What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. Examples include rewards sites, where users are rewarded with cash or gifts, for the completion of an offer, and the referral of others to the site.
The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as ‘retailer’ or ‘brand’), the network, the publisher (also known as ‘the affiliate’), and the customer.
If you’re doing it right, you fit ALL definitions above.
The Stigma of Affiliate Marketing
There used to be a time not long when I saw affiliate marketing as a bad word phrase. Keep in mind that my education is in Advertising Design and I shouldn’t have had that opinion, but I did. Why? Because I had been played by the “dark side” of affiliate marketing.
Just like anything in life, there are both negative people and positive people. I’m a very positive person and it really irks me to see people playing on the fears of others for their own gain. Especially when the products and services they offer are junk. And there’s a lot of that floating around online
However, there are also high quality products and services and people promoting them who are truly interested in “paying it forward” and helping other people to gain the knowledge they are so desperately seeking.
The affiliate marketing field is nothing new, it’s been around a long time. It’s just that with the advent of the Internet and easy access to building your own online presence, there are those that are honestly trying to make money online by promoting honest high quality tools and services, and there are also “snake oil” salesmen who will promote anything and everything just to make a quick buck.
One group genuinely cares about their reputation and their customer’s success and the others, well, simply put…don’t care at all.
The Right Way to be an Affiliate Marketer
After being soured for a few years on the term “affiliate marketer” we revisited our opinion and started looking deeper into this culture. The more we dug, the more we realized that there are honest marketers out there offering high quality products and service, and most important to us, the level of follow-up support they are offering is very good.
The reason we researched until our fingers bled was because we have been creating what we believe to be high quality digital products and services. We also promote other items that we use ourselves or believe to be useful to others trying to duplicate our successes online.
Proof of Affiliate Marketing Success
To date we have three digital products available. The first two are 100% free. The third is our first paid product here on WP Pro Business.
- Setup for Success Video Course
- Business Blogging Quick Start Guide
- Facebook Fan Pages for Business and Profit
As a team we regularly discuss what content and products/service we will offer. Our first goal is to always provide something that is of high quality and that our customers (YOU) will find useful for your own online pursuits. We believe we have achieved that will all of our offerings.
Obviously our belief in the quality of our products is inherently biased since we’re the ones that created them. So rather than rely strictly on our own opinions, we encourage and seek feedback from our users regularly.
If you join our video course or download any of our guides, you will receive an email several days later asking for your feedback. We learned long ago that data means a lot, and we are only as successful when our customers are successful.
We’ve been very humbled by the following and positive feedback we’ve received so far and are committed to creating even more high quality courses and guides in the coming months.
