Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate programs are agreements between website publishers (you) and websites that are trying to sell product. What happens is you put an advertisement for a certain product or website on your pages from an affiliate. When someone comes to your website, clicks on the ad that refers them to the seller's website, you get a commission on whatever sales are made.

Affiliate ads can be in banner for or text form. Here is an example of a banner ad I had on one of my websites:

This can be an excellent source of income. Although the earnings could be potentially less consistent in comparison to something like Google AdSense, the potential is there to earn much bigger revenues as well. This is due to the nature of commission sales as opposed to pay per click. With affiliates, you won't get paid every time someone clicks on it, but one click can be worth a lot if someone buys. So you definitely want to make sure you're promoting a good product as good products will obviously have a higher sale per click rate. Here is an example of my affiliate earnings in 12 days gained from the ad above:

The amount shown does not seem like a lot of money, and definately won't make you rich. But just remember, this is only one product. You get 5 - 10 going like this and you'll be flyin!

How Do I Find Affiliates?

To get started, a simple Google search with your topic and the word 'affiliates' beside them will get you a good start. For instance, if you were doing your website about Asian Cooking, you could do a Google Search with the query 'Asian Cooking Affiliates' or simply 'Cooking Affiliates' if you wanted to be less picky. After a while you'll see that most affiliates belong to large affiliate networks. So once you are a member of a network, you can easily see the other organizations that belong to that network and easily apply to their program. A couple of the best affiliate networks out there in my opinion are Click Bank, which primarily handles electronic data, and Commission Junction, which is mostly physical products.

What Products Should I Promote?

First of all, you want to make sure that the product is some how related to the content in your website. This is important because your visitors will more likely be interested in it. Also, the best affiliate programs out there pay a commission of 40%, 50%, or even as high as 75%!!! Those are the one you want to focus on for obvious reasons. They are usually the ones selling electronic data, such as e-books with valuable information, rather than physical product. They can pay you such high commission because they don't need to pay to produce more copies of their product!

If you have any questions about affiliate marketing, always feel free to contact me and ask.

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