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Affiliate Marketing Programs
Affiliate marketing programs (or associate programs) are a common technique used to grow an internet business... They are touted as a great way of making extra income from your web site, or a method for marketing your own products on other web sites.Everyone says I can make money from the traffic my web sites are getting... If you believe some pundits, even a novice can make $1,000 a month or more from affiliate programs.
Affiliate Marketing Programs Explained
Affiliate marketing is the process whereby a web site owner (the affiliate or publisher) promotes the products or services from other web sites (the merchant or advertiser) by linking to those sites with a unique URL link.In return, the affiliate may earn payment for:
- the sale of products, and/or
- generating a qualified "lead" for the merchant to follow up on, and/or
- directing traffic to the merchant's web site.
Publishers enter into an affiliate arrangement with an advertiser - either directly with the advertiser, or indirectly through a range of affiliate program management providers (see More Information panel at bottom for links to some of these).
Each advertising banner or text link can be tracked by a URL unique to the affiliate, and affiliates place these URLs on their web pages.
When a visitor to an affiliate's site clicks on the banners or text links, the transaction can be tracked. The merchant can easily identify which affiliate sent the visitor and the result of that visit, and the affiliate is able to identify how many people they have sent as a result of specific advertisements.
Depending on the arrangement made with the advertiser, the affiliate may earn a commission for:
- any purchase made by the visitor, or
- or may earn a set rate for
- the referral to the merchant web site (a click-through), or
- an enquiry made by the visitor (lead campaign)
The secret to making money through affiliate programs lies in two very important factors:
- choosing the RIGHT PRODUCTS to promote, and
- generating ENOUGH TRAFFIC to those products to get your 1% to 3% conversion rate actually happening!
Choosing the Right Affiliate Products
Your BIGGEST PROBLEM is the ongoing search for affiliate products to promote that YOUR AUDIENCE responds to.At any stage, your web site may have 10, 20 or even 50 or more products that you promote.
The sad fact of life is that only 10% of those products will actually sell... but which 10%? You have to monitor everything closely. Stay on top by weeding out product that doesn't perform, and find new stuff that might!
Then, once you've found product that converts to sales, promote it like crazy!
Generating Enough Traffic
One thing that is needed to get ANY sort of result, is traffic... and lots of it! If your web site is not getting at least 10,000 unique visitors a month, then the stats (click-through rates) are going to be against you.Traffic generation is going to become a very important part of your affiliate life!
Of course, you can always buy traffic, and the most common way affiliates do that is by signing up with Google Adwords. You can put ads on Google and on publisher sites like this one, and pay for each click that you send through to your site.
Now there are HEAPS of eBooks around about how to use Adwords to promote products - but BEFORE you venture into that field, remember to test, test and test again!
Make sure you are promoting a product that converts at a good rate because there's no point in spending more on advertising than you are going to earn!
And through testing of your ads, you will notice that even small changes can make a big difference to your costs and click-throughs.
Before investing in many of the traffic "schemes" that are available out there... remember that not all traffic is created equal! Many "schemes" will generate traffic to your site, but is it targeted? Are the people being sent interested in what you offer? And what about banner advertising? It's well and truly lost its effectiveness with response rates down around 0.05% or even lower - yes 5 in a thousand!
A technique that might be worth trying is article marketing, which will soon be discussed elsewhere on this site.
Like most things on the Internet, you won't get rich quickly or easily as an affiliate marketer. It will take time and effort, but careful selection of products and the right promotion should earn you a reasonable amount of pocket money.
My first "serious" venture into marketing products from ClickBank has earned a nice $1200 USD in 2006... and has already passed the $500 mark early in 2007 as I implement some of what I've learned - you know, what works and what doesn't.
And, in case you were wondering, many of the products featured on this site (see right hand panel) are affiliate items I have carefully selected to promote to work from home operators. So check them out, and when you buy, be content in the knowledge that you've help feed my kids today :)
More Information:
Recommended Affiliate Management Programs:
Commission Monster - Australian Based
PayDotCom - Affiliate Marketing using PayPal
ClickBank - 1000's of digital goods to sell
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