It’s Time To Monetize Your Affiliate Marketing Business!
Once you have created your Affiliate Marketing website with lots of useful, quality content for your visitors, it’s time to find some good companies whose products you want to promote, and get some affiliate links into your content so you can start earning some commissions.
At this point you should know what the topic of your website will be, and therefore the kinds of products you will most likely be promoting. You can do a search to find lots of companies to consider by entering “your topic + affiliate programs” into the search box. For instance, if your website is about shoes, you would enter “shoes + affiliate programs”.
Generally speaking, you’ll want to look for reputable companies with excellent products that are relevant to your site’s theme. And as tempting as it may be to choose only the companies that pay the highest commissions (or whatever the mode of payment is), it’s important to know what the conversion rate is for a product or service.
If the company pays well but their product/service isn’t selling, you’re probably not going to make a lot of money with them. However, if the commissions are lower, but the product is a good seller, your chances of making a decent income are increased.
Find out whether or not the company offers life-time – or at least long-term – referrals (‘cookies’). If a visitor comes to your site – likes a product or service you offer, but decides not to buy until sometime in the future – will you still get credit for that purchase?
A good program will provide excellent training tools and resources such as banner ads for their affiliates. Ideally, they should have a member’s area where you can log in and grab promotional materials, your links, and also check your stats and commissions.
Note that even though many websites continue to display lots of flashy banners on their websites, it’s becoming more common for webmasters to use more text ads than banners. The choice will be up to you, and it’s a good idea to try it both ways and see what works best for you.
Good Communication Is Important
The best affiliate program will respond to your questions in a timely manner. But – by the same token – a good affiliate will make sure they read all the materials provided on the website before contacting the program/merchant.
When you join their affiliate program (for free) the company will in turn assign unique-to-you URL links to place on your website. These links will let the merchant know when a visitor to your site has clicked through to them and made a purchase.
Affiliate Networks
These networks function as middlemen between merchants and you – the affiliate – and are another great place to find suitable merchants to affiliate with. One of the larger Affiliate Networks – Clickbank – is a huge retailer for digitally delivered products such as ebooks and software, and has a vast inventory of products for you to choose from to promote… Or you can just link directly to the Clickbank Marketplace if you so choose.
You can do a search from the Marketplace by category or by keywords, and choose Clickbank affiliate programs that are suitable for your site. If you haven’t signed up for a free Clickbank account yet, you can do that here. It’s free and easy, and only takes a couple of minutes.
Where appropriate – it is always a good idea to purchase and use the products that you plan to promote so that you can give an accurate review of all it’s features – good and bad. Customers appreciate honest feedback and will be more likely to buy from you if you give them good quality information and honest reviews. This will help to promote trust – and your customer will be much more likely to come back and visit you in the future.
Advertisements and Google AdSense
If you’re promoting an ebook, or other product from your site and sending your customers to a sales page, be weary of sales pages with all sorts of ads all over them. Your efforts will most likely just be spent wasting your own traffic.
Google Ads on your own website or blog can be a very powerful source of revenue – but sales pages that you send your customers to are probably not the best placement for them. If you haven’t signed up for a free Google Ads account yet, you can click on the link and sign up now.
High Sales Minimum
Watch out for programs that ask you to sell a certain amount before you get paid. For example – the commission on a $20 book is 10% (or $2 per sale) and the company’s policy is to send out checks only when the affiliate has accumulated a minimum of $200 in commissions.
You’d have to sell a boatload of books (100 – to be exact) before getting paid one dime, which may be fine if you have a lot of targeted traffic that is converting to sales, but if not you may have to wait a while (if ever) before you see any affiliate checks.
Some of these programs operate on the theory that most affiliates will not make that many sales, so they’ll never need to pay out. It’s unfortunate, and I’ve never had it happen to me personally – but I have talked to others who say it has happened to them. Just be careful and pay attention to each site’s TOS.
Always read the Terms of Agreement (they DO have one, don’t they?) before signing up for any affiliate program. It’s important to know what their rules and guidelines are before you commit. (More on Finding The Best Affiliate Marketing Programs).
And finally, selling other people’s stuff is not the only way to monetize your new Affiliate Marketing website, and we’ll be covering some of the other ways in later installments of the Affiliate Marketing Guide.
< Affiliate Marketing Guide- Part 1
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