So, you want to be an Affiliate Marketer. You've made that decision. Now what? Where do you get started? There are so many decisions that you need to make now. What's important to remember is you don't need any special skills? you don't need to be especially technical or have any fancy education. Good, solid common sense, the right information and regular access to the Internet will do just fine for getting started.



One place new Affiliate Marketer starts with is Clickbank. Clickbank is the world's largest digital provider of products. What this means is that they only provide digital products for sale and have affiliates that promote these products.

Clickbank has some great advantages. One of them is there are no products to handle. Therefore, from your standpoint as an affiliate marketer, you do not have to have any physical products, and it makes it very, very easy. You do not need a shopping cart because Clickbank handles that for you. They handle all the payments. Clickbank also tracks all of your sales. They give you a very good history on everything that you have sold, to whom you sold to and what products you sold. You can actually put tracking numbers on it so you can track them back to the actual ads that were clicked on to make the sale. They also have very good pay per sale. It is higher than most products. Because they are digital, there is not a whole lot of overhead, so there is a higher percentage per sale.

Now, there is more to Clickbank than just picking a product and promoting it with Pay Per Click ads. Pay per click (PPC) is used on search engines, advertising networks, and content websites/blogs. Advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser's website. Advertisers bid on keywords they predict their target market will use as search terms when they are looking for a product or service. When a user types a keyword query matching the advertiser's keyword list, or views a page with relevant content, the advertiser's ad may be shown. These ads are called a "Sponsored link" or "sponsored ads" and appear next to or above the "natural" or ?organic? results on search engine pages, or anywhere a webmaster/blogger chooses as a content page.

You will also find Pay Per Click ads on content network websites. In this case, ad networks such as Google AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher Network attempt to provide ads that are relevant to the content of the page where they appear, and no search function is involved. While many companies exist in this space, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft AdCenter are the largest network operators.

While this is a lot of commonly known information for those affiliate marketers that have been around for a while, anyone just starting out would not truly understand the power that is behind using Clickbank together with Pay Per Click ads. And, there is more than just understanding the Pay Per Click methods. Essential to your success is knowing whether you have a good product to promote before spending money on Pay Per Click ads. Not knowing this insider information is the number one reason new affiliate marketers fail.

You need to make sure that you are promoting the best ones that you can find. Being an affiliate marketer is a business that should be taken seriously. Remember, Clickbank is only one of many Affiliate programs, but is one of the best ways to make money. You can make up to 50% of the sale and all you have to do is drive traffic to the offers. You don't have to worry about customer support, technical issues, spam, owning a web site or product development. It's the ticket for many to the lifestyle of their dreams.