Make Money with Affiliate Business
Affiliate Programs are not the only method, but they are the easiest by far. Literally, within minutes you can be running ads on your website and turning those visitors into sweet beer money (or it can be your entire income if you are good at it). Before I go forward on this subject let me go over what an affiliate program is.
Businesses advertise on the web. That’s not news to you I’m sure. But how do these businesses find all those thousands of websites and convince them to run ads on their site? Well, actually they don’t. They wait for webmasters like you to come to them and sign up for their affiliate programs. Once signed up, you are given an identification code which represents your account. That code can be placed into any link or banner.
The company (know as a “seller”) will offer you a list of links and banners with your code already embedded into them. You simply place those links onto your site and when a visitor clicks the ad and arrives on the “sellers” website, a tracking cookie is placed and you receive a percentage of any sales which that customer might make. So, if the customer you send spends $100 and your getting a 15% commission, then you have just earned $15. The cookie (assuming that the visitor has cookies enabled on their computer) will persist on the customer’s computer and credit your account with sales made for a period of time should they return to the seller’s website (usually 30-90 days depending on the program). That’s the basic gist of how it works. You advertise for them and they give you a percentage of the sales which are delivered via your ads.
So how to find these affiliate programs? There are two major methods to find an affiliate program.
- The first requires you to “hit the pavement”. Find businesses that sell the type of product or services that you are interested in advertising on your site, and look over their website. If they have an affiliate program they will usually have a link at the top or bottom of the page directing you to it (also look for “webmasters” links).
- The other method is far easier and that is to sign up with a major affiliate marketing company. These sites gather hundreds of affiliate sellers together into one single site (and one account for you). From within your account you have access to all the programs, links, and many other features like sales tracking, traffic reports, advertisement click-through ratios all of which can help you to home in on which ads are working and which are not. The down side to this format is that some of the really good affiliate programs out there don’t sign up with these conglomerate companies,,,, they prefer to run their own programs. AND, you will usually receive a lower commission from these type of sites because the seller has to pay a commission to you and the conglomerate.
What kind of things can I sell? The world is your oyster. I’m not kidding. There are affiliate programs from banking services to diaper companies to gambling to web templates.
How should I start? First you will want to decide what kind of product or service will appeal to your audience. You certainly don’t want to sell pet supplies on your Fitness website. Likewise if your website already sells a product or service you may want to avoid competing against yourself by advertising for companies which duplicate your own business. Once you have decided what kind of product/services you might wish to sell, it’s time to sign up. I would suggest starting with a “conglomerate” affiliate program. These are usually easier to learn and will offer you a great variety of seller options to get started. Then after you have found your niche and learned to really sell, you can start looking around for individually run programs that might suite your needs better (or maybe they won’t,,, but it doesn’t matter, you can be signed up with as many as you wish). Here are a couple of the best conglomerate programs in my opinion. I’ve worked with both of them for many years and found them to be very effective.
- Commission Junction (all categories)
- Link Share (all categories)