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ABOUT AFFILIATE PROGRAMS
TIPS FOR AFFILIATES
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Tips for Affiliates |
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.
Copyright 2010 Richard Grady
About The Author
Richard Grady has been helping ordinary people earn
online since 1998. He writes a free newsletter which
is published every two weeks. To subscribe (and
claim your free gifts), visit: http://www.thetraderonline.com/newsletter.html. |
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