Earning Money From Affiliate Programs

Earning Money From Affiliate Programs
By Richard Grady

Affiliate programs allow you to refer visitors/subscribers/
customers to someone else`s website and if your referrals
purchase anything, you get a commission. For digital products,
this can be as much as 75% of the purchase cost!

Used correctly, affiliate programs can be extremely lucrative.
Used incorrectly, they will earn you absolutely nothing. I
should also add that you don`t even need a website to promote
affiliate products so they are incredibly flexible. The
following tips will help you to use affiliate programs wisely
and hopefully, in a way that earns you some money :-)

If you plan on placing affiliate links on your website (or in
your newsletter), you should only link to products that are
relevant to your own content. It is a complete waste of time
linking to irrelvant products just because they pay a high
affiliate commission.

Always try and review the products that you link to before
making any sort of recommendation - if the product sucks then
this will reflect on you.

Don`t expect each affiliate link to earn you a fortune within a
few weeks. Some affiliate programs won`t make you any money at
all and it is just a case of testing to see which ones work
and which ones don`t. Instead of taking the view that you want
one program to earn you a thousand dollars a month, aim a
little lower - maybe $50 or $100 - but work with several
programs. To illustrate this point, I promote a number of
affiliate programs and each one earns me between $150 and
$1000 a month. Most of the commission payments I receive are
for less than $300 a month BUT I receive lots of them. Last
month, these `small` amount added up to over $3,000!!

The beauty of affiliate programs is that you don`t have to deal
with customer enquiries, payment collection, delivery,
complaints or any of the administration tasks that go with
selling a product - the product owner does all of this for you.
Your role is simply to direct traffic to the appropriate site
(sure, this is not always an easy thing to do but it does mean
that this is the only thing you need to concentrate on).

Ok, so what if you don`t have a website?

No problem! There are numerous ways of advertising your chosen
affiliate program without the need for a website or newsletter.
For example, it is quite common to set up a pay-per-click
advertising campaign with a company such as Google Adwords
which links directly through your affiliate link to the main
product website. The visitors never even pass through your
website and as long as you are earning more in affiliate
commissions than you are spending in PPC fees, then this
really is money for nothing.

From a personal point of view, I have been using affiliate
programs to earn money for some time now and I have recently
built several small websites specifically to promote affiliate
products of one sort or another. I am not looking for these
sites to make me huge profits - just a couple of hundred
dollars a month each. But remember, this is a couple of
hundred dollars EVERY month for doing NOTHING (once the
initial site is set up).

There are so many advantages to promoting affiliate products,
not least the fact that you don`t need to create your own
product in the first place and there are considerable
financial rewards if you get it right.

Written by Gian Luigi Ruggeri © 2001 - All rights reserved
To find other tips, advices, as well as articles, tools and
resources to help your net marketing activity
MARKETERS ONLY, The Netmarketers Help Centre
http://NetmarketersHelpCentre.com (http://
NetmarketersHelpCentre.com)