Affiliate Marketing you need to manage visitors

Getting the email address and name of visitors before sending them to the product sales page is essential if you want to contact them again. Getting the email address and name is known as list building; for anyone wanting to make another sales it is paramount that a list is built and then nurtured. It may be necessary to build more than 1 list because each list should be relevant buyers for the products being sold. The lists become the primary asset of any internet business because the lists can be sent further offers and be directed to the sales pages of affiliate sale page offers more than once.

A list can be marketed to in a very cheap way because all that required is to send an email. The sending of emails can be pre-planned and automated.

To be very effective, an affiliate marketer needs the following tools:

1. A squeeze page (also known as landing page); basically a product promotion page that has a form where the name and email address of the potential buyer can be entered. Ideally this squeeze page should be on a dedicated website. Squeeze pages work best with some kind of video message, it is quicker and easier to watch and learn rather than having to read.
2. Something to incentivise the buyer to want to leave their information such as a free report.

3. As a minimum a 5-part email follow up series, preferable using an autoresponder that can be set up to automatically send the emails at pre-timed intervals.

Making the effort of setting up the right process from the outset will increase your potential of making the sale by up to 500% so it's well worth the effort of setting it up. Once the process is set up it can be to run automatically - you just keep sending visitors to the squeeze page.

If you have not got time to set up the right process then it is advised to outsource the work to someone; Elance is a website for finding people to outsource the work to.