With the Internet’s availability and vast resources, making money from your computer can be easier than you think.
If you have a blog, a company website, a fan site or just about any other presence on the Internet, you may be missing an opportunity to make money. If you don’t have a product or a service to sell yourself (or even if you do) Affiliate Marketing is a way for you, with just a little up front effort and no additional cost, to make additional dollars.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a relationship based marketing effort in which a company with a product or service to sell offers a cut of the sale to their affiliates. An affiliate is usually a website owner who meets the criteria of the business seeking the relationship, whether that be something as simple as placing a link on a web page or something more specific, such as generating over a thousand unique impressions per month by visitors to the affiliate’s site.
What’s in it for the business?
A universal truth of any business that is interested in making profit is the need to bring customers to wherever the products or services are kept, be that a traditional brick and mortar store, or an online version that accepts payment in everything from credit cards to Paypal. Regardless of what the business has to offer, if the potential consumers never hear about it, sales are not going to be record-breaking; they may not even be enough to pay the light bill. If a business owner wants to sell, he’s got to tell; a marketing budget is a mainstay in any business plan.
Considering that the costs of advertising in traditional media can rocket up into the millions (should there be a hankering for a Superbowl halftime spot,) business leaders are always on the lookout for efficient, effective and inexpensive options to get the word out.
By offering an affiliate program, they are not taking on any risk. They determine how much they are willing to pay, either a flat rate or a percentage of the sale, for every widget or gewgaw an affiliate sells for them, or, more accurately, for each sale that results in an affiliate driving a customer to their site.
By smart planning, business owners can offer a slice of the pie to their affiliate partners for less than they would have normally spent per unit on other forms of advertising. With the Internet culture being one of free-market, no-barrier to entry capitalism, there are no limit to the number of go-getters who will take them up on their offer, and help to increase their bottom line while hopefully lining their own pockets along the way.
How much can I expect to earn?
How much a person can earn with web-based affiliate programs depends a great deal on a number of factors, including effort, savvy and picking the right programs.
Affiliate programs offer everything from a few pennies a click to $65 a sale and up, depending on what it is they are selling. While, upon reading this, many people would immediately think “Well, I’m going for the sixty-five and up category!” there is more to consider before selecting the affiliate program that is right for you.
Each program wants something from its affiliate partners in return for the money they will bring them. For many the “thing” they want is a sale, which means that if a potential customer clicks to their site from yours via a banner ad, but that visit does not result in a sale, then nothing is paid out. Even if the same customer goes back to their site, bypassing yours, and makes a purchase the next day, in most cases there is no pay out to you.
Some sites will pay per click, regardless of a sale, and others even give things away for free and pay you for each download, be it icon packs, screensavers, or wallpaper for the desktop.
Can I center a business around affiliate programs?
You may be reading this and thinking “well, this is all well and good, but I don’t have a website that has regular traffic; how am I supposed to take advantage of this opportunity?” There are a few answers to this question.
Focus Your Efforts
Take some time to browse the affiliate programs available and select one or two that meet your own criteria, such as profit per unit, ease of selling, etc. Once you have read the companies affiliate program information, which will tell you what they expect in order for you to join the program, you can then design a site specifically around those programs.
For instance, there is one program that sells an eBook on how to write a book in two weeks that offers an affiliate program. If you were to investigate this and decide you wanted to use this as your focus, you could build your site around the product. Purchase it yourself, read it, perhaps even write the book it states you can write, and then talk about it on the site. Become an advertisement for the product, and, naturally, include plenty of easy-to-find links to their sales-front.
Once you have your product and your site designed around it, you would market your own website by submitting it to search engines, going to link exchanges, adding it to the signature line of your emails; anything you can do to get people to visit your site. It really is a numbers game; the more visits to your site, the more changes someone will really like what it has to say and follow your links to the product.
Diversify
There are plenty of people who have decided to go this route. Understanding that the affiliate program route to money is a numbers game, they have decided to maximize their efforts by listing tens, if not hundreds, of affiliate programs on their web sites.
A good idea, if you choose this route, would be to make the site about affiliate programs, in which case it would make sense to list so many. By diversifying you are placing your bets that, by having more options, something will appeal to any visitor to your site.
The Middle Ground
Other webmasters have decided to find the middle ground between Focusing Their Efforts and Diversifying. By including multiple affiliate program links and banners, they are increasing their odds of enticing a surfer (or even a loyal visitor) to click a link and make a purchase, but by limiting the offerings to only the most relevant to the site content, they are trying to hit the target market without overwhelming the reason people come to their site in the first place.
If you wanted to get advice on tricking out a car and went to an appropriate site, you would expect to see adds for books on the topic from Amazon, for example. If you saw the “How to write a book in 14 days” advertisement instead, odds are good you would not click on it. You might even loose a little respect for the people who run the site you are on, thinking they are only interested in making money from your visit instead of offering you something of value.
Another Look
Another form of affiliate marketing is personified by what is arguably the most popular and largest affiliate program of all, Google.com’s AdSense. With a program like AdSense, you submit information about your site to Google, who then, using their search engine technology, places text adds on your site that are most relevant to your site content. In this way you are freed from having to track down multiple leads of who might be interested in advertising on your site. Depending on the contract Google has with the advertiser, you may earn anywhere from fractions of a penny per click up to a couple of dollars. Depending on your site traffic, even a few pennies could result in a large paycheck, or at least cover your hosting costs.
While we are on the subject of programs such as AdSense, don’t discount the possibility of using it yourself from the other end; become an advertiser. By setting your budget to what you are willing to spend per month, you can have Google search out other relevant sites and advertise you with them, thus increasing your site traffic, and hopefully increasing the conversions you get from visits to sales (to cash!)
What are the next steps?
Take a good long look at your current web-presence. Asses where you are; do you have a web site with regular, consistent traffic in high numbers? Do you have a site that has occasional visitors? Do you have a site that has next to no traffic? Do you have a site at all?
What kinds of goals are you hoping to achieve with affiliate marketing? Do you want to make six figures a year? Do you want to make a few hundred bucks a month? Do you want to make enough to cover the costs of running your web site, and no more?
Once you have answered the above questions, take time to visit affiliate directory sites; be aware that many of these are doing exactly what you are hoping to do by turning your visit into a sale. Most, however, do provide a healthy directory of programs for you to investigate.
Locate the affiliate programs that make the most sense for your web site and take some time reading their rules for participation. Select the ones that pass your criteria and sign up!