Affiliate marketing has become a widely accepted way of doing business among merchants. This has created tons of affiliate marketing opportunities. Almost any niche you can imagine (and some you probably can’t) now has an affiliate program of some kind. Many of America’s largest retailers have even jumped on the affiliate bandwagon.

Affiliate Marketing Opportunities For Beginners

Are you considering becoming an affiliate marketer but don’t own a website yet? Or maybe you have a couple web properties sitting around that you haven’t decided what do with yet. Either way, there are several affiliate networks that are great for beginners.

Clickbank

Clickbank is one of the largest and most popular affiliate networks for digital products. Most digital products tend to be “How to” courses or e-books. These types of products have always sold well online because digital products are delivered immediately upon purchase.

Clickbank has 23 categories, dozens of sub-categories and 1,000’s of digital products to promote. With that many products to promote, almost anyone can find something they can sell.

Since Clickbank handles the affiliate programs for so many different authors, you don’t need to apply for each product you want to promote. Once you’ve been accepted, you are automatically able to promote any and all products within the network.

Clickbank is definitely one of the better free affiliate marketing opportunities for beginners.

Amazon

When it comes to affiliate programs, they don’t get any bigger than amazon.com. The variety of products offered by amazon continues to grow by leaps and bounds thereby creating many new affiliate marketing opportunities.

The amazon affiliate program is easy to apply for and there are no pre-qualifications to join. One of the benefits of being an amazon affiliate is the fact that you will earn a commission on any product that is purchased by your referral.

I have read a few stories of people sending their visitors to amazon through a link to a $25 dollar product only to have the visitor by a $1,000 T.V. instead! And if your referral buys multiple products during that visit, you earn a commission on everything they buy!

Note: Due to complicated Government tax laws, the amazon affiliate program is not available in all U.S. States.

Pay-Per-Lead Opportunities

Sample Banner

Pay-per-lead is another easy way to monetize your site. This is where companies who offer certain kinds of services pay for qualified leads. Banks, insurance companies etc. These programs can be easy to promote since most of these companies have taken the time create great looking banners.

The banner to the right is a sample I got from ShareASale. Unlike Clickbank, the affiliate programs at ShareASale must be applied for separately. The company will have someone examine your website to see if it is a good match for their company.

You will want to wait until you have a website that receives traffic before applying to ShareASale.

PPC Opportunities

Many experienced affiliate marketers create profits everyday using PPC (pay per click) methods. With PPC, you don’t have to wait for your visitors to find you. You can advertise your site through Google Adsense and have your site exposed to a much wider audience.

With PPC campaigns, you pay a certain amount of money every time your ad is clicked. The cost per click will be determined by the keyword you are targeting. The more competitive the keyword, the more you are likely to pay per click. Once you fund your Adsense account and create a campaign, it’s up to you to decide your daily budget.

Although many people do well with these campaigns, many beginners also lose money. To make this work, you need to be good at converting visitors into buyers. If spending $100 leads to 100 visitors that generate $200 in commissions, then you have a winner. If 100 visitors doesn’t lead to any sales, then PPC may not be right for you at this time unless you can get a fairly high percentage of email subscribers out of it.

Local Business Marketing Opportunities

Did you know that 55% of local businesses in the U.S. and Canada have no web presence whatsoever? Yet 80% of people use a search engine to find local businesses. That means that over half of all business owners cannot be found where 8 out of 10 people go to look for them!

This has created a HUGE opportunity for affiliate marketers. Since most traditional business owners don’t understand internet marketing, those who do are buying keyword focused domain names and easily get top rankings in the search engines.

For example:

People will find a popular search like “car dealers” followed by the name of a city like “Tampa” There are many “business type + city .com” names available and they are usually very easy to rank for.

Then, they will find a business owner in that city and offer them a banner ad plus a link to their site (if they have one) for a monthly fee. Because these kind of site are fairly easy to build and require very little maintenance, it doesn’t take long to build a sizable portfolio of these sites all bringing in a nice monthly cash-flow.

Any questions or comments on affiliate marketing opportunities? Please leave them in the box below and I’ll be happy to respond.