Affiliate Marketing, My First Contact
November 8th, 2008Here is how I got to learn of Affiliate-Marketing.
I believe there are millions of people out there like me who would like to know what works with Internet-Marketing and what does not. I got to learn about Affiliate-Marketing by trying out something that was not going to work anyway. While pursuing this other strategy that had a very slim chance of any success I stumbled across Affiliate Marketing, which turned out to be a much better alternative.
I really don’t think there’s anyone out there who has never heard of Affiliate Marketing before. At the same time I could be wrong. Briefly, Affiliate Marketing is a type of online business that allows you to have a link on your website to another website where goods or services are sold. Visitors to your website can click on any of these affiliate links on your site to make purchases and you get a commission from the amount paid by your visitor for the goods or services.
I had this big idea about the London Underground Network, popularly known as ‘the tube’. I actually went as far as building a website for this idea. I think I registered the domain name sometime in 2003. The website was a test of your knowledge of the underground network. Questions were randomly generated from a database of questions and the idea was that whoever answered all the questions generated at a particular time correctly qualified for a raffle draw to win a travel card.
Now, this is where I started getting it wrong, I wanted some kind of endorsement from Transport for London (TFL), the organisation in charge of the London Underground network. My flatmate then, who was working with the Underground, saw the website and thought it was a wonderful idea. This encouraged me further to seek approval from TFL. Needless to say I never got it and due to no fault of the respected organisation. Heaven knows the number of individuals and organisations seeking some kind of sponsorship or approval from them on a daily basis.
Now, this is the good part, there was a point when I started preparing myself for receiving approval from TFL and I started making calls to Internet advertising companies to ask them if they would be interested in sourcing advertisements for a site that had the backing of TFL. When I called the third company the gentleman who picked the phone, after hearing me out, said to me, ‘I think what you need is an affiliate programme.’ This was December 2004 and that was the first time I would ever hear about affiliate programmes! I only knew that if enough people visited a particular site, advertisers could be interested in advertising on that site and everything would fit in, somehow.
Let me conclude by saying that the lesson I learned was that whatever you want to do don’t give up. Even if you do not actually succeed in it you might make a wonderful discovery along the way that could give you a new lease of life.
Sokunle Sonuga, the author of this article seeks to form a team of Internet marketing beginners who want to learn about Internet marketing. Read his blog at http://newbiesunion.blogspot.com feel free to drop a comment if you are interested.