Affiliate Marketing Advice To Start Making Money
Clickbank is one of the easiest ways to get started promoting products as an affiliate. Unlike other affiliate networks, you don’t have to have a website in order to be approved as an affiliate. In fact, you don’t have to do much of anything to sign up aside from have an email address. You can use clickbank.com as a means to generate easy links that you can use in any number of different internet promotion strategies.
Affiliate networks are another source of finding products to promote. These types of sites coordinate the relationship between the advertisers and the publishers. This may be a great way to get additional products and services to sell, but should be used after you’ve already gotten your feet wet elsewhere. Some more popular affiliate networks are Commission Junction, Link Share, and Share a Sale.
Another popular type of affiliate marketing is called CPA which stands for Cost Per Acquisition. This is a scenario in which the company whose products or services you’re promoting is going to pay you for a lead. So, when a visitor to your site completes some action, you get paid. This may be as simple as someone putting in an email address all the way through someone completing a survey or multi-page application.
You can promote affiliate programs through classified ad websites. Some easy ones to use for affiliate programs are backpage.com, usfreeads.com, adoos.ca, and check out as many local classified ad sites sponsored by either local newspapers, tv or radio. The benefit to these types of sites are that they have built-in promotion. The radio, tv and newspaper will typically promote through advertising their own classified sites which means they will get traffic. Craigslist is also a good option but must be used with care simply because Craiglist will “ghost” your ads which basically means they won’t make it to the category listings on Cragislist which will severely limit their visibility.
Article marketing is one of the best ways to promote affiliate products. Depending on which article directories you use, the idea is to write the article on a topic that is related to the product you’ll be trying to promote and submit that article to article directories. The idea is to submit unique articles so that the search engines rank those articles which gets traffic to the articles and clicks to the links in your “resource box” or “author profile”. I’ve found from personal experience that the click through rate for people who click on the links in your resource box is anywhere from 5 to 15% depending on the article and the specific call to action in the resource box.
Social networking is becoming more and more popular and can be leveraged to help you promote your affiliate program. Some sites, such as squidoo.com and hubpages.com allow you to create a page talking about and promoting whatever you want to promote. Other social networking sites can be leveraged significantly for getting your main website into the search engines as well.
Another way to promote affiliate products is through blogging. Some people use the blog to specifically sell their products, other people will use a blog as a means to get traffic usually for some controversial topics or instructional topics then promote products as advertisements on their sites. Blogging can be a great strategy to help you get traffic to your affiliate promotions.
A more “traditional” or “old school” website can work as well. I wouldn’t recommend this method for most people as the automation and upkeep is typically not very easy and your ability to leverage other people’s work is diminished significantly. If you want to run your own website, I’d still recommend that you consider a blog platform, such as wordpress that will help you manage your content, but not have to rely on knowing any html and the look and the feel of the site is very customizable.
Once you have a site or decide to start promoting products, you should consider pay per click. This is one of the most solid and guaranteed ways to get traffic to your site. The only down side to this is that it costs money for each visitor. This is where the tracking of what keywords you’re bidding on and which keywords or which ads are producing results really pays off. If you track which ads are converting, you’ll be able to do more of the same and you can also eliminate advertising expenses for ads that aren’t converting. Consider tracking a foundation for success when it comes to pay per click.
This article is meant to simply introduce you to some of the ways to promote affiliate products and services. If you’re serious about pursuing any of these methods, use the internet to find great content. Spend some time on some affiliate marketing forums and ask around what other people are doing and how they’re successful. Remember, though, nothing can replace actually getting out there and trying these things for yourself. There’s only so much you’ll be able to do without trying this first hand. Good luck with your efforts.
Brian Armstrong :: Nov.11.2008 :: Business :: No Comments »
