Advertising

Now you know what it means to be an affiliate and how an affiliate relates to a merchant. Since you are likely to start your business as an affiliate, you are probably wondering what your main role is. It must be simple to just send traffic to a website and make money from it- right? WRONG! This is the role of Wealthy Affiliate: to help affiliates learn how to send traffic to their merchant websites and how to turn this traffic into buyers.

There are a number of ways to generate traffic, but the fastest way to get results is to advertise. When you visit www.google.com, and do a search for something, you'll most likely see a list of boxes on the right-hand side of the screen. These boxes are called sponsored listings, and advertisers are paying Google to put their ads there. There isn't a set cost to have an ad placed, as your cost depends on how many people click on your ad and the quality of your ad campaigns. This is called "paid traffic", and is also known as "Pay-Per-Click advertising" (PPC).

When a web surfer does a search and clicks on a sponsored listing, it costs the advertiser money. How much depends on the amount the advertiser is bidding on the term that the surfer typed into the Google search box.

Wait a minute, so what do sponsored listings have to do with me, the affiliate? As an affiliate, it is your responsibility to get people to visit the merchant site. Advertising in Google is a great way to do this. This is the world of Pay-Per-Click advertising. You sign up with Google Adwords (their advertising network), and create ads that will be shown in the search listings. You will pay Google every time someone clicks on your ad and is taken to the web page of your choice (usually a page that you create, and in turn links to the merchant site).

Google Adwords isn't the only place that you can advertise online. It isn't the only search engine out there. Another big PPC network is Yahoo! Search Marketing. It works in a similar way to Google Adwords in that you pay for your ads to be displayed within the Yahoo search results. We're not going to get into the specifics of Google and Yahoo advertising here because both techniques need more explanation than we can give in an introduction.

Although there are paid advertising techniques, you should be aware that there are also free advertising techniques. We offer tutorials and explain many of these here at Wealthy Affiliate. The main ones include Article Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and Forum Marketing. As with PPC, we are not going to elaborate on these here, but you should definitely be aware that there are free marketing techniques that you can use to earn money online.