Looking for a way to make money with your website or blog? One of the easiest ways to monetize a blog or website is by promoting products as an affiliate marketer - where you promote someone else's products. There are literally thousands of webmasters who are earning five figures doing just this.
What is affiliate marketing?
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia defines affiliate marketing as, "a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts." To put this more in layman's language, affiliate marketing is where you promote a company's products and earn a commission for doing so. The four key players in affiliate marketing are the merchant (or retailer) who supplies the products, the network (more about this later), the publisher or affiliate and, of course, the customer.
Before you leap into affiliate marketing, it's important to look at five key factors.
The pay out
Smart marketers understand that their web pages are like shelves in a grocery story. They don't want to fill their web pages with poor paying products any more than super markets want to fill their shelves with products that don't pay well. You need to "stock" your home page with affiliate products that offer the highest possible commissions.
The value offered
The program you're promoting as an affiliate must offer a high degree of value and it must be something that your visitors need and can quickly understand. Here's an example of what I mean. Millions of Americans are struggling with debt today. According to the Federal Reserve, median household debt in America has risen to $75,600. Many Americans spend decades as slaves to their debt. One in four Americans has more credit card debt than savings. The average American family is carrying $15,799 in debt and many have $20,000, $25,000 or more in debt. This suggests that any product or program that offers debt relief could be a good one to promote.
What help do you get?
Your time is as valuable as your "real estate" or the amount of space on your homepage. You don't want to have to spend a lot of time creating banners or sales copy to promote an affiliate program. In choosing a retailer to promote, you should make sure it provides sales tools such as banners, text links and sales copy that you can just copy and paste into your site to make it as easy as possible for you to promote its products.
Does it belong to an affiliate marketing network?
It's important that any company you think about promoting is part of a network such as Share-A-Sale or Commission Junction. That tells you the company is legitimate and not some fly-by-night entity. Plus, networks like Share-A-Sale make it easy for you to track important statistics such as your 7-day and 30-day EPC or earnings per click.
What's the company's history?
When you serve as the affiliate of a company, you're putting your website's brand name on the line. You want to be associated with a company that has a good track record for dealing fairly and honestly with its customers.
A good start
If you use this five factors as a checklist in evaluating potential retail partners, you should be off to a good start in affiliate marketing.
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