Make Money With Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are an excellent way of making money online. They are easy, inexpensive and can be used in a broad range of niches. There are many methods that can be used to make money with affiliate programs and using a combination of them is a good way to ensure steady profits. Selecting the affiliate programs you want to use is the first step.

A good place to start is Clickbank. Here you can find a large number of products in many different niches. You will be able to choose according to the niche and the amount you would get as a commission. Check on the popularity of a product, though. It doesn't help to have a high percentage of commission if the product is slow to sell.

If your have bought products that you liked, check to see if there is an affiliate program. Products you use yourself are easier to promote since you are more familiar with it and can be more convincing in your promotions. Once your have joined one or more affiliate programs, the next step is advertising to bring traffic to the product site through your affiliate link. This can be done in quite a number of ways.

Pay per click advertising is a good method and can be inexpensive if you use the smaller search engines. The traffic may not be as high as the larger engines but it is cost effective and easier to get the top spot. Bids can be as little as five cents per click. So it is a good way to begin.

Text ads or banner ads on websites or in ezines is another method. With some research, this can be an inexpensive way to advertize. Some ezines will publish your text ads at little or no cost to you. 

Free Traffic from forums

Forums can also provide a good source of traffic to your affiliate link. Posting in forum related to your niche is not only good for your business but can be very enlightening, too. You can learn of other products people may be interested in. Forum posting needs to be developed into a source of traffic. You don't want to go right in promoting your link. Putting your link in your signature line is all you really should do.

Article marketing

One easy method to get exposure for your affiliate link is through article marketing. Original or rewritten PLR articles can be submitted to article directories with your affiliate link in the resource box. The articles must be relative to your affiliate product and be information, not promotional.

If your link appears in the body of the article or the article is a sales pitch, it will be rejected by the directories. When using PLR articles, they must be rewritten to be a minimum of 40% unique from the original.

Opt-in list

If you have an opt-in list, you can promote your affiliate products to your list as long as they are relevant to that list. You won't get very many sales for a product on dog training from a list interested in vintage metal toys. If you don't already have an opt-in list, you can use the methods mentioned before along with a lead capture page to build one.

An opt-in list provides a ready source of potential buyers for your affiliate products relevant to the list. To make money with affiliate programs, the best way to go is to use more than one method to get traffic to your links. But you should start with one at a time to get it going before starting another.

Trying to start too many at one time can get overwhelming. The one exception would be list building as this can be done in conjunction with almost any of the others.

Landing page

Using a lead capture page or 'squeeze page' as a prelude to viewing your affiliate page is a good way to build your list. People who want to view the product you are promoting will give their contact info readily if they will get a newsletter on a regular basis with more information on their interests. Your list will provide a means for you to have ongoing sales in related affiliate programs.

Affiliate programs are an easy way to get started making money online. No start-up costs are really necessary, though a small advertising budget is a good to have. Though it can take some time to get started, it is not very time consuming after that. This makes it very easy to have a large number of affiliate programs making money for you.


To your success,

Nick Marks