Affiliate program marketing
You have a website set up and you are getting visitors and now you want to start making money with your site. If you are not selling your own product but you would like to make money from your site or blog, the best way to go is affiliate program marketing.
To explain affiliate marketing in a simple way, it is to sell someone else´s product for a percentage of the price. The percentage that affiliates get can vary a lot, but the good deals usually range from 50-75%.
The benefits of affiliate program marketing are many. First and most obviously, you don´t need a product of your own which leads to you not having to keep the product in stock. The second benefit is that you don´t need to handle the processing of sales. Which means you don’t need to mess around with paperwork (unless you consider cheques paperwork). Another thing that can be considered a benefit, depending on what you promote, is that you are actually selling a known product. This can really help if people are looking for this particular product.
There are many places that offer good products that you can sell as an affiliate, some of the largest places when it comes to digital products today is ClickBank and PayDotCom. Both carry a huge selection of digital products for affiliates to promote and the commission usually range from the above stated 50-75%.
Both ClickBank and PayDotCom are excellent sources to find a product to promote on your site. As I said, they carry a very big selection of products and this makes it easy to find a product that fits your niche or topic. Selling a product that is relevant to your content is very important since the visitors on your site is obviously interested in this product ”by default”. If you run a site about cars, you don´t want to try to sell a product about dogs.
As mentioned, the products are digital which means people will have access to their product in a matter of seconds after purchase, which helps when selling things online.
When you start looking for the product to promote you should do some research. Browse through the products you can find relevant to your topic, visit the sites for each product and see if the site appeal to you. See if the product triggers the emotion to want to buy it for you. If you want to buy the product by just going to the site, there is a good chance your visitors will too.
Continue your research by looking into if you can contact the owners of the site, if they offer promotional tools and in that case how much of it. For me it´s important to be able to contact the owners of the product I´m promoting in case I want to ask something or need advice. I´m not saying you can´t make good money even if you can´t contact the owner or they don´t offer 20 different banners. But this is important to me since it also shows a certain amount of seriousness towards the affiliates that help sell their product.
Once you have found your product, integrate the promotion of it into your layout. Don´t just smack 3 banners up on the site in odd locations, make it look good.
