How to Make Money with Affiliate Programs

super affiliate meetings in group

How do you make money with affiliate programs as a beginner? What are the best affiliate programs to make money online? What does it take to become a super affiliate?

Affiliate programs pay you a commission to send them customers. Depending on the type of program, you receive a percentage by sending traffic or customer who makes a purchase or take a positive action on the merchant’s site based on your referrals.

Once you have a blog or website that generating traffic, you can easily sign up as an affiliate to make extra money by following simple steps:

1. Search online and locate a program that offers a product or service you like to offer.

2. Sign up online by completing the affiliate agreement.

3. The affiliate program you select will provide you with banner ads or links for you to place it on your existing site.

4. You will promote the affiliate program through banners, reviews, newsletters, and other online marketing techniques.

5. People who are exposed to your marketing or notice banner ads may click the link. Once they click your links, they will land on merchant’s site. If they make a purchase or fill in the form or take any positive action based on your contract, you will receive a commission.

Your success as an affiliate marketer depends on your ability to generate traffic to your site. It is also important to remember that the tougher the competition, the harder you have to work in your marketing. Try to avoid high competitive niche areas in the beginning because it is hard to beat high authority sites.

You can use search engine optimization to generate free traffic, or advertise in pay-per-click, or use as many online marketing techniques.

It is not uncommon for super affiliates to make $100,000 to $500,000 or more in a year. It is up to you to be an aggressive affiliate marketer or just use affiliate marketing to add extra revenue. Here are some tips to start as a successful affiliate marketer:

Try to create and keep adding unique and valuable information in the form of articles or videos and images that is relevant to your target audience and what you plan to offer as an affiliate.
Search online and look for affiliate programs that offer products or services that appeal to your existing target audience. You need to make sure the people that search for your content are the same target audience for the affiliate products or services you choose to add to your site to market.
You must generate traffic to your site in order to increase the number of potential customers who might click your affiliate links to visit the merchant site. You will need to educate yourself in writing effective direct response copy, and try to learn online marketing strategies in order to separate yourself from an average affiliates. That’s what exactly set regular affiliates who are happy with modest income from super affiliates who effectively use variety of marketing activities.

Types of Affiliate Payments

There are different types of affiliate payments. Here are the most common affiliate payments:

CPS (cost per sale): You are paid when someone click your link on your website or blog and make a purchase on the merchant’s site.

CPL (cost per lead): You are paid when someone clicks the affiliate link on your site, visit the merchant’s site and takes a positive action such as completing a form.

CPC (cost per click): You are paid based on the number of clicks from your site to the merchant’s site.

a young affiliate checking his laptop to search for good affiliate program

Searching For best Affiliate Programs to Make Money

Before searching for an affiliate program, you need to decide what types of products or services you plan to offer that relates to the interest of your target audience. Make a list of your favorites and search online.

Online stores with an affiliate program usually have Affiliate tab on their homepage or on the “About Us” page.

You may want to go directly to affiliate networks and check out hundreds or thousands of affiliate marketing programs. Major retailers often use networks to handle their affiliate programs. There are hundreds of networks that offer affiliate programs. You can start by checking the following networks:

www.cj.com

www.linkshare.com

www.clickbank.com

Before you sign up to participate for any affiliate marketing program, carefully read the affiliate agreement in details, including:

Type of product or service: Exactly what you will be offering. Is the product or service is what your target market will be interested?
Fees to join: All legitimate affiliate marketing programs are free to join. Never pay to join.
Commission structure: Commission is usually based as a percentage of sales, leads, or clicks. What will be the percentage for your commissions?
Method of payment: Look for currency used for payment, the amount accumulated before being paid, the option for receiving your payment, etc.
Recordkeeping: You should be able to view your commission history and the amount in your account in real time.
Refunds: What is the policy for handling customer returns or refunds? When and how the money is taken out of your account?
Tracking and cookies: You should know how many click-through you get in addition to final purchases. Merchants usually use cookies for tracking affiliates since someone may not make an immediate purchase after clicking your link, and may return after a week and decide to buy based on your referrals. Cookie expiration date that can monitor the visits and offer credit for your original referral is important.
Limits and restrictions: Some programs may have strict guidelines for promoting certain products or have restrictions on what products or services are included in an affiliate program.
Restriction for marketing: Affiliate marketing companies specify how affiliates can and cannot market their programs. Most restrictions for marketing refer to emailing strategies that can lead to problems because the affiliate marketing companies will be legally responsible for your actions. Therefore, you must follow the guidelines to avoid any violation of antispam laws. Pay close attention of which marketing techniques are prohibited. You will be subject to penalties for violating any agreement you sign.

Try to read the affiliate agreement and fine print very carefully so that you are not caught off guard. In addition, do not try to sign up for too many affiliate programs simultaneously because you will lose your focus and marketing objective.

super affiliates celebrating their success in a yacht

Affiliate programs want you to be successful because the more customers you refer, the more money they make. That’s why they provide you with marketing tools for you to use. Go over their site and read their sales copy, refund policy, contact information, and so on. Are they successfully selling their products or services? You don’t want to waste your time and money referring prospects to a site that fails to convert them to customers.

Make sure to read the terms and conditions of the affiliate agreement to determine your potential liabilities for participating. Enter in a search engine the name of the company you want to do business with to see whether the company is legitimate. Look for their country of origin. Do they have a U.S. based operations? Affiliate programs exclusively run from foreign countries may be a sign that the activity is not permitted in the U.S.

Avoid companies without contact information. Legitimate companies place contact information on their websites. The company must provide some form of money-back guarantee to customers. Read reviews to see customers’ comments about the products or services.

Does the company provide reasonable support to help affiliates to be successful or answer questions? All their marketing tools, banner ads, newsletters, contact information, and technical support must be normal and legitimate.

Signing up for an affiliate network or affiliate program is simple. You simply visit the site’s homepage, and then click the Affiliate tab. If it is network, in the drop-down list that appears, click the Publisher Solution link.

Joining must be free. Click the publishers Join Now button, and then fill in the basic information, including your company’s name and information, account information, email address, etc.

After you enter all the required information and click the submit button, watch for an email message from the company and follow its instructions.

It may take 48 hours or more before your application gets approved for participating in an affiliate program. You must have an active or live site. Some programs may require that your site should not violate any of their terms and conditions.

Once your approval with an affiliate network is confirmed, you can apply for as many of their individual programs. Simply go through their categories and select the programs that interest you. You can join multiple affiliate programs, but try to go slowly in the beginning.

For additional articles written by John Stanford, see alliedpublishing.com/affiliate-marketing. John Stanford is the author of
Ultimate Guide to Affiliate Marketing Program published in 2019.

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