The Affiliate Program
The Realities of Affiliate Programs
We’ve all seen the claims of affiliate marketing programs – make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month while doing absolutely nothing. Sure, there have been a few big-time affiliate marketers who have made lots of money by using one or more affiliate programs ads on their websites. When visitors click through to the affiliate sponsor and make a purchase (convert), the home business affiliate marketer makes money. How easy is that? No product inventory to stock or ship, no customers to service. Making money with an affiliate program must be a piece of cake, right?
Success Tips for Affiliate Programs
There are a few things you can do to improve your chances for making money with an affiliate marketing program:
o Get lots (and lots, and lots) of traffic visiting the websites you use for your affiliate programs.
o Associate only with good affiliate marketing programs that offer products or services or information that your website visitors will actually want to purchase.
o Look for affiliate programs that pay high commission rates on time and who keep their customers happy, not just their affiliate marketers, by providing actual value.
oWould you buy the product or service the affiliate program is offering? If not, why would you expect your site visitors to click through? If you are linking out to affiliate marketing scam artist, eventually the word will get out and you’ll lose credibility. People won’t want to come back to your site and they may not click through to your other affiliate programs that may very well be legitimately offering value.
oYou need to provide content on your home business website that is related to what your affiliate programs are offering. For example, if you write about figure skating, it’s not likely your visitors will be looking to buy a book on motorcycles or a new set of saddlebags.
o A blog that contain information about what you are promoting is very useful for keen consumers to read up. More importantly a blog with testimonials will give that confidence level and entice people to sign up.
oIf you also use ads on your website, such as Google AdSense for making money, be advised that having both affiliate program links and AdSense links on the same page may result in poor performance of both. I’ve seen actual cases where AdSense revenues fell after adding affiliate marketing program links.
oIf you can afford to experiment a bit, try setting up ads in Google AdWords for your affiliate marketing program (make sure your affiliate program allows you to use their product names, etc. and allows you to advertise as part of your affiliate program). If it costs you 50 cents per click for your AdWords ad and it takes an average of 40 such clicks to make a sale in your affiliate marketing program, your cost of that sale is $20. If your commission is $40 per sale, it would be well worth it to advertise.
o The basic idea is to get as many people to click on your hoplink. Use a shorten URL in replace of your long hoblink. A good example of a short hoblink look something like this http://flornt.com/simplyrich
In a nut shell
It takes time, knowledge and considerable effort to succeed with affiliate programs, but there’s no reason you couldn’t make money with an online affiliate marketing home business. Just don’t believe the outrageous claims and don’t plan on quitting your day job right away.
An affiliate marketing business is like any other business you might want to start. It takes planning, time and some money as well as a lot of hard work and determination. lasy but not least, you need to be very resourceful as well.
