Make Money with Affiliate Programs

Making Money with Affiliate Programs

If you have a website and you are not involved in any of the thousands of affiliate programs available on the Internet, you are losing great opportunities to make some extra income. As in the case of some top affiliate marketers this extra income might even transform into thousands of dollars.

Affiliate program is one of the most effective methods of producing sales second only to direct mail. According to Forrester Research, a marketing research company, in this year 21% of all online sales will be generated from affiliate sites promoting affiliate products.

If you do your homework right, you too can earn handsomely from the correct use of affiliate programs.

What is an affiliate program?

The concept of affiliate program is based on the age-old business practice of referral service. This is quite common in many industries. An attorney, for example, gets a certain percent of commission if he refers a client to another lawyer.

Back in 1996 Amazon.com started the first widespread use of referral service on the Internet. If a client comes to Amazon.com and buy a product using a link provided by Amazon, from a website which signed affiliate partnership agreement, that site receives 10 to 15% commission from the sale. The Amazon Affiliate Program became so successful that it prompted others to follow the suit. Today, affiliate programs became ubiquitous on the Internet making them one of the primary methods of online marketing of products and services.

Affiliate Program can be defined as Internet marketing system where a company allows and helps third party websites, called affiliates to post link and refer clients in return for a predetermined flat-fee or percentage-based commission. Benefits of affiliate programs

Affiliate Programs became so popular because as a partnership it's a win-win situation for both the program owner and the affiliates.

Benefits for program owners include:

Increase Sales The primary reason for most of the companies to adopt an affiliate program is the possibility of boosting sales. In fact, proper implementation of a quality affiliate program is capable of increasing sales dramatically.

Free promotion A successful affiliate program can easily become the largest traffic generator for the company website. Many websites receive major portion of their visitors from their affiliate links. To find suitable websites with required content in order to run a banner or link campaign is time consuming and require large resources; affiliate programs in comparison can resolve this issue often with a far smaller investment.

Increase search engine ranking Search engines, Google in particular, calculate link popularity as one of the main factors in their ranking algorithm. Backward links from affiliate sites certainly help improving this.

Branding Thanks to its affiliate program Amazon.com banner links can be seen on numerous websites. Popularity of Amazon.com among the newcomers to Internet proves that Amazon.com was successful in creating its online brand name. No doubt, omnipresent visibility of their logo on the affiliate sites definitely had a huge impact on the brand recognition of the Amazon. Offline companies had to spend billions of dollars of advertisement money to get similar results!

How about the affiliates? What are the benefits they get from an affiliate relationship?

No product or service to carry Online business with your own product or service might be rewarding, but it requires substantial investment from your part. With carefully chosen affiliate programs you can have your online business without the requirement of having your own products. The investment is low as all you need is a website.

No need to have a merchant account Since you don't carry your own products or services you do not have to go through the hassle of having a merchant account to cater your clients. Your affiliate program owner will do everything. All you have to do is supply clients through your designated link.

Possibility of residual income

- Many programs pay you a commission from the sales made to the customers generated from affiliates, who have signed up as an affiliate following your link. This kind of affiliate system is called 2-tier system. - Visitor tracking system allows affiliate programs to pay you a commission when same visitor from your website makes repeat purchase. - Some affiliate programs that promote monthly or yearly subscription services pay a commission each month as long as customer referred by you stays subscribed.

Complement you website with added products and services If your site is dedicated to certain products or services, there must be other stuffs that go well together with your own products. It's a good idea to seek out viable affiliate products of these items and promote through your site. Your visitors will love this and this will help building loyalty among your visitors.

Have new contents for your site many affiliate programs supply you with valuable marketing materials. Some of these materials can be nice addition to your site content bringing further value to your website. Various Affiliate programs

There are two ways of running an affiliate program:

- The company owns and handles the program itself, using certain software. - The company uses third party administered affiliate programs.

The reasons why many companies prefer to hand over management of their affiliate programs include technical aspects, cost factor and human factors.

В Companies do not have to spend money on developing, running and updating the software. В Proven technology allows companies to concentrate on their job of selling their products and services. В Many prospective affiliates prefer third party managed programs, because they rightfully ponder, in this case the program owners have less chance to cheat their affiliates.

Find below a list of some leading third party affiliate program administrators:

http://www.befree.com
http://www.linkshare.com
http://www.cj.com
http://www.clickbank.com

However, this does not mean that you should avoid company run affiliate programs. On the contrary, some of the most successful and best affiliate programs are run by the owners.

If you find an affiliate program that suits your requirement and you feel that the company is a reputable one, by any means you should give it a try!

How To Select The Best Affiliate Program?

Are you having difficulties in selecting an internet affiliate program to join and promote? Too many opportunities to sort through? Uncertain of your next step? Guess what - you are not alone. Join the crowd! You will probably find the road full of potholes in your research, review and selection of the right affiliate program for you.

You should consider the following steps to help you make the decision on which affiliate program to join and promote. First, you need to find the affiliate programs that are available for you to join and promote. Second, you need to sort through all these opportunities to learn the details of each affiliate program. Third, you need to select a program (or programs) that fits your wants and needs (whatever they may be).

I am making the basic assumption that you want to select a program that will result in cash flowing into your pocket rather than flowing out of your pocket. Look out for the potholes in the road. There are a lot of them out there. You should keep in mind that most affiliate programs will not make any promises regarding your future potential earnings or lack of earnings. Warning - Avoid any program that makes promises that seem unrealistic or too good to be true.

You should review a wide selection of affiliate programs before you decide which program (or programs) is right for you. As painful as it sounds, you need to do the research before making any decision. You should perform sufficient (and not necessarily exhaustive) research to understand what programs exist and what they provide to the affiliate (promoter/seller) and customer (buyer). The amount of research you perform depends on what you need to make an informative decision.

The process of research is probably the most painful and yet the most educational part of setting up an online internet business. Do not cut it short because you will probably pay for it dearly in different ways at a later date. This includes spending unnecessary money, pursuing the wrong marketing paths and just plain wasting your time and energy.

It is essential to perform thorough research if you are going to profit from any promotional effort of an affiliate program. It is an established fact that commercial success starts with having a product to sell (hopefully a product that provides value, usefulness and/or happiness to the buyer of the product). It is another well known fact that the economics picture is not complete without a seller and a buyer that are willing and able to sell and buy the product. Warning - Do not get involved with an affiliate program where it is uncertain what comprises the actual product being sold.

Many factors, including the selling price of the product and the total cost of the product (potential costs include manufacturing, storing, distributing, marketing, and selling), need to be evaluated to determine if a profit can be made on the promotion and sale of an affiliate product. As a side note, the difference between financial success and failure could be a simple matter of promoting a product that has more appeal or intrinsic value to the potential buyer than the cost of the product.

The research process should consist of gathering sufficient information on potential opportunities that will enable you to make an informed decision on what affiliate program(s) to join and promote. You will need to devote precious time and energy to accomplish this phase of the affiliate selection process.

In order to locate the affiliate opportunities, you should start by using a national search engine. Select "key words" in your search (such as: affiliate opportunities, affiliate ebook, affiliate networks, affiliate income, affiliate marketing, etc) to locate opportunities. Be innovative and change the search word(s) to match your personal needs and interest.

You should probably direct your attention to the top 10 to 20 search results for any key word group since these are likely to be the websites with the highest level of internet traffic. Higher traffic is an indicator that the website gets visitors and is probably in demand. Demand is important since it is one part of the economic "demand versus supply" equation.

Write down the appropriate information from each website that will provide you with data to review after you complete your online searching. You should probably print out the sales letter and any other useful information that will help in your follow-up review and evaluation. Part of your research will include communicating with the owner of each website that you are considering.

In addition, join some of the internet discussion boards and chat rooms that discuss the topic of affiliate programs. This can potentially provide a wealth of information in your review and comparison process. You can use the search engines to find these discussion boards and chat rooms.

Another source of information resides in ebooks and ezine articles that have already been written on the subject of affiliate programs and affiliate marketing. You can locate these ebooks and articles by using the search engines. Do not hesitate to communicate with the authors. Work with the authors because it may help you in your quest for usable information. You may find some authors willing to discuss your specific concerns since it may provide them with useful material for their future use.

In the process of performing your research, you will be compiling a lot of hand-written notes and web page printouts of potential affiliate programs. Furthermore, you will probably accumulate material on your computerЎs hard drive of website pages on affiliate programs that you had an interest in performing a follow-up analysis upon.

The process of research is not only time consuming but also may consume some of your money. How much money you spend depends on the types of programs you are considering. Furthermore, you may have to join a program or purchase something (for example, buy the ebook that is being promoted) in order to get the information you need for your review and evaluation phase. You should always ask for a free copy - it does not hurt to try.

Keep yourself organized by putting the paper information (hand-written notes and web page printouts) into 3-ring binders. Use tab inserts to separate each affiliate program. Each tab insert should be labeled with an appropriate affiliate program title. This will enable easy identification of each program in the binder and access to the detailed data.

The next step is to make a "summary table" that includes each affiliate program you are considering. The summary table should contain information on each affiliate program such as: name of the program, URL website, definition of what the program offers to the affiliate, description of what is offered to the customer of the product, cost of the program to the customer, commission payable to the affiliate, description of the downline sales commissions (if any), training available to the affiliate by the owner of the product, sales material available to the affiliate, etc.

Next, you need to review, evaluate and compare the various affiliate programs at a summarized level. This is the phase of utilizing all the information that you collected, categorized and organized during the search phase. This process can now be accomplished with considerably less stress and anxiety than just looking at a list of affiliate programs.

You now have the important and essential information (that fulfills your needs) necessary to make an informed decision. The summary table provides you with the data to compare the different affiliate opportunities (whether it is only two or many).

At this point, your review and evaluation process will probably lead to more questions. However, your questions should now be very targeted. Any follow-up research you need to perform to obtain answers should be highly focused.

Make certain you communicate with the owner of each affiliate program to gain as much knowledge as possible about the respective affiliate program. The owner of the program should be anxious to hear your questions and help you since it could result in increased revenue to the owner. Make your questions as direct and to the point as possible to uncover your deepest concerns.

Finally, what did you achieve or learn from your search of ebooks and ezine articles on the topic of affiliate topics? Use this information in your decision process. You should communicate with the author(s) if you found something of interest that can help you in your eventual decision. The author(s) should also be willing to talk to you since it could result in material for future ebooks they might write.

I hope you find this information valuable and worth your time in reading. A decision based on having the appropriate information is definitely worth more than a decision made by "guessing." This article is just the beginning. You will find your niche in affiliate programs by performing a proper research, review and comparison of available programs before making your informed decision. Good luck in your quest to find the right affiliate program(s) for your future personal and financial success.

How To Really Make Money With Datafeed Merchants?

I am not going to describe what a product feed (or a datafeed) is. There is a lot of information out there about how to use one to build sites. Instead, I want to talk about how you can actually make more sales with datafeed sites.

The program that I manage offers a product feed, and I get a chance to see a sad picture of many good affiliates wasting their potential.

Here is my advice from the affiliate manager's perspective.

Whenever you join (or think bout joining) a program, you need to look for two things: Temporary or permanent opportunities Flaws of a merchant

Here is an example of an opportunity that was created by an outside factor.

Recently, we got removed from the Yahoo index because of a penalty. I have no idea when (or if) we will get included back in, but I do know that it makes one decision much easier for our affiliates.

Judging by the numerous posts on various SEO-related message boards, it looks like Google and Yahoo use very different algorithms to rank pages. So for any given site, you have a choice to make. You can optimize for Yahoo, for Google, or for both.

Since Yahoo and Google use different algorithms, it is going to be hard to optimize the same set of pages for both of those engines at the same time, unless you employ heavy cloaking. And the way I see it, for an affiliate, it is better to appear high on one search engine than to appear low on both of them in an attempt to optimize for different algorithms at the same time.

Imagine that you are one of our affiliates. Given the information I just told you, shouldn't you concentrate on Yahoo for that datafeed site that is being used to promote our products?

Why spend (at least) half of your time and resources on optimizing for Google when you know that we are nowhere to be found in Yahoo?

You have to have an extremely well linked and optimized site to get ahead of the merchant for the exact product-name search terms. The merchant is your biggest obstacle when it comes to the search engine traffic. So if there is a route that lets you get around that obstacle - take it!

Most of our well-performing affiliates did just that. Either intentionally or unintentionally, they ended up making much more money by appearing high in Yahoo results, while not being ranked high in Google.

So on a practical side of things, here is what you should do.

For your existing merchants, check if they are removed from the index in any of the major search engines, and if they are, then start reading and implementing SEO tips for that particular engine.

And if you are thinking about joining a program and can't decide between several merchants, then check if any of them is not in the index of either Yahoo or Google. If you find a merchant like that - drop everything else you are doing and jump on that program.

As far as theory goes, this was just a simple, but specific example of what you should look for to make your efforts pay off. There are many different opportunities to get ahead in existing programs with datafeed sites; you just have to look for them.

Now, let's talk about flaws of merchants and how you can exploit them to make more money and help consumers at the same time.

I will give another specific example, but you should be able to apply this concept to many different programs.

Our site has one huge structural flaw: we only list products by product-oriented categories.

In other words, there is no way to navigate our site by a specific occasion or by the purchasing intent of a visitor.

You can follow a path like:

widgets -> wooden widgets -> red wooden widgets

This setup works fine for some type of shoppers, but is a complete turn-off for others.

And the problem is that most affiliates simply mirror the catalog structure of a merchant according to their feed.

But if you structured your site to list widgets as: widgets for birthdays widgets for girlfriends widgets for those who are over 50 the Independence Day widgets etc.

then you would attract different type of shoppers. You would no longer compete with the merchant, but instead you would complement them.

A visitor who is looking for a gift for his 50-something friend and has no idea that a red wooden widget would be perfect, will not travel down the path laid out by our catalog. So if he gets to our home page, we simply lose a sale. And if your datafeed-based site follows the same structure - you lose as sale as well.

Also, since the visitor does not know that he really wants a red wooden widget, he we not use those keywords while searching for a present on the search engines.

But if you attracted that visitor to your site, presented him with ideas for older friends' birthday gifts and guided him to that specific widget's page - then we would make a sale, you would make a commission, and the visitor (turned customer) would get his present with much less searching around. Everyone wins.

Such approach takes more work than simply cloning the merchant's site with a feed, but affiliates who actually do something to complement merchant instead competing with them make a lot more money. After all, if you create a copy of a merchant's site - you are not only competing with the merchant, you are also competing with all of their affiliates that use the same feed in the same way.

6 Hottest ClickBank Affiliate Programs

How To Make Money Selling Affiliate Products Without A Website

By john bek

You have probably heard about affiliate programs. You promote somebody else's product and get a commission when a visitor you refer buys the product. Many people quickly sign up for these programs, place the affiliate link on their website expecting sales to roll in like an avalanche, but are soon disappointed. Being a successful affiliate requires discipline, creativity and strategy . One can write a book about how to be a successful affiliate, but in this article I will focus on a strategy that can make you a top selling affiliate even if you don't have a website.

What affiliate program you should choose? Well, it's up to you, there are many to choose from. I recommend using Clickbank, since they have over 10,000 digital products and rank their products based on number of affiliate sales each product is generating. I suggest selecting a product that gives you at least $20 commission on a sale. Products with lower commissions are simply not worth promoting, because promotion is going to cost you money.

The main advantage of an affiliate program is that you don't have to develop your own product to sell. The product is there; your efforts must be focused on promoting it. One of the best ways of promoting a product, when you don't have a high traffic website, is using Pay Per Click advertising.

Pay per click advertising is the hottest new marketing medium. Pioneered by Overture, PPC advertising is offered by major search engines including Google. PPC method allows an advertiser to bid on specific keywords and when a search engine user is searching for that particular keyword, the advertiser's add appears in the search results. You get charged only when that user click on the ad. For example, an advertiser may bid on the word camera. When a user searches for the word camera, the advertiser's ad would appear in the search results. The rank of the ad in the search results depends on the advertiser's bid, since the highest bidder gets the top position.

Which search engine should you use to promote your affiliate product? I recommend using Google's Adwords .

PPC advertising is quite effective for promoting affiliate programs, especially if you don't have a website. When you sign up for Clickbank or some other affiliate program, you will be given a nickname or an affiliate code that you must insert inside a link used to direct people to the vendor's sales page. In a PPC advertising campaign this will be the destination link. For example, let's say you have signed up with Clickbank and have decided to promote an ebook about weight loss. You open an account with Google Adwords, and create an add for this particular ebook. When creating your add, you will be asked to enter a destination url, this is the address of the website that the user will be taken to when they click on your add. You must use your affiliate name or code inside this destination url or link, so that when the user clicks on your add and is taken to the vendor's sales page and subsequently purchases a product you will get your commission. As you can see, you do not need a website to promote an affiliate product. You can use the PPC add to drive targeted traffic to your affiliate's sales page, and when someone from this pool of traffic purchases the product, you get a commission. More sales you generate, more money you make.

When setting up your add you have to decide which keywords you will bid on. Google has a keyword suggestion tool but it does not tell you how many times a keyword was searched in the past. I recommend using another free keyword suggestion tool . This amazing tool tells you the number of searches that were conducted both on Overture and Wordtracker throughout the previous month for each keyword phrase. This should give you good idea what words and phrases are being searched by search engine users and enable you to target your keywords accordingly. .

When writing your PPC add, you must use a catchy headline to get the viewer to click on your add. I suggest using words like achieve, discover, lose, make, overcome, protect, enjoy, enhance, satisfy, seek, win. These words have a psychological effect on humans and have been statistically proven to get people's attention. Of course, your headline must fit the product you are promoting. In the body of your add describe some of the benefits of the product and include a call to action. Tell the viewer what you want them to do: buy, order, download. After your add goes live, you should monitor it and see how many clicks you are getting. If you are not getting enough clicks, modify your add and try a different headline.

Mastering PPC advertising takes time, but once you know what you're doing, you can promote any affiliate program and make good money doing it. I know several affiliates that make a comfortable living by promoting affiliate products using solely PPC advertising. If you want to learn more about using PPC advertising to make money, I recommend an excellent book by Chris Carpenter called GoogleCash. I recommend this book because it is a step-by-step guide filled with practical and real examples. Remember, the worst thing an affiliate can do is give up easily. Set a strategy, stick by it and you will succeed. Good Luck

About the Author
John writes about various business and finance topics. His newest website is www.electronicforextrading.com