An affiliate program, also known as "referral", "associate" or "partner" program, allows web site owners to earn commissions from their web site by referring people to products and services.
If you don't have a product of your own to sell, you can join affiliate programs to bring in additional revenue to your site.
Let's say your site is about home improvement and you offer tips on various household projects, tools, etc. You would join affiliate programs from hardware companies and refer your visitors to their products from your own website.
How Do Affiliate Programs Work?
Most affiliate programs are free to join and easy to setup. The company will usually provide you with a special link to use that contains a tracking code inside it. Any time you send your visitors to the company's web site, you'll send them via the link so all your orders can be tracked and identified.
For example, let's say Home Depot has an affiliate program. Once you join, they may instruct you to send your visitors to a link that looks something like this:
http://www.homedepot.com/?ID5004
The "ID5004" is the part that is tracked by Home Depot. Any time someone goes to their site via this particular link and places an order, it is tracked back to you. Then you earn commission for that sale.
How Much Can I Earn?
How much you earn per sale depends on the company's affiliate program model. Many programs pay a percentage of the total sale. Some will offer a fixed dollar amount ($50 per sale, for example).
The Big Myth!
Unfortunately, many people believe since many affiliate programs are free and that they are given a website, it will be much easier to make money than it would if they had to market their own product.
Not true at all.
Even if you are involved in an affiliate program, it's very important that you develop your OWN site with a clear and solid theme. Then integrate related affiliate programs into your site. So if your site is about gardening, you would find companies that sell products related to what your visitors are interested in: gardening tools and furniture, lawn care, etc.
It's important to make sure your own site is not just pages full of links to the company you're affiliated with. You should have your own unique and well-organized content throughout your site. Aim for at least 20 pages of ORIGINAL content and prepare to keep building.
Staying with the Home Depot example, you could register the domain name, HouseHoldMistakes.com and develop a guide for common mistakes made when repairing household items.
Throughout that site you could make recommendations for various Home Depot products and earn commissions. The key is to join programs and recommend products and services that naturally compliment the theme of your web site.
Something to Remember
One thing you should keep in mind is that you should only join affiliate programs that relate to your website. If your site is about home employment, it makes no sense to advertise jewelry on it. People are coming to your site to look for jobs, not diamonds.
Although it's tempting to join any and every affiliate program that sounds lucrative, more is not always better. You could do quite well simply promoting one or two programs if they are a good fit for your site's audience and you present the products/services well.
Plastering banner ads all over your site is not a good way to earn money. Recommendations through useful editorial content is the best way to get the sale.
Another Example . . .
Let's say you have a web site about child safety and you're writing an article about burglar alarms. You belong to an affiliate program that pays you $100 for every burglar alarm you sell.
At the end of the article, you could include a recommendation for a burglar alarm system, and it's important to note that the recommendation shouldn't sound like an advertisement. It would just be a logical statement that flows with the rest of the article. For example:
One of the premiere burglar systems on the market is Burglar Alarm XYZ. We use it in our home and it has always given us top-notch performance. Click here for more information.
And of course when the visitor "clicks here" they're taken to the company site via your unique affiliate web site address so you receive the commission if that person orders a product.
See how the recommendation just wraps up the article? It's not a blatant advertisement that yells for the visitor to BUY NOW!!!!! Notice also that the recommendation includes a personal testimonial.
That's a great touch. If you can tell your visitors that you've used a product and can provide feedback about it, that will add to your credibility.
First the article provides general, useful information about burglar alarms and then ends with a solid recommendation for a particular product that the web site owner endorses.
Build a Site With Lots of Content
Web sites that do the best with affiliate programs contain lots and lots of useful content that's updated often and has its own developed theme with a targeted audience.
Don't ever waste your time joining a couple of affiliate programs and then building a one or two-page web site to promote the products.
Build a web site with a clear, concise theme that is supported by tons of articles and information on your topic.
You need to build credibility to encourage people to respect your recommendations. It's difficult to do that with a small site. One good way to build this credibility is by providing useful articles and helpful resources that gives your visitors confidence that you know what you're talking about.
You want them to feel comfortable taking your advice. Remember they can't see or talk to you so all they have to go on is the information you provide on your site -- so make it good!
Also remember, there's almost never a such thing as too much information. The more knowledge you can fill them with, the greater chance they'll keep coming back to your site again and again.
This is another reason you should always choose a topic you are truly interested in. The more you know about a subject, the easier it will be to add content and keep your site updated.
Most people will not buy on the first exposure. They need to see the product more than once. If your site is lacking content, what reason would your visitors have to return again?
Updated, quality content encourages visitors to keep coming back for more. The more they're exposed to what you have to offer, the greater the chance they'll decide to purchase something based upon your recommendation.
Only Promote High Quality Products
Don’t hurt your web reputation by referring less-than-satisfying products and services. There are plenty of good products out there for you to offer. Don’t waste your time on the junk.
If you’re looking for long-term success out here, start off on the right foot and only refer high quality products to your visitors. If you do this, chances are they'll return to your site and respect your recommendations.
Take the Free Affiliate Masters Course!
This is the best source available online that will help you understand how to succeed with affiliate programs. You can download it for free by going here.
Need Help Finding Affiliate Programs?
Commission Junction is an affiliate network that you can join and it will give you instant access to hundreds of free affiliate programs in one place.
Simply search through the network and find affiliate programs that fit your site's theme and apply to the ones you want.
Let's say your site is about music and you want to find programs that pay you to refer people to buy CD's. Simply search the CJ network and join the music affiliate programs that interest you.
CJ provides all the banners and links to help you promote the specific program. They also track sales and traffic for each program right from their online control panel.
At any given time you can login to CJ.com and check your traffic and earnings for the day, month or year. You can even break down the report by affiliate program so you can see which programs are performing the best for your site.
Commission Junction keeps track of all your earnings and sends you a payment once a month for any commissions you've earned.
Join the Commission Junctionnetwork today.
In Summary...
The key to finding success with affiliate programs is to build a website on a specific niche. It can be a topic you know a lot about, hobby or even a pastime.
Create at least 20 pages of unique content on your niche and always look to expand your site. The more information the better.
Once you start building that content, begin searching for affiliate programs that match your site's theme. Then work on getting traffic to your site via the search engines, especially Google. Here's a small tutorialon getting listed in the main engines.
If done effectively, you could earn enough income to drastically change your life. I've done it, and so can you.
http://www.2createawebsite.com/money/affiliate.html
The more success you have with your blog / website, the more time and money you're going to invest to update it and host it properly.
At some point you may think: wouldn't it just be nice to have my site pay for itself?
Well, that is actually easier to achieve than it sounds! A decent hosting plan should cost you no more than $6.95/month. However, that's quite a low figure here and most people make many many times more than that in ad revenue...
By properly monetizing your blog site it is actually possible to have it pay, not only for the hosting, but also for the time you spend working on it.
First, because AdSense is a very simple and proven solution that already pays for hundreds of thousands of blogs/websites accross the world!
Also, AdSense is provided to you by Google which not only makes it reliable but also trustworthy. Once you have earned money from Google, you can actually trust them to pay it to you!
Finally, because the ads will be contexual, i-e they will be relevant to the content of your blog/site. This way, your visitors will not be offended for seeing the ads on your site.
It's as simple as that:
Sign up:
Sign up for AdSense.
Enable Javascript in your browser and reload this page in order to sign up.
It's totally free! Then follow the provided instructions to put a little javascript snippet onto your blog skin or any web page you like. You may use our b2evolution AdSense plugin to make this even easier.
When visitors view your site they see contextual text ads that automatically adjust to the contents of each page / blog post so that they are always relevant. No flashing images, just relevant text links! :)
When a visitor clicks on an ad link, Google records the click and you get paid for it. Get ready for a monthly check from Google ;)
You can choose the exact position and colors of the text ad blocks you place on your site.
Below are two examples of blogs that incorporate text ads and successfully pay for themselves. Judge for yourself:
Example 1: Ad links at the end of the blog post.
Example 2: Ad links at the top of the page.Note: as you can see, AdSense is not limited to English!
Google has an extensive FAQ about this program. Here's our additional mini FAQ about integrating AdSense with your blog. Feel free to contact François for further information.
How do I integrate AdSense into my blog?
Try the AdSense plugin for b2evolution!
How do I integrate AdSense into my blog without the plugin?
You just copy/paste the AdSense code from Google into your blog template.
The short answer is that the template is located in /skins/skin-name/_main.php (b2evo 1.x) or /skins/skin-name/index.main.php (b2evo 2.x)
More info about skins & the main template »
The more success you have with your blog / website, the more time and money you're going to invest to update it and host it properly.
At some point you may think: wouldn't it just be nice to have my site pay for itself?
Well, that is actually easier to achieve than it sounds! A decent hosting plan should cost you no more than $6.95/month. However, that's quite a low figure here and most people make many many times more than that in ad revenue...
By properly monetizing your blog site it is actually possible to have it pay, not only for the hosting, but also for the time you spend working on it.
