The Easy Way To Make Money Online – Affiliate Programs
So, what’s an affiliate program? An affiliate program is a way for a company or individual to get other people to sell their products for them in exchange for a portion of the profits.
Typically the way it works is that you sign up as an affiliate for a specific website. They will send you a special link that allows them to track any visitors that come from your site. Once you put this link on your website, anyone that makes a purchase from your affiliate website will be tracked and you will get a portion of the sale. The sad part is that most affiliate programs only offer a few cents commission for each referral. I don’t know about you, but I need more incentive than that to make me want to send traffic to another website.
The good news is that there are several affiliate programs out there that will give you up to 75% of each sale that you generate. These programs are typically part of an affiliate network. What’s an affiliate network? An affiliate network is a collection of websites that sell similar kinds of products and usually share a similar way of creating affiliate links. Here is a list of the ones that you must join if you are going to take advantage of affiliate networks:
1) ClickBank
2) Commission Junction
3) BeFree – Part of Commission Junction
4) LinkShare
ClickBank is probably the easiest affiliate network get started with, and I highly recommend it for beginners. ClickBank is unique in that it will only sell digital products. This usually means software, ebooks, mp3 and video courses, anything that can be delivered immediately on purchase through the Internet.
Commission Junction is a collection of companies that sell physical products: Home electronics, credit cards, you name it. There are some big names doing business in this affiliate network, so it is definately worth a look. A word of warning though, you need to have been around for at least a year and belong to the local Better Business Bureau.
BeFree is just a spin off of the Commission Junction system. Again, there are a lot of great programs in here, so take a look and see if there is something you are interested in marketing.
Link Share is another great program with a lot of really great brick and mortar companies.
So now that you know what an affiliate network is, what kinds of products should you sell? What you want to look for is earnings-per-click for each product in the affiliate network. This will tell you which programs are converting the best, ClickBank calls this number Gravity. Look at the products with the highest gravity in each ClickBank category and start marketing those. Be careful though, also look the amount that is earned per sale and the amount of the commission you get. If someone is selling a product for $40 and you get a 50% commission, you get $20 per sale. If the amount earned per sale is only $10, then you know that there are a lot of returns, so you need to find something else to market.
If you can, try and purchase the products yourself to see if you feel comfortable marketing them or if you think they are a scam. I do not promote any products that I have not personally tried and have been able to pay for themselves or deliver the results they promise within a couple of months.
There are a several ways that you can use affiliate links to generate income. As I mentioned in my article on PPC advertising, you can write short ads for Google AdWords and insert your affiliate link directly into the ad. The drawback to this is that you have to write one ad per affiliate link, which can cost you more money. This can work if you are marketing profitable products, but you need to figure out if they are profitable very quickly.
A better idea is to put links on your own website and market your website. The advantage of this is that you are only paying for traffic to your website and can market dozens of affiliate products at the same time. The downside of this is that you need to get people to click twice, once to the get your site and a second time on the affiliate link.
This normally isn’t too much of a problem, especially if you write an honest review of each product that you are selling. Highly what worked in the program, what problems it solves, and how it solves them. Then give people the option of clicking on the affiliate link.
One trick that is useful when marketing affiliate links is to offer a rebate of some kind, usually about 15-20% of the total cost of the product you are marketing. Tell people that if they buy the product through you, they can save 15% off the total price. Make sure that you explain that they need to purchase the product at the full price and that they need to send you some kind of proof of purchase. Then, after 90 days you send them a check or pay them through PayPal for the amount of the rebate. You need to wait 90 days to make sure that they can not get a refund on their credit cards. Quit honestly, only about 20% of the people that use your link will ever ask for the rebate. They forget to send you the proof of purchase, and after 90 days they have probably moved on to other things and completely forgotten that they bought something from you in the first place.
Another great way to use affiliate links is to put them in your email campaigns. If you have a website with an email newsletter, put a small ad for the products you are selling at the bottom of the email. Alternatively, you can write an entire email around a single product and send it to your list.
The real power of an affiliate network comes when you are selling your own products. If you sign up with ClickBank and you have a digital product, you can literally get thousands of people to market your product for you. When you are first starting out with this, offer affiliates a 75% commission on each sale, the highest that ClickBank will allow. This attracts affiliates like crazy, especially if you have a quality product that doesn’t generate many returns.
Another trick you can use to get affiliates to market your website is to offer the top performing affiliates an additional few dollars for each sale they generate. You can either send these people a check or pay them through PayPal at the end of the month. This is particularly useful for keeping affiliates, and keeping them promoting your product. You might only make a few dollars per sale, but if there is a high enough volume you can still make a ton of money.
For more tips on using affiliate programs to their fullest potential, go to http://beattherichjerk.com
Author: Christopher Shireman
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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