Making Money With Affiliate Programs
So Lets Kick It! off with Affiliate Programs.
I am going to break down this post into two individual posts, the first part will focus on what exactly affiliate programs are, and how they work. The second part will present you with a blueprint that you can use to start making money with affiliate programs.
In order to truly understand how affiliate programs work, and how you can make money with affiliate programs lets get you some of the basic information about affiliate programs, how they work and how they can make you money.
Think back to retail sales - I’m sure everyone has done some retail in their time. I’ve worked several retail jobs - most positions were hourly wage + commission, while some were hourly wage only (those really sucked sometimes).
The sales positions that were hourly wage + commission were great - the more I sold, the more I made and each item carried a different commission rate. The commissions were anywhere from 5% of a product to as much as 25% of the product, but you should also remember that many of the products had HUGE markups. For example a computer cable (any type) were purchased for around $0.50 each and sold for well over $9.95 to as much as $19.95.
Sales + Commission jobs were usually a win-win situation. If the sales person is good at what they do, they make great commissions, otherwise they just get an hourly wage — but most companies do expect their sales people to meet some quotas, so you can’t really sit on your backside expecting a job for long.
Affiliate programs are sort-of like your sales job but you get only a commission, no hourly wage.
Like the sales job, you are only as good as the products you try to “sell”, and how well you promote your products. The more competetive the product, guaranteed the more competetive the keywords would be to sell that product - that’s why you see so many people resort to spamming (think about all those viagra and discount pharmacy e-mails you get). If someone could send out 50,000,000 e-mails for viagra and they happen to get a 1% hit who happen to buy - they’ve just made a few dollars.
Affiliate programs allow you to sell hundreds of different products without knowing a thing about the products. You could set-up one or a hundred websites selling everything from fruit baskets, to meat and wine, to construction equipment or consumer goods. Some products will need more finesse, and in some cases you could even create your own affiliate program (we’ll talk about this later) even if a company doesn’t have such a program.
Affiliate programs are nothing more than revenue sharing opportunities.
Here is an example of how an affiliate program works.
Suppose I enjoy golf. I’m a golf fanatic. I live and breathe golf, so naturally I’d like to make some money off of my addiction… er, hobby.
So I set-up a golfing website or blog and I post regularly. I’ve amassed quite a readership, but I’m not monetizing the visitors nor am I doing anything to monetize my regulars.
So I sign-up to a few of the top affiliate networks out there and sign-up for several of the best rated golfing programs.
Initially I just slap on the advertisments on the blog, and though I make some money it’s nowhere what I could be doing. So rather than just post advertisements, I make the advertisements part of the posts. I include ads at the start and end of the posts, but I also try other things.
For example, I decide to do a series of posts on how to improve your swing and in the course of the posts I also have someone video tape some lessons - perhaps teasers, perhaps freebies (you do know what I’m getting at, don’t you? I won’t go into it here - but will save this discussion for another post). But as I post the series, I ensure each set of posts is keyword rich for specific keywords.
Each of the keywords that I am targetting is then linked to a specific affiliate program - because the keywords are phrases that are searched on there is a very high probability that they pages will get picked-up by the search engines and if I’ve done my job right then I may get into the top 3, 5 or 10 listings.
Each time someone clicks on the link they are redirected through my affiliate link (which includes my special tracking ID) and if they purchase an item - I get a commission on it.
Now I may only make $5 or $100 per item (or even more) but if I can direct 10,000 people to my site daily and out of that I manage to interest 10% of the people to click on the links (so that’s 1,000 people) and out of that 1,000 people 3% buy something (so that’s 30 people) then I get a commission on their purchase. It could be a few dollars to as much as $300 or more (for example, treadmill sales regularly result in commissions in excess of $100 — redirect and sell 10 of those per month and you’re making some good money).
Affiliate sales are a numbers game - you need to drive visitors to your site and your content needs to be good enough to have them return and click on the links.
Something else you want to do with any affiliate site you run (especially if it’s something you enjoy) is to further monetize it:
- Set-up e-mail subscriptions/lists
- Create personalized or general training guide or videos
- Create and develop physical products
That’s only the tip of the iceberg - there is so much more that you can do with an affiliate site.
I will expand on this article to go into more detail on how you would pull all this information together to create a tight, well developed website that is guaranteed to make you money (well, I can’t really guarantee you anything).
As always I welcome your feedback and questions!
Take care!
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Comments
Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer
there is a lot of Affiliate marketing that we can found in internet but the question is what the best ? realy im confused to choice one !!
@Alex - you are correct, the key is the relationship. I will go into that a bit more in my next post!
@Maroc - there are many great choices, in my next post I’ll go into why Affiliate Marketing is an ideal choice for newcomers.
Stay tuned!
Mo
Mohameds last blog post..Making Money With Affiliate Programs
I agree with you, affiliate sales is purely a numbers game, the more targeted traffic you can get to your affiliate links the more sales you will receive.
I would agree that it is just a numbers game, but I put far more emphasis on getting people to convert than getting them to my site. I typically get around $.6 per visitor to a few of my web pages, and per newsletter opt-in I average $2.17.
Thanks, Very interesting read, you should be proud of your blog.
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You should be commended for your time and effort.
You have the best idea here but I cant practically use it because in my country, affiliate industry are really slow.
I am so sad.
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Ya. This is a actual acceptable account about associate marketing. I anticipate addition affair to success in associate business is to body able accord with visitors. If the accord is good, they are added acceptable to buy.
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Is it reliable ???
A lot of confusion people are saying u can earn bucks with affiliates but in my opinion its not that easy to earn the bucks from affiliate …
You’re really thankful for this post, I’ve been really enjoying checking up your posts from time to time. Looking forward to see your future posts 
I have gain an insight about affiliate program system. It can help us to count traffic and the sources of traffic. Is it so? If it is then it would be very helpful for us in deciding where to invest and where to pull back our investment as those sources are not positively contributing in our traffic generation.
WAITING FOR THE NEXT POST ON IT!!!
[...] A comment was left on the previous post about affiliate marketing: Is it reliable ??? A lot of confusion people are saying u can earn bucks with affiliates but in my [...]
This is truly a great read for me!! Once again, thanks for the quality articles you post on your blog!! I admire your articles and informative information you share. Keep up the good work. I have you bookmarked to show this to my brother!
Thanks,
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Some products will need more finesse, and in some cases you could even create your own affiliate program (we’ll talk about this later) even if a company doesn’t have such a program.
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Ya. This is a very good explanation about affiliate marketing. I think another thing to success in affiliate marketing is to build strong relationship with visitors. If the relationship is good, they are more likely to buy.
I realize some visitors will actually ask you question before they buy products. If we as affiliate marketers use blogs and allow them to ask in comment area, that will help in sales too.