Mon 14 Sep 2009
If you’re new to affiliate marketing, one of the easiest places to not only learn about affiliate marketing from some of the great products but also how to get started promoting products is Clickbank. This is a marketplace of electronic products that you can start promoting any number of different products from dozens of different categories. It’s good because they have a relatively high payout per sale. Unlike some affiliates that pay a small percentage of a retail product, you’ll typically be making about $20 - $60 per sale which allows you to get less sales to achieve your financial goals.
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.
If you’re not anxious to sell anything, you can still make money as an affiliate through CPA networks. These are typically companies that will pay you to get your visitors to take some action. This may be as simple as filling out a form, or a survey for which the company whose services or products you’re promoting will pay you a bounty for a lead.
There are a number of ways to freely promote affiliate products. One way that you can find that is usually free is through online classified ads. Craigslist is the largest of these, but several other free online classified sites can generate a significant amount of traffic. The important part of doing anything related to online classifieds is to track your results. You should have a unique tracking ID attached to each affiliate link. If not, you’ll get hits to your site without knowing what is generating the traffic and resulting sales.
If you’re good at writing or can find a writer to assist you, article marketing may be an excellent way to go. Articles have the capacity to drive some great traffic to your website or affiliate landing page. In my experience, articles tend to produce about a 7% click through rate, or the rate at which people will click on the link in your resource box is about 7%. Some articles will do better than others which isn’t unexpected. If you submit to article directories with a good ranking and good “authority”, you’ll have the chance to have those articles rank well in the search engines.
Social networking is very popular and often times a relationship through some of these social media sites can generate some good sales. People will buy things based on the recommendation of a friend or acquaintance. If you’re participating in social networks where the interactions and relationships are based on a specific topic, find a product that you can promote that adds value to people within that category. If you’re part of a network where the members of that network are all dog owners, promote a dog training video series or ebook about dog training.
Blogging is perhaps the easiest way to get a website created without having to learn html or some new software. Blogs can be used to discuss benefits of ownership of a specific product (which you’ll promote as an affiliate) or some service that you can also promote as an affiliate. One key to success with blogging is consistency. If you can be consistent with your blogging, you’ll add a lot of power to strategy.
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.
Pay per click advertising is another way to drive traffic to your website or affiliate program. This is one of the methods that can have the best results based on the ability to track visitors and what actions they take based on what words they just searched for. With this knowledge comes significant power because if you can approach pay per click advertising scientifically and make this a “numbers game”, you’ll always be able to get traffic, test what converts and what doesn’t and keep what works and drop what doesn’t. This is a sure way to be profitable if you can get past the initial expense of the learning curve.
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.