Online Marketing >> Affiliate Marketing

Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a very lucrative way of earnign an extra income whether you're already selling your own products or not. When you are an affiliate marketer, you basically advertise other peoples' products for a fraction of the sale price which is also known as a commission. Through your affiliate link, you drive targeted traffic to the merchant's sales or sign-up page. There are different ways the merchants will pay you a commission depending on what action the user has to take. in fact, the merchant determines what constitutes an action worthy of compensation. There are basically three types of actions that the merchant decides to pay you for.

• Per-Click advertising (Click-throughs): This type means exactly what it says. In other words, every time that a user clicks on your affiliate link that will take him to the merchant's site you get paid.
• Per-Lead advertising: This type requires that when a user lands on the merchant's web page he or she has to input their credentials in a sign-up form. This kind of programs is common among mortgage and loan companies where the user requests a quote for instance.
• Per-Sale programs: These are the most common and popular form of affiliate programs. as a matter of fact, you get paid only when a user makes a purchase of the product adverised. This type is the one that pays the highest commissions because it's harder to generate sales than it is with click-throughs and leads.

How To Choose An Affiliate Program?

You would agree that there are so many affiliate programs out there that you don't really know which ones to sign up for. Following are some criteria that will help you choose the affilite programs that are right for you:

• Alaways make sure you pick a program that you like and have interest in. Before you decide to promote a product, ask yourself if the product to be promoted is of any interest to you. In other words, ask yourself if you would buy that product. If the answer is yes, then there are chances that other people will buy it too.
• Make sure that the program is catering to a growing target market. The product has to be in demand otherwise you will be wasting your time and probably money promoting a product that nobody needs or wants.
• The affiliate program you join has to offer a compemsation plan that pays you a residual or recurring income and a commission of no less that 30% per sale.
• It is better to sign up with an affiliate program that offers marketing tools and resouces to its affiliates. This will tremendously help you grwo your business in the shortest amount of time.
• Never ever sign up for an affiliate program that charges you a fee to join. Affiliate programs are supposed to be free. What if they charge you 50 dollars to join and you never make a single sale. It will be money down the drain.

Where To Find Affiliate Programs?

There are actually three methods that you can use to locate affiliate programs that you would like to join.

• One way you can join affiliate programs is by registering with affiliate networks. If you wish, they're kind of the middleman between the affiliate and the actual owner of the product. They handle the payment process and all the commission distributions and they're free to join.The major affiliate networs are the following:
  • Clickbank: It is the largest digital product market place. Any marketer out there has at some point worked with clickbank. Most merchants will pay you a hefty 70% commieeion per sale. Clickbank will send you a check every two weeks. It is a graet network and I have been working with them for a while now. However, please not that Clickbank won't send out any checks untill you have accumulated sales that are made with 5 or more different credit card numbers and two different payment methods;Visa, Mastercard or PayPal. If you wish to join ClickBank, click here to go to the sign-up page.
  • Commission Junction
  • Click2Sell
  • PayDotCom
  • Amazon.com: Everyone knows that Amazon is the largest online store there is. They're not really an affiliate network, but they have their own stand-alone affiliate program.
• Another way of finding affiliate programs is look for websites whose products or services fit in your niche and look for a link that says "Affiliates" or "Affiliate Program". Those links are usually located in the top navigation bar or in the footer of the page. Then, you can register as an affiliate so you can get your affiliate id.
• The third method to look for affiliate programs is to use Google search box. You can input keywords like "affiliate programs" or "affiliate networks". You will be amazed by the number of results you will have. All you have to do then is just browse through these result and make your decision on which programs to sign up for.

How To Promote Affiliate Links?

Well, I am glad you asked. In fact, there are many ways you can promote your affiliate links. You can do this through either your own website if you own one, autoresponders and articles or through search engine advertising like Google AdWords, MSN or Yahoo. Below is break-down of the different ways you can promote products as an affiliate marketer.

How To Promote Products On Your Website

Having your own website is a big advantage when it comes to promoting your affiliate links. The primary reason is that it won't cost you a dime apart from your hosting cost of course. However, in order to for this method to work you need to have enough traffic. To know more about how you can do this, you can refer to the search engine optimization section. Once you think you have the traffic necessary to monetize your website through affiliate programs, you can place your links on your website. Effective and strategic placement of your ads is key to your success. Take advantage of the different tools that your affiliate manager provides you with. These can come in the form of text links and ad bannes. if you don't have access to these tools, you can come up with your own. Personally, I prefer text links because they blend in your content and there are more chances that the user will click on them. Image or banner ads, I am not really excited about. I still use them but not as much as I use text ads. When was the last time you clicked on an image ad? Probably, a very long time ago. This is why you have to think like your users. If you don't like ad banners, then neither do they.

One of the many mistakes that internet marketers make is that they think that placing affiliate links here and there is enough to make money. In fact, you'll find so many websites that have no rich content but are staffed with affiliate links. Remember that content is king and that internet users are looking for information. It is your job as an affiliate to provide that information if you want to draw more sales. The best way to do that is by writing reviews about the product you are promoting. Write a three paragraph review in which you can both state the benefits of the product and embed your affiliate links. Try to be honest about what you write. Try also to include some , if any, of the cons about the product. In a sense, your reviews will be like a sales letter before the user goes to the merchant's sales page. If you succeed to convince the user to click on your link and go to the merchant's main page, then you just increased your chances to make a sale.

An other way to promote products through your website is to write a report or an ebook that you can offer to your taget audience for free. Pick a subject that pertains to your niche, like internet marketing for instance, and write a report about it. When writing, you can include your affiliate links. This is one of the most effective methods, because a report or an ebook will never stop working for you as long as people keep requesting it. Therefore, make sure your ebook or report is of a value to the user.

Promote Products With Autoresponders

Autoresponders are a great medium to advertise your products to your prospects. If you don't know what an autoresponder is, please refer to the email marketing section. If you're not using autoresponders to promote your affiliate links, then you are missing out on a huge profit. Autoresponders are not there just to collect users' info and build a mailing list. In fact, if used effectively, they can prove to be a money making machine. Whether you use them to deliver your ezines, newsletter or online courses, you should definitely use them to inform your subscribers about products that you either own or promote through affiliate marketing. One way to do that is to include your links in the body of your newsletter when trying to recommend a product to a user. Another way is to insert your links in the resource box which, by the way, you should include in all your mailings.

Promote Through Pay-Paer-Click advertising

Search engine advertising is another way you can promote products online. This is what is commonly known as pay-per-click advertising. It is one of the most cost-effective ways of targeted internet advertising. It constitutes an additional source of traffic to your website, aside from the natural or organic search engines.

The good news here is that, for your ad to appear in the top positions, you don't rely on meta and title tags. The position in which your ads show is determined depending on the keyword you're targeting and the amount of money you bid on that particular keyword. Remember that the more a keyword is searched for, the highest the bid. Therefore, you should not bid on highly searched-for and competetive keywords. Yes, PPC is cost-effective, but if you don't use it cautiously you will eventually lose your shirt. Be careful in choosing your keywords.

There are many PPC programs that you can use although the three that are mosty used are Google AdWords, Msn, and Yahoo. The program I've been using is Google Adwords. The reason I use this program is the ability to analyze and track my ads.

Believe me, I know how painful and time consuming it is to run your advertising campaigns using Google Adwords specially if you have no one to guide you. You're lucky because I happen to have compiled some detailed step-bt-step video tutorials that will walk you through every step. This is a free collection that I could sell for $47.00 but I am giving it away for free. Don't delay and grab your copy of Google AdWords Pay-Per-Click Basics Now.

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