Make Money Online with Affiliate
Programs: Getting Started Guide
Affiliates make money by referring customers to their merchants.
There are many companies and webmasters offer affiliate programs
to promote their online sales. When you sign up for an affiliate
program, you will be given an affiliate link with an unique
affiliate ID which will be used to market the product. When
someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link, you make
money (earn affiliate commission). Below are the steps to starting
an affiliate
marketing business:
Step 1 - Join an Affiliate Program
Clickbank.com is one of the best places to find an affiliate
program that interests you as there are a ton of sellers looking
for people to promote their e-books and info products. Before
you join any affiliate programs, do a little research. Find
out which products are most popular, the conversion rate of
the products and visit the sellers’ websites to see whether
their sales letters are convinced enough to generate sales.
A conversion rate of 5% is reasonably good. This means that
for every 100 visitors to the website, 5 visitors will buy.
Step 2 – Promote an affiliate
program through a website
You need to have a website to promote your affiliate programs.
Creating a website isn’t difficult nowadays. You can use
an easy website builder to create a website with little or no
technical knowledge. To learn more about how to set up a site
with website builder, you can go to Google and enter the search
term 'website builder' to find a site builder that is right
for you.
Step 3 – Decide the Content on Your Website
As you are promoting e-books, you can write a review on each
e-book with an affiliate link to the sales website of each e-book.
If you do not wish to write reviews, you can create a product
recommendation list on your website (e.g., ‘Top 5 SEO
e-books,’ ‘Top 3 MP3 music download,’ etc.).
Step 4 – Drive Targeted traffic/visitors to Your Website
To earn affiliate commission you need to drive targeted traffic
to your website. The more traffic your website gets, the more
likely you’ll generate more sales. There are several ways
to drive targeted traffic to your site in short period of time
(2 to 5 days). Here’s how……
Pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising
You can get a lot of targeted traffic using PPC advertising.
The two most popular and effective PPC advertising programs
are Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. So how PPC advertising
program works? PPC advertising programs allow you to bid for
top rankings on the keywords of your choice. When someone enters
a search term matches your keyword in the PPC search engine
and press the search button, your contextual ad will appear
on the sidebar of the search result page. If the visitor clicks
through your ad to your website, you’ll be charged base
on your bid amount. To learn more about PPC advertising, please
click here.
Article Marketing
Writing an article related to your affiliate products with a
link to your website in the article’s resource box and
submitting it to many article directories can bring some free
targeted traffic to your site. To get more and continuous targeted
traffic, you need to write more articles. Try to publish a new
article every week. Doing this for a year can drive truckload
of free traffic to your website.
Post Messages on Forums
Another way to get free traffic is by posting messages on community
forums with a link to your site on the signature of each message
posted by you. Here’s a technique I learned from an affiliate
marketer.
1) Run a search on Google to find out forums and message boards
that are related to your affiliate products and try to join
as many forums as you can.
2) Make sure that each one of your forums profile is edited
to include your website link within the signature option.
