Saturday, March 04, 2006

Make Money Online With Affiliate Programs

Author: Bing Zou
Broadly speaking, affiliate program seems including everything,
no matter as hot as pay per click advertising or as old as pay
per impression or pay per sale or lead marketing. So, it is true
that all businesses, no matter big or small, are making money
online with affiliate programs. The doubt is only how to select
suitable affiliate programs to make money.

What is a partner? What is an affiliate? A partner is an
associate who works with others toward a common goal. An
affiliate is a subsidiary or subordinate organization that is
affiliated with another organization. It seems the difference is
there but the basic meaning is the same - for sharing benefit.

For home base business, affiliate programs have huge advantages:
1. no hustle and be your own boss; 2. with low or even no cost
to set up; 3. no hard task to deal with, such as customer
service, shipping or inventory management; 4. high income
potential and keep running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, no
holiday no stop and sales everywhere.

Based on individual company's policy, there are some rules that
do not allow you to sign up all affiliate programs, such as PPC
search engines or gambling affiliate programs may be not
compatible. Meanwhile, you may know that every company has its
minimum payout and commission rate is different.

In my personal experience, I strongly recommend you sign up
third party for your affiliate programs. This will bring you two
major advantages: one is save your time; the other is collecting
your money together.

There is thousands of individual affiliate programs offered on
the internet, many being through third party affiliate program
networks such as ClickBank, Commission Junction, LinkShare. and so on. These
companies connect a large number of advertisers and publishers
together via their own network.

As a publisher, one registration gives you access to tens, even
hundreds of advertisers simultaneously. Tracking partner
performance is easy: there is only one technical support contact
and easier to manage, like only using one user id and one
password. The payment is received as your monthly revenue.
Another is third party check affiliate programs' credit and
reputation.

Payment thresholds can often be fairly high - a $50 US minimum
is common for international publishers. Finally, a payment delay
of two months or more from the date of a sale/lead generation
can occur often. Not mention some affiliate programs have been
known for not fairly treat affiliate to track sales and leads
properly as honestly as they could be. Not mention some
affiliate programs announce they are not responsible for missing
check. Can we ask whether they really send check?

For those big affiliate programs, like Google AdSense, Amazon,
you may participate directly with their affiliate programs.

How should you choose an individual affiliate program? My
suggestion is not to choose a affiliate program only according
to the payment scheme, but rather according to the kind of
people who are likely to visit your website, it means relevance.
For example, if you are targeting home based business on your
site, links to affiliate programs with school recruiting
program, text-books sale and the like may generate less revenue
than banners that link to paid survey companies. The most
important rule of choosing an affiliate program is to know your
target audience.

Another suggestion is not necessary to join every single
affiliate program that comes your way. Some gurus suggest that
sites that make the most money from affiliate programs are only
sign up a small amount of affiliate programs.

About the author:
Bing Zou is the owner of website www.haveatry.com and www.onlyworkonline.com.
Haveatry.com is designed for making money at home with a new
lifestyle. Onlyworkonline.com recommends opportunities to make
money fast. You can contact him at email: infofreetoyou@yahoo.ca
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