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Affiliate
programs are a very easy and effective way to make money on the Internet right?
so how do they work?
Essentially, affiliate programs are a way that you
can promote other peoples products and get paid a commission for promoting them.
You can get paid to promote almost any type of product and service on the web.
Most
of the top companies on the web have Affiliate Programs. Dell computers, Amazon,
Expedia, AT&T, Chase bank, Delta airlines and Walmart are just a few examples
- did you know that you can be paid a commission to sell products online for any
one of these companies?
The best thing about affiliate programs is that
it is so easy to set up a relationship with any one of these companies. Normally
in business you would have to spend weeks or months of meetings, proving that
you are a worthwhile partner to be able to do business with these sorts of companies.
However, an affiliate program allows you to get commissions straight away as a
little guy,without all the hassle of meetings and forming that relationship.
There
are thousands of affiliate programs that you can promote on the web. You have
so many choices that you could pursue. The key factors for success with affiliate
programs are the following:
Choosing the right affiliate programs. If you
choose certain affiliate programs you will likely only be able to earn a small
income because their payouts are small. Other affiliate programs have very large
payouts and high earning per click (EPC). If you dont know what earning per click
(EPC) is, it is the average amount that affiliates earn from each click to the
site that they are sending money to. Some networks express it in earnings per
one hundred clicks.
For example you could say an EPC of $57. This means
you make $57 on average for every 100 visitors that you send to a site or 57 cents
for sending one visitor to the site. Generally I am looking for affiliate programs
with an EPC of $20 or more, which means I am making 20 cents per visitor. Usually,
I focus on programs that have an EPC of $100 or $1 per visitor. When you are earning
$1 per visitor you have potential for a lot more profit.
The second critical
factor is getting the traffic to the affiliate program. We are going to talk about
this more in other issues of the Ecourse.
The third factor is being able
to pre-sell to the visitors of your site. Lets say that you have a website where
you discuss different products and services, a comparison type of site. You can
recommend the product that you think is most beneficial and then when people click
through to the site after your recommendation, they are much more likely to buy.
How
do you find good affiliate programs?
One easy way is to go to all of the
affiliate networks and sign up for affiliate programs there. The major affiliate
networks like Commission Junction have thousands of affiliate programs that you
can join in all sorts of categories. You can find a listing of the different affiliate
networks at: http://www.profitpuppy.com/affiliate-networks.htm
It also
depends on what type of strategy you are pursuing with affiliate
programs.
There are many different strategies and we cant go into all of them now, well
talk about them in detail in some later issues of the ecourse. However here are
a few strategies to get your brain ticking over with ideas:
You can promote
affiliate programs directly using Google Adwords. You simply promote the program
by creating your own ads. This is the quickest way to make money on the Internet
as you can get started and in 1-2 hours have some ads up that are making you money.
However, it is getting more and more difficult to make money with this strategy
as there are too many people doing it. As with anything in life, if something
is too easy to make money, everyone will start doing it and it then becomes more
difficult because there is more competition.
One strategy is to focus on
a particular niche area lets say you decide to do a site on car rentals. You could
then join all the affiliate programs to do with car rentals. You can find many
of them through the major networks, but you might also need to search on Google
for something like car rental affiliate program.
Another strategy is to
build lots of little mini sites on the Internet focusing on different keyword
phrases that people are searching for and get free search engine listings in Google
and other search engines. This is a great strategy because the traffic that you
get is free. This is general called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is great
and can make you a lot of money but it is also very tricky. It is not easy to
get to the top of the search engines. It requires a lot of knowledge, and quite
a bit of effort. Dont think that you can just read a book and do it normally it
is going to take months of dedication to get there.
Thats a few ideas,
but whatever area you are involved in on the Internet you should definitely be
promoting affiliate programs. Even if you sell your own product online you should
still look into affiliate programs as a back end profit centre for your business.
Affiliate
programs are one of the quickest ways to make money on the Internet. Over the
next few issues of the Ecourse we are going to talk about other strategies of
using affiliate programs.
If you want a free email course on affiliate
programs you can send a blank email to: tamsaffiliatemarketing@sitesell.net This
email course is written by Ken Evoy and it is this course that actually got me
started in marketing on the Internet.
http://www.profitpuppy.com Rob
Rawson You may reprint/republish any of the following articles on your own Site,
in your own ezine, auto-responder series, product, bonus items, or any other format
you wish as long as you adhere to the following: 1. The article must not be altered
in anyway and the links must remain active 2. You must not abuse the Internet
in anyway, shape, or form with ANY of your online marketing. This includes but
is not limited to sending unsolicited commercial email (SPAM), abusing online
forums, using copyrighted materials without permission, or infringing on the trademarks
of others. info@profitpuppy.com |
