How To Earn Money With Affiliate Marketting

Have you considered setting up an online business? You should!

Affiliate programs are a fairly simple way to generate an income stream. It’s very easy to set-up on any website. Just paste on the provided codes of the merchant site you choose and you’re good to go. 

You would be earning commissions for every click or for every sales that you direct from your website. Most affiliate programs don’t require any sign up fee at all. So for something that you get for free, not to mention maintenance-free as well, it’s something definitely worth giving a shot.

Earning hundreds of dollars through affiliate program is very possible and not just all hype, in fact, some people can earn much more! 

You can search for different affiliate programs on the web. To get you started, checkout www.clickbank.com. This site is a niche directory of affiliate programs giving you options and other helpful links. 

Choose a merchant that is appropriate for the site that you currently have (if you are promoting affiliate products using a website). It's also best to weave Google ads to your website to go with the affiliate program you chose to maximize your profits.

A lot of people have already joined the bandwagon of entrepreneurs and discovered their own pots of gold on the Internet. 

With the onset of push button web publishing, large-scale companies and small businessmen are breaking through into the Internet market fast and easy. It’s relatively simple to set up a site on your own with very little technical knowledge. 

There are ready-made templates you can use and in less than an hour you already got a site up and running - checkout Wix.com which has a great looking, simple to use drag and drop website builder. If putting up a website is too much of a hassle for you, then you can have some web designers to do the dirty work at a minimal fee. Your investment would pay off in the long run.

If your business is doing good offline, you can increase your wealth base by an incredible amount by building your presence on the Internet. Alternatively, if you don’t have a business yet, the best place for you to start is on the Word Wide Web. It’s by far the cheapest advertising tool that you can have plus you get to have global exposure.

Now the biggest question you probably have is how can you make money on the web, right? There are literally hundreds of ways, and the single most powerful strategy of them all is to build an affiliate program to promote and kick sale for your products and services.

What’s an Affiliate Program?

An affiliate program is a marketing technique initiated by Amazon.com CEO, Jeff Bezos in 1996. The main concept is to build a network of websites, aside from your own, to promote your company. These sites will then post links and banners of your merchant site. 

When visitors click on your ads, they will be directed to your site, now that’s time for you to do your thing and close the sale. 

Your website should be convincing enough to hold the attention of your potential client and eventually get them to try what you have to offer. Your affiliates will get paid for every referrer that you managed to close a sale with. You can also offer a certain amount for every visitor they direct to your site, also referred to as pay per click.

How to promote your affiliate program

Have s strong focus on content.

As with any other website, content is very important to drive traffic to your site. Add in useful content that readers would find beneficial and in turn would entice them to visit your site more often. You can then offer them related products that they might be interested in based on the content they are visiting. 

For instance, if you have created an affiliate program selling air mattresses, add articles about its history, design, engineering and the comfort it brings. These articles will not only serve as selling tools for your site but would also be very useful for your readers looking for information on the subject. Plus, getting useful content and optimizing them for search engines would give you a good standing on page ranks.

Choose your affiliates wisely

You don’t just scatter your affiliate links all over the Internet to anyone who wants them. They key here is to promote your site to your target market through your affiliate program. 

You should meticulously choose your affiliates. The visitors of your affiliate site should be interested to what you offer as well, thus clicking on your link. Following the example above, if you are selling air mattresses, get affiliate websites about beds, sleeping disorders, or even about gift ideas.

Provide attractive banner links [like the one above ;) ^^ ]

Banners are attention grabbers compared to text links. How you represent your website and the product/ services you offer is represented in your banners ads. 

Keep them eye-catching and enticing enough to get visitors to click them. There are cheap banners ads that can go for as low as $5. Alternatively, you can also try other selling techniques like fly-in ads, moving ads, and pop-ups.

Submit your website to affiliate directories

If you have a product to promote and want more people to join in your affiliate program, it is important to submit your website to directories. You will get a better response if you narrow down your positioning on the Internet and post your website on affiliate directories instead of the general directories. 

These websites have a list of affiliate programs categorized accordingly. Website owners will surely drop by the site to check out new affiliate programs that they could put up on their site. Niche directories are also very powerful in building your online presence, thus, making your website get more traffic and consequently, sky-rocket your sales.

Build an email list

The hidden weapon of the affiliate marketer is their email list!

When you promote offers, you should capture people's email address, usually by offering them something of value to them, such as a free ebook on a topic related to the product you are offering. This allows you to build a relationship with the person and remarket to them continuously, providing you are offering them products and content that is relevant to them.

Once you start to build up an email database, you will want to sign up to an auto responder, such as Aweber.com. 

This has lots of useful tools for collecting email addresses such as opt-in boxes and a landing page builder, and allows you to build up an automatic email campaign, so you can write the emails once, and everytime someone joins your list, they will start off the email sequence which will send them a mixture of value content and promotional content - so you only have to do the work once. Now that is truly passive income!