Making Money with Affiliate Programs
TweetOne of the best ways to make money online is with affiliate programs. You don't have to have a site with a large audience to get started, but if you do then you can earn a higher percentage. In most cases, you just sign up for a program, find some banners or text ads that interest you, put them on your site, and hope to start referring visitors in the hopes of earning dollars. Of course, there are better ways of going about affiliate marketing and that is why I'm here to help with my tips on making money using affiliate offers.
Use Relevant Products and Services
You have to match what you are offering with the needs of your audience. If you have a site about running, then offers dealing with running shoes, heart rate monitors, and races are going to be a better fit with your audience than web hosting companies would be. The more related the offer is, the higher conversion rate you are going to have. If you are trying to sell your readers irrelevant garbage, they will see right through it and you are going to harm your relationship with them. This brings us to the next point.
Trust
My affiliate offers seem to work best on readers that I have built up a relationship with. When they are reading what I have to say for a few months, they are a lot more likely to believe that I am offering them a solid product that will fit their needs rather than if they just stumbled upon my site. That is why when you are using auto-responders, do not get too pushy up front. Instead, wait until the reader is comfortable with you before you do much selling.
Targeted Traffic
Too many people worry about how many visitors they can get without focusing on the quality. If you have a hosting review site, you might get a lot of visitors for "free" hosting keywords, but those people obviously aren't looking to buy. Instead, focus on the keywords that Adwords advertisers are paying a lot for, because you know they convert to paying customers.
Use Posts
Banner blindness happens. Users start to completely ignore banner ads on sites. If you just put some banners up and hope people are going to click through the chances of it happening are slim to none. If you are writing a review about a company or product and use text links, the chances are a LOT higher they are going to click through. Incorporate the offer into a relevant article and I think you'll like the results that you see. That is one of the reasons I think MBP Ninja Affiliate is such a great tool. You can just enter the keywords you want to use your affiliate link on and it will replace them all for you.
There is a lot of money to be made with affiliate marketing. If you haven't been getting the kinds of returns you had hoped for or expected to find, try some of these tips out and let me know how it goes in the comments.