How can you make money with your website without even trying?
I’ll bet you have read a lot of headlines that sound similar to this one above, or make claims like this one. You have may have even read some of those articles all the way to the end, clicked on some of the links and read all the information on those links. You might have finished the article and then broken up into hysterical laughter… no way can I make money doing that; that won’t work, do that, write about that, endorse that… or whatever that! IT WILL MAKE ME LOOK SLEAZY!
That doesn’t have to be so. I’m going to give you some tips that will give you an opportunity to monetize your website or blog, while preserving your brand. One of the best and easiest ways to monetize your online properties is to join some affiliate programs and advertise them on your site.
Affiliate programs are the answer
Why affiliate programs? Simple. When you become an affiliate marketing associate, you market and promote products without having to develop them yourself. All the work of writing an eBook, or recording an audio track, or programming a software product is taken care of by someone else. But that’s not all the advantages. You also don’t have to create any marketing materials - those are all created for you by the affiliate program owner.
Another big benefit is that you really don’t have to manually keep track of money or finances. Most good affiliate programs will provide the members sophisticated affiliate management tools that are based on one of the leading affiliate software programs. The software programs let you measure the effectiveness of the ads that you place on your site, and keep track of your earnings.
Five tips for choosing affiliate offers to promote
- Look good earnings potential - You want to make sure that if one of the people you refer to an affiliate offer buys, that you will make some decent money. One idea is that you should find affiliate offerings that offer high percentage payouts. My preference is for affiliate programs that offer high ticket items and pay large commissions. This affiliate program for promoting sales interview tools gives you the opportunity to earn almost $50 per sale.
- Choose programs your readers will like - It is critical that you choose affiliate programs and offers that your audience will appreciate and be interested in. It wouldn’t be very effective to choose to promote affiliate programs and products for knitting and crochet products on a site that is dedicated to professional football. However, if you have a website that helps people find careers is sales, it would be great to promote something like How to Get Into Medical Sales.
- Look for affiliate programs powered by software - When you sign up for an affiliate program it will quickly become obvious if the owner of the program is serious about helping affiliate members be successful. If you are automatically redirected to a page for affiliate marketing software program, they are probably serious about their affiliate program. If you get an email message that says ‘here is you affiliate link’ and ‘we’ll let you know if you earn anything’ you should think carefully about investing any time. Their are several top name brands like iDev Affiliate, LinkShare, and JROX JAM. My favorite is JROX JAM, which you can get for free here: http://websitesthatdrivesales.com/recommends/free-affiliate-management-software.htm
- Make sure the website is NOT anonymous - What I mean is, make sure that there are real people standing behind the website, people with good reputations, who take customer service seriously. Affiliate program owners who let you know who give you contact information with phone numbers are more likely to treat you well. They aren’t likely to try to avoid paying you the commissions that you have generated. If you can find a bio, picture, and phone number of the website owner, chances are they will behave legitimately. You will also be able to search the Internet to find any complaints about their program. Peggy McKee, the Medical Sales Recruiter, is one of the country’s leading sales recruiters - she proudly announces her site ownership on the about pages like this one: http://30-60-90-day-sales-plan.com/about/
- Choose affiliate programs that have support programs - If you are choosing a piece of software to buy, you probably wouldn’t purchase it if there was not support mechanism in place. You should use the similar criteria when evaluating affiliate websites. If the vendor doesn’t have a support system in place - something like a help desk or help desk software - then they probably don’t care about their customers. If they do, then you can be fairly sure that they are trying to keep customers happy. If they AREN’T trying to keep customers happy, their poor service will reflect poorly on you, and tarnish your reputation.
Here are a couple of affiliate programs that I recommend if your site’s visitors would be interested in these subjects. One is an affiliate program for a sales interview tool that targets sales professionals - you can check it out here: http://30-60-90-day-sales-plan.com/affiliate-program-details/. The other is a program that has a broader appeal - it targets people who own businesses that either have no web presence or under performing websites; you can get all the information for it here: http://websitesthatdrivesales.com/blog/home/affiliate-program/
Tags: affiliate marketers, affiliate marketing, affiliate programs, affiliate software, internet business, internet marketing, make money from home, make money without working, making money online, monetize, online business, websites