Affiliate Tips

The Realities of Affiliate Programs

We've all seen the claims of affiliate marketing programs - make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month while doing absolutely nothing. Sure, there have been a few big-time affiliate marketers who have made lots of money by using one or more affiliate programs ads on their websites. When visitors click through to the affiliate sponsor and make a purchase (convert), the home business affiliate marketer makes money. How easy is that? No product inventory to stock or ship, no customers to service. Making money with an affiliate program must be a piece of cake, right?

Wrong. For every affiliate marketing success out there, literally thousands have failed to make any money with an affiliate program.

Success Tips for Affiliate Programs

There are a few things you can do to improve your chances for making money with an affiliate marketing program:

Get lots (and lots, and lots) of traffic visiting the websites you use for your affiliate programs.
Associate only with good affiliate marketing programs that offer products or services or information that your website visitors will actually want to purchase.
Look for affiliate programs that pay high commission rates on time and who keep their customers happy, not just their affiliate marketers, by providing actual value.
Would you buy the product or service the affiliate program is offering? If not, why would you expect your site visitors to click through? If you are linking out to affiliate marketing scam artist, eventually the word will get out and you'll lose credibility. People won't want to come back to your site and they may not click through to your other affiliate programs that may very well be legitimately offering value.
You need to provide content on your home business website that is related to what your affiliate programs are offering. For example, if you write about figure skating, it's not likely your visitors will be looking to buy a book on motorcycles or a new set of saddlebags.
Ideally, your affiliate program links should blend in with your content - not deceptively, but so that they don't disrupt the flow of your web pages. In general, text affiliate marketing program links seem to convert better than image links. Most affiliate marketing programs don't require you use the exact text they provide in the code. (Unfortunately, some of these links are pretty terrible and most seem to want to use "click here" for the text that creates the link.)
Consider inserting rel="nofollow" into your affiliate program links so that you do not drain off the ranking power of your website to the affiliate program.
If you also use ads on your website, such as Google AdSense for making money, be advised that having both affiliate program links and AdSense links on the same page may result in poor performance of both. I've seen actual cases where AdSense revenues fell after adding affiliate marketing program links.
If you can afford to experiment a bit, try setting up ads in Google AdWords for your affiliate marketing program (make sure your affiliate program allows you to use their product names, etc. and allows you to advertise as part of your affiliate program). If it costs you 50 cents per click for your AdWords ad and it takes an average of 40 such clicks to make a sale in your affiliate marketing program, your cost of that sale is $20. If your commission is $40 per sale, it would be well worth it to advertise. One successful affiliate marketer said that pay per click advertising with Google AdWords was how he was able to make money - more than both of his parents combined - with an affiliate program.

Plunging into Affiliate Programs

If you decide to go ahead with one or more affiliate programs, read up and get what tips you can, ideally from those who have been successful with the same affiliate program. There is a wealth of information available on the Web on how to make money with affiliate programs. Does that mean you should spring $50 for a get-rich-quick affiliate marketing programs book or kit? No. Look for reliable sources. Check out different affiliate marketing programs and try out different ways to get traffic to your website and visitors to click through to your affiliates. Test different methods on different pages and go with what works.

Affiliate Marketing Programs Summary

It takes time, knowledge and considerable effort to succeed with affiliate programs, but there's no reason you couldn't make money with an online affiliate marketing home business. Just don't believe the outrageous claims and don't plan on quitting your day job right away.

An affiliate marketing business is like any other business you might want to start. It takes planning, time and some money as well as a lot of hard work and determination.

A growing segment of Americans are beginning to work at home. The opportunity to run your own home based business is here. The best time is now, while there is still the richness and open freedom of Internet based businesses to make money. On this site, we are going to show you one such opportunity, as we believe it to have the most potential for sustaining a small work at home business. In addition, we will teach you what it is you need to learn, the first steps you must take to succeed.

This opportunity is called affiliate marketing. All you need to run this business is a computer, and Internet connection, and some time. There are no tricky schemes, it's simple traditional marketing where you bring a customer to a client, and get paid a percentage of what that customer produces.

While there are a number of different avenues to explore in the world of affiliate marketing that will enable you to work at home, you'll soon learn that some segments of commerce are more profitable than others. There are sweet spots, like any business, where the competition is not insurmountable, and the profits are well worth the effort. Until recently, the biggest sweet spot in affiliate marketing was the pharmaceutical industry. Re-importation of prescription drugs was easy to find customers for, the pay rate was top notch, and customers stayed for life, reordering every month. This opportunity has come to an end, however, as the FDA and American government have begun a crackdown on Internet based pharmacies.

The second sweetest spot in Internet marketing lies within the world of online casino gambling. As an affiliate, if you send a gambler to an online casino, you can be paid a good chunk of money for that player, or better yet, you can earn a percentage of the revenue that player produces, for life. The revenue potentials are as close to unlimited as any business gets - all while you work at home. The fact that you can take a slice of the pie while sitting at your home computer, without ever putting down a penny of risk, should be difficult to ignore.

If you're interested in making your own money, being your own boss, and earning as much as you can with a regular day job, look a little further into this work at home business opportunity.

Consider your Audience
It almost goes without saying – but it’s worth putting yourself in your readers shoes and consider what they might be looking for as they surf by your blog. Are they shopping for specific products? Might they be looking for related products or accessories? What would trigger them to purchase? Start with your reader in mind rather than the product. If you take this approach you could end up doing your reader a favor as well as making a few dollars on the side.

Genuine Recommendations and personal endorsements always work best
There are literally hundreds of thousands of products and services for you to choose from to recommend to your blog’s readers but making money from them is not as simple as randomly adding links to them from your blog. Your blog’s readers come back to your blog day after day because something about you resonates with them – they have at least some level of trust and respect for you and perhaps the quickest way to destroy this is to recommend that they buy something that you don’t fully believe will benefit them.

Link to Quality Products
We all like to make sure we’re buying the best products money can buy – your readers are no different to this and are more likely to make a purchase if you’ve found them the best product for them. Choose products and companies with good reputations and quality sales pages. There is nothing worse than giving a glowing review of a product only to send your reader to a page that looks cheap and nasty.

Contextual Deep Links work Best
When we started using the Amazon Associate Program I naively thought that all we had to do was put an Amazon banner ad (that linked to Amazon’s front page) at the top of a website. We thought that our readers would see it and surf over to Amazon and buy up big – thereby making us very happy. Nothing could have been further from reality.

We always says to bloggers that we're consulting with that they should learn something from contextual advertising when it comes to affiliate programs. The secret of contextual ads like Adsense is that a reader is reading a post on a particular topic on your blog and when they see an advertisement for that same product they are more likely to click it than if they saw an ad for something else. The same is true for affiliate programs. A banner to a general page on every page on your site won’t be anywhere near as effective as multiple links throughout your blog that advertiser products that are relevant for readers reading particular parts of your blog.

So if you’re writing a blog about MP3 players and have a review for a particular product – the most effectively affiliate program that you could link to from within the content of that page would be one that links directly to a page selling that specific model of MP3 player. This is how we use the affiliate programs today. It is more work than contextual advertising because you’re not just putting one piece of code into a template but rather need to place individual links on many pages – but we find that it’s been worth the effort.

Consider positioning of links
One of the things we go on and on about with Adsense optimization is the positioning of ads. We tell bloggers to position their ads in the hotspots on pages (like the top of a left hand side bar – or inside content – or at the end of posts above comments etc). The same principles are true for affiliate advertising.

Traffic levels are Important
While it’s not the only factor – traffic levels are obviously key when it comes to making money from almost any online activity. The more people that see your well placed, relevant and well designed affiliate links the more likely it is that one of them will make a purchase. So don’t just work on your links – work on building a readership. Not only this, consider how you might direct traffic on your blog toward pages where they are more likely to see your affiliate links.

Diversify without Clutter
Don’t put all your affiliate efforts into one basket. There are plenty of products out there to link to so there is no need to just work on one. At the same time you shouldn’t clutter your blog up with too many affiliate program links. If you do so you run the risk of diluting the effectiveness of your links and could disillusion your readership.

Be Transparent
Don’t try to fool your readers into clicking links that could make you money. While it may not always feasible to label all affiliate links we think some attempt should be made to let people know what type of link they are clicking on. We also think consistency is important with this so readers of your blog know what to expect. (ie a link my say ‘buy the XXX product’ or ‘get the latest product on XXX’.

Combine with other Revenue Streams
Affiliate programs and advertising programs are not mutually exclusive things. I’ve come across a few people recently who have said they don’t want to do affiliate linking because it will take the focus off their Adsense ads. While there is potential for one to take the focus off the other – there is also real potential for both to work hand in hand as different readers will respond to different approaches. You should consider the impact that your affiliate links have on other revenue streams – but don’t let one stop the other.

Track results
Most affiliate programs have at least some type of tracking or statistics package which will allow you to watch which links are effective. Some of these packages are better than others but most will at least allow you to see what is selling and what isn’t. Watching your results can help you plan future affiliate efforts. Keep track of what positions for links work well, which products sell, what wording around links works well etc and use the information that you collect as you work plan future affiliate strategies.