Making Money on the Internet From Affiliate Programs

No doubt, affiliate (associate) programs is one of the preferable free ways to make money on the Internet, especially for beginners. They pay you a percentage of the sales you generate for them. You don't have to spend time and energy creating your own product. No dealing with customer service, fulfilling orders, and the like. And some of the affiliate programs pay 50% commission.

If your intention is to make money on the Internet from affiliate programs, you should find a market niche and target it. You should know your visitors, and you need to choose the best affiliate programs whose products or services match the audience you attract to your site.

Many affiliates make the mistake of joining dozens of programs with little regard to their audience. They figure the more associate programs they join, the more money they can make. Even if they attract decent traffic, they have little chance of converting it into sales. Join only a few affiliate programs that fit with your site concept, and concentrate on providing attractive content that will generate traffic and sales.

You need to de-emphasize the affiliate programs and emphasize more on the content. This means that when visitors come to your site, they should feel that the site is primarily focused on providing information on that topic, and that the affiliate links are just a small aspect of your site.

The links to the affiliate programs should be in context of something that you have written, rather than making them appear as if the main purpose of the site is to get people to click on them.

By creating an information rich site with great content that your visitors value and respect, you become a trusted expert making a recommendation rather than a stranger making a sales pitch.

Don't push your visitors to the click to your merchant's site, make them want to click. And they'll click-through with pleasure, arriving at your merchant's site with an open-to-buy mind. All humans like doing business with a company who has been recommended to them by a expert whose opinion they have come to respect.

Affiliate programs marketing is a very popular practice on the Internet. Under this system you have a merchant that is willing to let other people (the affiliates) sell directly or indirectly its products and services, in exchange for a commission. Sometimes this type of advertising is also called CPA (cost per action) or CPL (cost per lead) based.

Affiliates can send potential customers to the merchant using several tools, from banner ads to text links and product reviews.

In order to find suitable affiliate programs you can turn to individual companies and publishers like Dreamhost and SEOBook, or join affiliate marketplaces and networks.

Finding affiliate programs

Finding online merchants with associate affiliate programs is easy. Just visit one of the most popular affiliate programs directories. This site lists hundreds of merchants who will pay you to sell their products. It has even organized them all for you into categories...

AssociatePrograms.com

There are also several affiliate networks that provide the tools, technology and services that online businesses need to register, track, report and pay affiliates. They provide merchants with affiliates, and vice-versa.

The most comprehensive and most promising affiliate programs network is Commission Junction. Join it for free, and you can join any of their thousands of associate programs. Commission Junction combines all of your earnings from any products, banners, and links you place on your Web sites into one monthly payment. You may choose to receive this payment through a check in the mail or through Direct Deposit to a designated bank account.

Selecting affiliate programs

Here are the most important factors you should consider before joining affiliate programs...

The Fit
Join only those programs that fit the audience of your site. A close match will always yield better performance.

The Commission
A reasonable commission starts at 20%, and can go as high as 50%, but if the product is too expensive, no one will buy it. The best affiliate programs will also pay you a second tier commission, that's the commission you make on sales initiated not by you directly, but by someone you referred to the program.

The Product Quality
Don't associate your business with low quality product or service. In addition, if the quality and usefulness of the product are low, few people will be interested, and the refund rate will be higher.

Referral Duration
After you've referred a visitor to a site, how long does the site continue to "remember" you as the referrer of that visitor? Many affiliate programs won't remember you at all. This means that if the visitors you referred didn't buy directly on their first visit to the site, you'll never get commission, even if they went back to the site later that day to purchase the product.

Good affiliate programs should at least remember you for 60 days. It's usually done by setting a cookie on the visitor's computer when they arrive at your merchant's site. Beware of associate programs that don't mention anything about this cookie and its duration.

Residual Commissions
The best affiliate programs will even pay you commissions for a prolonged period of time, after the original sale has been made. This is especially attractive for programs that sell services with regular fees. For example, if your referred customers make monthly fees, you'll earn the commission each month.

The Payments
Make sure the payments are made often enough, preferably once a month, with reasonable minimum. Some affiliate programs will only pay you every 3 or 6 months.

Reputable affiliate programs

Not many associate programs meet all the above requirements. But here are a few reputable affiliate programs in the area of Internet marketing. They are two-tier programs offering highly recommended products and services, at cheap prices, high commissions for life and sites which are obviously designed to sell...

Ken Evoy's 5 Pillar Program
When you register, you're provided with great marketing tools and an excellent manual, telling you, step-by-step, how to succeed as an affiliate. Although it's the best manual on the market, you can have this one totally free - all you have to do is join his free affiliate program.
No other company offers so much help to affiliates. SiteSell's Web pages are even not optimized for search engines because Ken doesn't want to compete with his affiliates in free traffic from search engines.

My TemplateStorage
I recommend this program if your site is closely related to website development. They sell high-quality professional Web templates and complementary services. Besides simple affiliate links or banners, they offer HTML code to insert their dynamic interface into your pages under your own brand without any references to their site.

Visit the above sites, look at their products, read about their affiliate programs, and you'll find out why I'm so enthusiastic about them.

List of popular affiliate marketplaces and networks:

Where to Find Affiliate Programs

You can find a list of affiliate programs and affiliate networks on thefreecountry.com's Affiliate Programs page at http://www.thefreecountry.com/webmaster/affiliate.shtml

To join an affiliate network or program, simply go to the site and complete their online application form. Some programs will give you instant approval while others require a human to check out your application before it is approved. Once it is approved, you'll be given some HTML code which you can cut and paste into your web page. Note that some affiliate networks and programs will not accept you unless you have your own domain name. If you are planning to earn from your site, you should seriously consider registering your own domain name.

How To Choose An Affiliate Program

How should you choose affiliate programs? My suggestion is not to choose a program according to the payment scheme, but rather according to the kind of people who are likely to visit your website. For example, if you are targeting parents on your site, links to affiliates with educational software, books and the like may generate more revenue than banners that link to web hosting companies. The most important rule of choosing affiliate programs is to know your target audience.

Another point to consider is whether you really want to join every single affiliate program that comes your way. Some studies suggest that sites that make the most money from affiliate programs are affiliates of only a small handful of programs. Furthermore, concentrating your advertisements from one network may allow you to be paid faster. If you advertise for hundreds of different affiliate networks on your site, you may wind up earning only (say) a few dollars per month from each network. If your advertiser's minimum payment amount is higher than what you can earn each month, it may take you a long time before you accrue enough to be paid.

On the other hand, that formula does not necessarily hold true for every site (or every page on your site, for that matter). For example, if your site has a particular theme, and an affiliate program only supports one or two suitable advertisers, you might want to sign up for a few affiliate programs so as to get a greater number of relevant advertisers. After all, advertisements that are relevant to your audience are more likely to be taken up than general advertisements. (What's the point of putting banners from only one affiliate program if nobody is going to click them?)

Automated Context-Sensitive Advertising

One of the latest trends in website sponsorship is to sign up with an advertising network like Google AdSense The advertising network automatically checks your web page and determines the most relevant advertisement for the page. As a result, without much additional effort from you, you get advertisements targeted at the interests of your visitors. As mentioned earlier, targeted ads tend to result in better performance and returns. See Google Adsense.

Monetization Widgets

The latest trend on the web are widgets that let you monetize your website. Examples include Widgetbucks and SmartLinks. Some of these services operate under a PPC scheme, others behave like text link ads, others yet leverage affiliate programs.

Their main differentiator, however, is the fact that they work as web widgets, making it easier for the user to plug and play the service on its website.

List of companies that provide monetization widgets:

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