Understanding Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a good way to earn extra revenue from your website. Many programs have a high payout and take very little time to set up. The following article on affiliate programs is a summary of the detailed information you can find at Affiliate Marketing Guide.
Make Money Now!

Well, you’ve created a new website, or maybe you have heard about how you can earn money online and want to see if it’s right for you. Often people are first exposed to the possibility of earning money online by seminars or online line eBooks. You might have even received emails stating how easy it is to get rich online. “Just follow our easy tips and start making over $1000.00 per day” Sound familiar? Let me assure you, paying the $49.99 for the ebook, spending 20 minutes setting up an affiliate site and sitting back and watching the check start coming in is not likely to happen.

That doesn’t mean that it is impossible to earn money over the Internet with affiliate programs, it’s just not that easy. First you need to have a good understanding of how affiliate programs work, choose a product that you believe in and can sell, set up a site that will actually get the desired response from a visitor, and finally get people to come to your site. This takes a lot of work and more importantly will take time before you start seeing results.
I already have a site; can I add affiliate programs to make money from it?

Likely so, if you already have a site that has quality content and you have visitor coming to it, then you have already done most of the work. The next step is choosing the right affiliate program to maximize the amount of money you can make on your website. This may mean choosing more than one affiliate program and doing some affiliate management to organize how they are laid out.
Where do I start?

First you need to research the available affiliate networks. There are not only a lot of different networks but also a number of different styles of networks to choose from. These include:


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Pay per Click (ppc) One of the most popular of these is from Google. You sign up for an adsence account and add code to your site, which displays ads that people have created through Google Adwords. Pay per click is one of the simplest affiliate programs available. After signing up for the account and getting accepted you choose they types of ads you want (image of text), how the ads will look (size, text colors, etc) and they produce some code you add to your site. Your most difficult job is to decide where to put the ads on your page and how to make them look so that you get the best results. Google provides most of the pay per click management and does all the work of finding companies willing to pay to advertise on your site.

The problem with pay per click is it often doesn’t pay much. You worked hard to get visitors to come to your site and $.03 to have them click on an ad and leave doesn’t go very far. Of course not all clicks pay the same amount. By having the right text on your page those clicks can be several dollars or more per click. For more information on this you can read our page on Pay per click.
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Pay Per sale – This is a little different. For this one you get paid each time someone buys an affiliate product after leaving your site. Payments on these can be much higher. $50, $100 and more is not uncommon. However you only get paid is someone actually buys.

With this type of program you will often spend much more time working on actually selling the product. This means researching the product, maybe even buying it yourself and then writing a page telling your visitor why they can’t live with out this product. A lot more work, but a successful campaign will also make you a lot more money. You can add many pages to your site devoted to different affiliate products or add the code to sell the product on an existing page that talks about something similar.

Remember while choosing products you don’t really have to put it on a page that talks about the exact product, you can put it on a page that attracts people who might be interested in the product but are on your page for another reason. For instance, if your site is about your wedding cake store, adding a few Amazon affiliate ads showing wedding dresses doesn’t compete with your store, but likely will be of interest to your readers.
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Pay Per Lead – Usually this is only offered by affiliate programs with big ticket items. Good examples are automotive or house sales. The profit made through each sale warrants the originator of the affiliate program to pay you just for providing a good lead. They are then responsible to make the sale. You will often see affiliate programs for automotive sales pay $3-$10 per lead.

Usually it is considered a payable lead when the visitor enters the affiliate programs site from your site and fills out some sort of contact form for the Affiliate manager to be able to contact them with.

Is affiliate marketing worth it?

There is a tremendous amount of money to be made on the Internet. With some hard work, time, and a lot of perseverance you can be one of those people making that money. Don’t quit your day job though. Make this a side job until you get it well established, this could take some time, but YES, affiliate marketing is worth the effort.