Bill McRea

Affiliate marketing and niche marketing are two separate and distinct business models for making money online. Because there are some similarities between the two models, there may be some confusion about the specifics, so we are going to explore each online business model and explain how each one works and how you make money.

What is niche marketing?

Niche marketing is all about targeting a very specific segment of a larger market, finding out exactly what they want and need and offering it to them.

When you are marketing to a specific niche you want to get some insight into exactly what these buyers want and specialize in that. An example of a major market might be candy. There are hundreds of different kinds of candy available. A niche market within the candy market would be fine chocolates. Your buyers who are looking for the very best fine chocolates are not going to be the same buyers that will be looking for gummy bears, or jaw breakers.

You might set up a website with content focused on the various different varieties of fine chocolates, the countries where it comes from and reviews of the different brands of chocolate. Searchers looking for information about fine chocolates would land on your site, read your reviews and maybe click on the ads you have on your site or maybe they click on an affiliate link that pays you a commission if the visitor actually makes a purchase.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketers basically drive traffic to a specially coded affiliate link for a product or service that is owned by a merchant. If any of the people who clicked on your affiliate link make a purchase, you earn a commission paid by the merchant once per month.

Affiliate marketers select the products that they want to market, and they create blogs where they can pre-sell the product, add sometimes add value by kicking in a unique bonus that can’t be found anywhere else. In this way, affiliate marketers create relationships with their buyers so that they come to trust them over time and become repeat buyers.

As an affiliate marketer you don’t have to collect payments, you don’t even have to deliver the products you have pre-sold, you don’t have to deal with customer complaints or support. Once you get your affiliate sites up and running, they can operate largely on auto-pilot. All you have to do is send targeted traffic to your sites and you will start generating sales if the offer is appealing.

If you want to get started making money online, but you don’t have a merchant account, you don’t have a product of your own, and you don’t have a lot of money to develop an ecommerce site, affiliate marketing is a good way to delve into the world of making money online.

So, with niche marketing you are focusing in on a defined segment of a market and catering to their specific needs. Affiliate marketing is a broader approach where you might be marketing several different kinds of products.

But niche marketing and affiliate marketing are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the various ways that you can make money online. Visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog, where you will find lots of information about how to build and grow your business online.

Freelancing is one of the quickest ways to start making money online. If you have a particular skill that is marketable and in demand, you can start making money by consulting with other businesses on a freelance basis. You can become a freelancer using many skills including photography, graphic design, programming, writing, web design and more. Another proven way to make money online that is inexpensive to get started with is affiliate marketing. Let’s compare and contrast these two money making methods and see which one might work for you.

Freelancing

To get started as a freelancer, all you really need is to be proficient enough at your chosen skill that clients will want you to work for them, and you need a website to market your services. When you set up your website you’ll want to include a portfolio of samples of work that you have done for other clients along with testimonials from satisfied clients.

One of the benefits of freelancing is that you get to choose the clients that you want to work with. You choose your projects, you do them and then you get paid right away.

One of the down sides of freelancing is that you are basically trading dollars for hours. You are only making money when you are doing the work. You complete the work, deliver it and get paid once for it. Then you must find more clients to work for.

Freelancing is appealing because you can do it from anywhere you have an Internet connection, and it’s flexible enough to fit in with the busy lifestyle of people who work from home.

affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketers make money by referring buyers to product vendors. They generate traffic and build relationships with prospective buyers and then pre-sell them on the merits of a particular product. If the visitor clicks on a special affiliate link and purchases the product, the affiliate marketer earns a commission that represents a percentage of the product’s sales price.

Affiliate marketing takes time to set up a blog or a website and to start generating traffic. You can focus on using free methods to generate traffic that take time, or spend money to purchase PPC (pay per click) traffic that kicks in right away.

With affiliate marketing once you get your sites set up and generating traffic it can become a passive income stream, but until you star generating sales, there is no money coming in.

In comparing the two ways of making money online, with freelancing you’ve got a way to get started quickly and a way to make money quickly. With affiliate marketing it takes time to get your sites set up and get the traffic flowing before you will start making money, however, the potential for making more money is greater with affiliate marketing because of the fact that you can keep setting up more and more affiliate sites, which will continue to build on your income streams.

Freelancing and affiliate marketing are just two of the many different business models when it comes to making money online. Visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog to discover more about Internet marketing today.

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If you are a beginner to Internet marketing and you are looking for a way to get started making money online the Amazon Associates affiliate program is the perfect way for you to dip your toe in the pool and start making some extra money for yourself.  With the Amazon affiliate program you can earn anywhere from 4% to 15% advertising fees when visitors to your blog click on your affiliate link and then make a purchase on Amazon.com. But I will give you fair warning that once you start creating passive income streams such as affiliate blogging, you will definitely become addicted. Let’s dive right in.

Setting up your blog

One of the cool things about affiliate marketing is that you can get started without any money. If you have access to a computer that has access to the Internet, and the time it takes to get all of this set up, you can start making money online without investing a single penny in the beginning.

Go to blogger.com and start a blog. Begin with a niche that you are familiar with and have enough knowledge and passion about to write five posts per week for the first few months to get it rolling. Do some keyword research to pick a few primary keywords to focus your content on and get started.

Sign up for the Amazon Associates Program

You can sign up for the Associates program from within your blogger profile. Once you have signed up, log in to, ‘Associates Central,’ and read every word of the operating agreement, and then read through the performance tips and the glossary. You want to have full knowledge of the program and know what is allowed, what is not allowed and what are the best actions to take to ensure your success. You will also find discussion boards where you can ask questions, get support and feedback from other associates. Be sure to read the forum guidelines before you start posting.

Add your links, images and widgets

One of the things that makes the Amazon affiliate program so appealing is the array of images, links, and widgets you can create in one or two clicks and add them to your blog.  You will find click by click instructions on how to add your affiliate links to your blog so that you can start getting clicks.

Create compelling content that pre-sells the products

Your unique, value-added, compelling content is what will attract visitors to your blog, and it will be what motivates your visitors to click on your links. Create content focused on your primary keywords, and choose products that are directly related to those keywords. If you blog about fly fishing, offer links to products related to that hobby. Review books, videos and products related to your niche and demonstrate your knowledge of and passion for the topic.

Generate tons of targeted traffic to your blog

The final step in the process is to get lots of traffic to your blog. There are countless ways of generating traffic such as article marketing, video marketing, posting in niche forums, podcasting, and social media marketing etc.

You will get out of the Amazon affiliate program what you put into it. Take the time to master the program and take consistent action until you achieve your goals.

There are lots of other ways that you can make passive income with niche affiliate marketing. Check out, http://www.passivenicheprofits.com, to discover how you can generate passive income online today.

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The Amazon Associates program is Amazon’s affiliate program that offers you the opportunity to make money by sending some of your website visitors to their website. When your visitor clicks on your affiliate link and makes a purchase at Amazon.com, you get paid advertising fees, which is a percentage of the purchase price. These advertising fees are pretty low by industry standards, but there are many people who have been able to generate plenty of income with the Amazon Associates program. The trick is that you have to be willing to put in the time and effort to learn the program and then stick with it until you create the results you are looking for.

There are many common mistakes that people make when it comes to trying to make money with Amazon associates. These are three of the more common mistakes that people make, and how to avoid them.

1. Not offering product reviews

Offering honest, straightforward product reviews adds an incredible amount of value to your visitors life. They are on your blog because they are looking for something specific, and if you can answer their questions and provide the value that they are searching for, they will be happy to follow a link from your site to the resource that you are pointing them to because they trust you.

Write book reviews on books that you have read and enjoyed, but even for those that you did not like as much as you thought you would. Both your positive and not-so-positive feedback will be helpful to your visitors.

2. Not using several tracking IDs’s

In order to see which campaigns are more effective you can set up several Tracking ID’s within you Amazon associates account. Go to the ‘Account Settings’ link at the top of the page, then in the ‘Account Information’ section, click on, ‘Manage your tracking IDs.’ You will see a button, ‘Add Tracking ID,’ which will return a field where you can give your new tracking ID a name. You might give it the name of the campaign, or the website. If you are in North America, this your IDs will always end with ‘-20.’

Once your tracking IDs are in place and you have made a few sales, you can run a report to see how each one is performing. Click on, ‘reports,’ and then, ‘Tracking ID Summary Report’ form the dropdown menu. Select the date ranges for the report and you will be able to see how each channel is doing and where your clicks and sales are coming from.

It’s been said that you can’t improve what you don’t measure, so track your clicks and sales and focus on improving the campaigns that are falling behind.

3. Choosing low priced products

With referral fees as low as 4% in some cases, it makes sense to focus on higher ticket items with the Amazon associates program. If you are going to put in the effort to get the traffic required to get clicks on your ads, you might as well offer products that you will gain higher advertising fees for.

There are lots of other ways that you can make money online with niche affiliate marketing. Check out, http://www.passivenicheprofits.com, to discover how you can generate passive income online today.

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The Amazon affiliate program, called, ‘Amazon Associates,’ provides a free, easy way for bloggers to monetize their Blogger blogs. Blogger, which is a free blogging platform, is owned by Google. It provides users with a free blog that they can use however they like.  You can create a blog for free on Blogger to blog about those topics that you are passionate about, and then add in some links to related products from Amazon that might be useful to Your readers.

If you have already got a Blogger blog up and running, you would just need to join the Amazon Affiliates program, and then choose a mix of image and text ads for items that are relevant to your content and post them on your blogger blog.  Blogger makes it easy to create an Amazon Associates account directly from your profile  so that you can get up and running quickly.

Amazon associates can earn advertising fees when their visitors click on their special affiliate link, go to Amazon and make a purchase. These fees can range from 4% to 15% depending on volume and the kinds of products you are promoting. A good thing is that if your visitor clicks on one of your links and goes to Amazon, you get a commission on the product you were linking to as well as whatever else they purchased in that transaction.

Let’s say that you have a blog about chocolate. You write blog posts about what new offerings your favorite choclatiers have to offer, you might share recipes and sources where your readers can find the fine chocolates that you are raving about in your posts. On a blog like this you might link to books on Amazon that contain chocolate recipes, the various chocolates that they sell, kitchen gadgets that bakers might use, etc.

You have an array of options for displaying related Amazon products such as sidebar widgets, product carousels, gadgets that actually play mp3 clips, and Amazon search boxes, but you want to make sure that you integrate the ads tastefully and that everything you are offering is related to your content.  You do not want to turn your readers off because they get the feeling that all you are trying to do is push these products on them.

It is also important in light of FCC regulations to disclose that some of the links on your site are affiliate links, and when users click on them and make a purchase you will be compensated. You can post a site-wide disclaimer or identify which links are affiliate links. As an online business person you should familiarize yourself with the regulations related to affiliate marketing.

Posting book reviews and product reviews are a great way to pre-sell Amazon products from your blog. When you add your unique point of view—whether you loved the product, or found some shortcomings with it, people appreciate the value you add.

Amazon associates makes it easy and fun to monetize your Blogger content. It’s free to sign up and you can start making money with it right away.

There are lots of other ways that you can make money online with niche affiliate marketing. Check out, http://www.passivenicheprofits.com, to discover how you can generate passive income online today.

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