Make Money With Affiliate Programs, A Beginners Guide
Clickbank is one of the easiest ways to get started promoting products as an affiliate. Unlike other affiliate networks, you don't have to have a website in order to be approved as an affiliate. In fact, you don't have to do much of anything to sign up aside from have an email address. You can use clickbank.com as a means to generate easy links that you can use in any number of different internet promotion strategies.
Affiliate networks are another source of finding products to promote. These types of sites coordinate the relationship between the advertisers and the publishers. This may be a great way to get additional products and services to sell, but should be used after you've already gotten your feet wet elsewhere. Some more popular affiliate networks are Commission Junction, Link Share, and Share a Sale.
If you're not anxious to sell anything, you can still make money as an affiliate through CPA networks. These are typically companies that will pay you to get your visitors to take some action. This may be as simple as filling out a form, or a survey for which the company whose services or products you're promoting will pay you a bounty for a lead.
There are a number of ways to freely promote affiliate products. One way that you can find that is usually free is through online classified ads. Craigslist is the largest of these, but several other free online classified sites can generate a significant amount of traffic. The important part of doing anything related to online classifieds is to track your results. You should have a unique tracking ID attached to each affiliate link. If not, you'll get hits to your site without knowing what is generating the traffic and resulting sales.
If you're good at writing or can find a writer to assist you, article marketing may be an excellent way to go. Articles have the capacity to drive some great traffic to your website or affiliate landing page. In my experience, articles tend to produce about a 7% click through rate, or the rate at which people will click on the link in your resource box is about 7%. Some articles will do better than others which isn't unexpected. If you submit to article directories with a good ranking and good "authority", you'll have the chance to have those articles rank well in the search engines.
You can use social media websites to promote an affiliate program as well. Some social media sites that are easy to use and easy to setup are Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com, Ning.com and several others sites similar to this that allow individual users to setup free accounts and create pages with whatever content they choose. These social sites typically have guidelines and some have regulations that might affect what you do to promote specific affiliate products. If you provide good solid advice and content, you'll be ok with most of these types of sites.
Blogging is a good way to promote affiliate products. This strategy does require that you develop traffic to your blog. Unlike article marketing and social media sites that generate a good amount of traffic for you, a blog will require that you do the work to get traffic to that site. You're in luck, however, because search engines tend to like blogs for the most part because they represent updated, fresh content. You can use free websites like blogger.com to host your blog or a self-hosted blogging solution using some software, such as wordpress.
A more "traditional" or "old school" website can work as well. I wouldn't recommend this method for most people as the automation and upkeep is typically not very easy and your ability to leverage other people's work is diminished significantly. If you want to run your own website, I'd still recommend that you consider a blog platform, such as wordpress that will help you manage your content, but not have to rely on knowing any html and the look and the feel of the site is very customizable.
Once you have a site or decide to start promoting products, you should consider pay per click. This is one of the most solid and guaranteed ways to get traffic to your site. The only down side to this is that it costs money for each visitor. This is where the tracking of what keywords you're bidding on and which keywords or which ads are producing results really pays off. If you track which ads are converting, you'll be able to do more of the same and you can also eliminate advertising expenses for ads that aren't converting. Consider tracking a foundation for success when it comes to pay per click.
These ideas are just meant to introduce you to some of the concepts. You can do some additional research on any of these methods and find a lot of great free information online. Several websites offer great resources for how to get started with affiliate marketing. Good luck!
Affiliate networks are another source of finding products to promote. These types of sites coordinate the relationship between the advertisers and the publishers. This may be a great way to get additional products and services to sell, but should be used after you've already gotten your feet wet elsewhere. Some more popular affiliate networks are Commission Junction, Link Share, and Share a Sale.
If you're not anxious to sell anything, you can still make money as an affiliate through CPA networks. These are typically companies that will pay you to get your visitors to take some action. This may be as simple as filling out a form, or a survey for which the company whose services or products you're promoting will pay you a bounty for a lead.
There are a number of ways to freely promote affiliate products. One way that you can find that is usually free is through online classified ads. Craigslist is the largest of these, but several other free online classified sites can generate a significant amount of traffic. The important part of doing anything related to online classifieds is to track your results. You should have a unique tracking ID attached to each affiliate link. If not, you'll get hits to your site without knowing what is generating the traffic and resulting sales.
If you're good at writing or can find a writer to assist you, article marketing may be an excellent way to go. Articles have the capacity to drive some great traffic to your website or affiliate landing page. In my experience, articles tend to produce about a 7% click through rate, or the rate at which people will click on the link in your resource box is about 7%. Some articles will do better than others which isn't unexpected. If you submit to article directories with a good ranking and good "authority", you'll have the chance to have those articles rank well in the search engines.
You can use social media websites to promote an affiliate program as well. Some social media sites that are easy to use and easy to setup are Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com, Ning.com and several others sites similar to this that allow individual users to setup free accounts and create pages with whatever content they choose. These social sites typically have guidelines and some have regulations that might affect what you do to promote specific affiliate products. If you provide good solid advice and content, you'll be ok with most of these types of sites.
Blogging is a good way to promote affiliate products. This strategy does require that you develop traffic to your blog. Unlike article marketing and social media sites that generate a good amount of traffic for you, a blog will require that you do the work to get traffic to that site. You're in luck, however, because search engines tend to like blogs for the most part because they represent updated, fresh content. You can use free websites like blogger.com to host your blog or a self-hosted blogging solution using some software, such as wordpress.
A more "traditional" or "old school" website can work as well. I wouldn't recommend this method for most people as the automation and upkeep is typically not very easy and your ability to leverage other people's work is diminished significantly. If you want to run your own website, I'd still recommend that you consider a blog platform, such as wordpress that will help you manage your content, but not have to rely on knowing any html and the look and the feel of the site is very customizable.
Once you have a site or decide to start promoting products, you should consider pay per click. This is one of the most solid and guaranteed ways to get traffic to your site. The only down side to this is that it costs money for each visitor. This is where the tracking of what keywords you're bidding on and which keywords or which ads are producing results really pays off. If you track which ads are converting, you'll be able to do more of the same and you can also eliminate advertising expenses for ads that aren't converting. Consider tracking a foundation for success when it comes to pay per click.
These ideas are just meant to introduce you to some of the concepts. You can do some additional research on any of these methods and find a lot of great free information online. Several websites offer great resources for how to get started with affiliate marketing. Good luck!
About the Author:
If you're serious about getting to the 4 Hour Workweek, you should seriously consider affiliate marketing. Brian's website is a resource dedicated to helping internet savvy individuals find out more about how to make money with affiliate marketing.