The Promise of Online Affiliate Marketing

When Amazon.com first launched in the mid-1990s as the world's biggest online bookstore, no one could have imagined how it would grow into the behemoth retailer of practically everything under the sun. Yet that's how online e-commerce has evolved in the past 2 decades.

E-commerce sales on Amazon.com this year are ready to touch a mind-boggling $1.2 TRILLION, making it one of the largest - and fastest growing - business sectors the world has ever seen. Millions of online sellers are building their own amazing selling machines on the platform every day, and leveraging the massive crowd of buyers that Amazon has aggregated on its platform to sell a host of different things.

And we're nowhere close to slowing down. In fact, most experts tell us that we are on the cusp of a mighty expansion in capacity that is set to dwarf everything else we've seen until now. The good news is that this creates a lovely opportunity for any enterprising entrepreneur, big or small business owner, to take advantage of this book.

Many vendors including those with 6-figure annual revenues from e-commerce ventures on the Internet began their careers as affiliate marketers. They offered products and services that were created by other businesses, and saw that there was potential in the niche. They then went on to build businesses around these areas and fulfill orders themselves.

Amazon was one of the popular choices for affiliates to learn the ropes about e-retailing. And as they grew to offer products across wide swathes of the online marketplace, millions of affiliate marketers flocked to the portal to sign up as associates and promote these products to their own audience of buyers.

They could offer the world's top brands and best-known products directly to their homes, by ordering them over the Internet. Online retailer affiliates didn't even have to touch a product or ship it out to buyers. They just earned a healthy referral income from referring new customers to the service.

Anyone who already comes from a retail selling background will find this very appealing as they can now attract new audiences to offers over the Internet and by advertising on social networks like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. It's even possible to develop a nice supplementary sideline to an existing offline retail chain, where the website and online customers become additional assets to your company that complement regular in-store buyers.

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