Wednesday, April 05, 2006

How You Could Make Money With Affiliate Programs

Author: Francois Panassac
Making millions on the Internet is not something surprising
anymore. Thousands of people went from earning pennies to buying
their own cars generated from Google adsense and affiliate
programs alone
. It just a matter of strategy and technique that
makes these people leave their eight-to-five jobs and earn more
than they can even imagine just by sitting at home on their
computers.

Affiliate programs are making a wave in the Internet industry.
It's very easy to set-up on any website. Just paste on the
provided codes of the merchant site you choose and you're good
to go. You would be earning commissions for every click or for
every sales that you direct from your website. Most affiliate
programs don't require any sign up fee at all. So for something
that you get for free, not to mention maintenance-free as well,
it's something definitely worth giving a shot.

Earning hundreds of dollars through affiliate program is very
possible and not just all hype. You can search for different
affiliate programs you can find on the web. To get you started,
try to choose one affiliate program that you can try at:
http://www.agreataffiliate.com. This site is a niche directory
of affiliate programs giving you options and other helpful
links. Choose a merchant that is appropriate for the site that
you currently have. It also best to weave Google ads to your
website to go with the affiliate program you chose to maximize
your profits.

A lot of people already joined in the bandwagon of entrepreneurs
and discover their own pots of gold on the Internet. With the
onset of push button web publishing, large-scale companies and
small businessmen are breaking through into the Internet market
fast and easy. It's relatively simple to set up a site on your
own; a little technical background is sufficient. There are
ready-made templates you can use and in less than an hour you
already got a site up and running. If putting up a website is
too much of a hassle for you, then you can have some web
designers to do the dirty work at a minimal fee. Your investment
would pay off in the long run.

If your business is doing good offline, you can increase your
wealth base by an incredible amount by building your presence on
the Internet. Alternatively, if you don't have a business yet,
the best place for you to start is on the Word Wide Web. It's by
far the cheapest advertising tool that you can have plus you get
to have global exposure.

Now the biggest question is how can you make money on the web?
There are hundreds of ways, and the single most powerful
strategy of them all is to build an affiliate program to promote
and kick sale for your products and services.

What's an Affiliate Program? An affiliate program is a marketing
technique initiated by Amazon.com CEO, Jeff Bezos in 1996. The
main concept is to build a network of websites, aside from you
own, to promote your company. These sites will then post links
and banners of your merchant site. When visitors click on your
ads, they will be directed to your site, now that's time for you
to do your thing and close the sale. Your website should be
convincing enough to hold the attention of your potential client
and eventually get them to try what you have to offer. Your
affiliates will get paid for every referrer that you managed to
close a sale with. You can also offer a certain amount for every
visitor they direct to your site, also referred to as pay per
click.

How to promote your affiliate program

Have a strong content As with any other website, content is very
important to drive in traffic to your site. Add in useful
content that readers would find beneficial and in turn would
entice them to visit your site more often. In no time, they
would definitely buy what you offer. For instance, if you have
created an affiliate program selling air mattresses, add
articles about its history, design, engineering and the comfort
it bring. These articles will not only serve as selling tools
for your site but would also be very useful for your readers.
Plus, getting useful content and optimizing them for search
engines would give you a good standing on page ranks.

Choose your affiliates wisely You don't just scatter your
affiliate links all over the Internet to anyone who wants them.
They key here is to promote your site to your target market
through your affiliate program. You should meticulously choose
your affiliates. The visitors of your affiliate site should be
interested to what you offer as well, thus clicking on your
link. Following the example above, if you are selling air
mattresses, get affiliate websites about beds, sleeping
disorders, or even about gift ideas.

Provide attractive banner links Banners are attention grabbers
compared to text links. How you represent your website and the
product/ services you offer is represented in your banners ads.
Keep them eye-catching and enticing enough to get visitors to
click them. There are cheap banners ads that can go for as low
as $5. Alternatively, you can also try other selling techniques
like fly-in ads, moving ads, and pop-ups.

Submit your website to affiliate directories If you want more
people to join in your affiliate program, it is important to
submit your website to directories. You will get a better
response if you narrow down your positioning on the Internet and
post your website on affiliate directories instead of the
general directories. One good place to start posting your site
is at: http://www.agreataffiliate.com. This website have a list
of affiliate programs categorized accordingly. Website owners
will surely dropped by the site to check out new affiliate
programs that they could put up in their site. Niche directories
are very powerful in building your online presence, thus, making
your website get more traffic and consequently, sky-rocket your
sales.

About the author:
Owner of websites such as http://www.creascripts.com and
http://www.agreataffiliate.com. Creascripts proposes a
collection of Asp and Asp.net scripts. The most popular is
Creadirectory which allows you to build a fully branded, search
engine friendly web directory similar to Yahoo! and Dmoz, but
only at a fraction of their cost.
money money
money money