The
affiliate model - how to make money as an affiliate
The affiliate model - how to make money as an affiliate
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 people’s 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 don’t 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. Let’s 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 can’t
go into all of them now, we’ll 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 … let’s
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. Don’t
think that you can just read a book and do it … normally it
is going to take months of dedication to get there.
That’s 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.
About the Author This email course is
written by Ken Evoy and it is this course that actually got me started
in marketing on the Internet. From http://www.profitpuppy.com
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