First, what exactly is affiliate selling? To put it simply, you send visitors to a shop website, they track the sales that these visitors make and they pay you a percentage of these sales as a commission. It is up to the owner of the shop, the merchant, to take the payment, hold stock and distribute the goods and deal with returns, fraudulent orders etc.

All that you need to do is to find the potential buyers.

Yes, ‘all’. OK, if you are set-up as a shop then finding the traffic is probably the hardest part of the job and that is why you have chosen to run an affiliate program to promote your business. But if you have the time and are willing to spend some time and effort at the work, then promoting an affiliate scheme can be very rewarding.

So what do you need to do to start affiliate selling? First, you need a product. Pick something that interests you and that you know something about. If you love playing on mobile phones, then there are plenty of relevant schemes to choose from. If you have a hobby, then look around on the major affiliate scheme providers for someone selling relevant products. I think that it is vital to pick a product that is interesting to you so that you can write about it and understand the terms and features.

Then, once you are signed up, it is time to start selling the product. Depending on your preferences and knowledge there are a few different choices here.

The easiest way to start the selling is through signing up for Google AdSense and creating an advert that pulls in people and passes them straight to the merchant’s website, although many schemes do not allow this as they run their own pay per click schemes. Personally, it is better to send the visitors to your own website first as you can also hit them with cross advertising, just in case they decide not to buy.

You can also promote schemes through blogs, either by getting a following and selling to them or buy optimising the blog so that the search engines are sending you traffic. This is where it really helps to know your product so that you can talk about it and write lots of posts.

After this the next step is to build your own website, maybe even from a product feed from the merchant. Here you take a list of their products and create or add to your own website. Then you can use various methods of driving traffic to your own website so that the visitors then follow the links to the merchant websites. The big advantage here is that you are not just selling the products. Back to the mobile phone example, you can also advertise mobile phone insurance and phone recycling around the rest of the page.

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