Getting Rich from Affiliate Programs

Some times it pays to work with others. In this article we will discuss how to make money with affiliate programs.

Affiliate programs (also called Referral Programs or Partnership Programs) are essentially commission-based sales schemes. You recommend a site to your users and pick up a percentage of any sales those users generate. You benefit from the commission and the site benefits from sales it wouldn’t otherwise have made. If you’ve ever gone to a website and seen links to Amazon, those were affiliate links.

You can run an affiliate program from a site you’ve already set up, or create a site specially to promote a product or service. As long as it brings in more cash than you spend on building it and buying traffic, you’re laughing.

Affiliate ads work two ways: you can join them to make money, or you can run one to attract users.

Joining An Affiliate Program

As with any marketing venture, you need to be careful in the selection of an affiliate program. The benefit of an affiliate program is that it gives you another way to make money from your users. Instead of selling them a product yourself, you send them to a partner and take a cut.

On the downside though, your affiliate ads will take the place of a different ad that you could have put in that same spot. You have to make sure that each advertising position on your site is bringing in the maximum revenue possible. If you’re not getting the most from your site, you’re tossing money away.

The key to success is to choose the right program, right from the beginning.

Now, a lot of commercial sites run affiliate programs. That’s because they know that they only have to pay a commission if a sale is actually made; it’s a proven way to generate revenue without risk. What that means for you is that when it comes to choosing an affiliate program, you’re going to have a huge range to choose from. What it all boils down to though is product and price.

While it might be tempting to go for the program that pays the highest commissions, the program won’t pay you a penny if your users won’t go there or won’t buy once they get there. You have to be certain that the service you’re promoting is of genuine interest to the kind of users you buy, whether you’re buying them from search engines or anywhere else.

Sure, you can work backwards: You find a high-paying affiliate program and create a small site to send users to it, but do you know where to buy users for a program like that? You’re going to have to research the field, check out the most popular sites, and negotiate banner campaigns and link exchanges.

That’s fine if you want to invest the time and the effort. But it’s much easier to find an affiliate program operating in a field you’re familiar with, and use that program to earn extra cash.

For example, suppose you had set up a dating site. You might make bit of money selling subscriptions, but you might make even more by joining Match.com’s affiliate program and selling them your users. Unless you’re planning to be the Internet’s biggest dating site, you’re not going to be able to compete directly and beat them, but you can join them—and earn money.

Or rather than sell your users directly to a ‘competitor’, you can look for services that complement your own. Visitors to your dating site, for example, might be interested in buying flowers, books on relationships or tickets on singles cruises. Instead of selling just one product—membership subscriptions—you’d be selling a whole range of different goods to the same people, and increasing the sources of your income.

Here are some tips to selecting an affiliate program that is lucrative and right for you:

• Don’t accept less than 25% commission. You can find affiliate programs with great payment structures and high percentages of the purchase price in just about every field.
• Look for comprehensive statistics pages that list the number of click-throughs, sales and earnings so you can see how you’re doing. The information should be broken down by month.
• Look for programs that offer a wide variety of promotional tools to put on your Web page, including text links, banners and graphics.
• Find out how often you will be paid and make sure that the payment schedule meets your expectations. Some programs pay monthly, others quarterly; which is best for you?
  
• Look for examples of marketing methods that successful affiliates are using to get the best results.
• Make sure that top level support is given. If they can’t answer your questions promptly and intelligently, you don’t want to work with them.
  

Affiliate programs offer a viable solution to competing against larger competitors and still make money. As the saying goes, if you can’t beat them, joint them!

Blogs

In this article we will discuss a relatively new internet tool – the Blog.

Blog (also known as Weblog) is traditionally a webpage where pre-surfer or a blogger “logs” all pages he/she finds interesting. In other words, it is a Web page that contains brief, chronologically arranged items of information. Typically updated daily, blogs often reflect the personality of the author.

Weblogs provide a series of annotated links to items such as news stories, and often include personal rants. They are maintained by one person, most commonly someone who is involved in Web design or some other tech-related field.

A blog is often a mixture of what is happening on a particular website and what is happening on the Web, a kind of hybrid diary/guide site, although there are as many unique types of blogs as there are people. Blogs can be used to introduce products to potential customers.

People maintained blogs long before the term was coined, but the trend gained momentum with the introduction of automated published systems, most notably Blogger at blogger.com. Thousands of people use services such as Blogger to simplify and accelerate the publishing process.

Blog as a marketing tool

Blogs offer huge marketing potential. They are highly strategic tools that can strengthen relationships, share knowledge, increase collaboration, and improve branding. Besides, blogs can represent the real voice of the website.

A weblog can take the form of a diary, a news service (or summaries of and links to current news items on a topic), a collection of links to other Web sites, a series of book reviews or products, reports of activity on a project, the journal of an expedition, and much more. Businesses can use this tool to effectively advertise their products or services.

One of the most interesting ways to use a weblog is by allowing it to function as a discussion forum for customers of your products or services. In this case, the webmaster can give posting rights to other people – visitors and customers, and their posts may or may not be reviewed before they are published to the Web page. Customers, in such a way can post favorable comments about the websites offerings. Some weblogs are set up in such a way that only the owner or the owner and certain other people have posting rights, but anyone else can add comments to the posts.

Weblogs when used with newsletters present immense marketing opportunities:

• Articles within newsletters can be linked to a blog, extending life and creating a massive conversation.
• You can offer a bidirectional forum to customers to get true, personal opinions on your products and services.
• Company experts can start a blog and become industry experts, helping your company edge out competition and, through this interactive forum, draw customers into another exchange of information and thoughts.
• The beauty of this interplay is you can layer your blog with editorial controls.
  

How to create a Weblog?

The majority of weblogs are now created using software or services designed specifically for this purpose. Some of the software is free - and some of the organizations that provide weblog software will also provide free server space to house a weblog so that it is publicly accessible on the Internet. There are also commercial versions of some of the free software; these commercial versions often provide more features. Some weblog software is available only as commercial software. Alternatively, bloggers can create and maintain their weblog using free software or a free weblog service, but use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to load the resulting weblog to their own Website.

There are many blogging softwares available easily on the Internet. One of the most popular weblogger is “Blogger” which can be downloaded for free at http://www.blogger.com. Most webloggers simplify the process of Website creation. However, they do require basic knowledge of FTP, Website structures and a few technical terms. Besides, creating an advanced weblog requires knowledge of HTML.

So get out there and start your own Blog…it’s free, easy and can work seamlessly with the rest of your website or newsletter.

Banners

In this article we will discuss the ins and outs of banner ads. Are they worth your advertising dollars or are they a thing of the past?

When the Web first started, banners were all the rage. Today, they’re pretty much passé. They’re no longer a novelty and unless they’re super-clever, users pretty much ignore them. Conversion rates have dropped through the floor and many advertisers have found other ways to push their products.

And yet, every website still contains a whopping great banner ad splashed along the top or running up the side. In part, that’s because they’ve become more sophisticated with better targeting and improved graphics. But in practice, banner ads tend to be used for one of two reasons: as a method of gaining/ giving users through an affiliate program; or as a way of generating revenue—or traffic—through paid advertising.

Both these methods work to some extent, but the key is always to make sure the economics make sense. We’ll look closely at the math in this chapter, but before we go on to talk about the math of banner ads—and how to tell whether your banner campaign is worthwhile—let’s just take a look at the terms involved. You’re going to see these words whenever you join an affiliate program or take part in any other kind of online marketing scheme. You should definitely be familiar with them.

Banner Glossary

• Banner Ad — A graphic ad linked to an advertiser’s website. These usually run across the top of the page but can also run up the page (“skyscrapers”). Banners are usually limited by size.
• Banner Views —The number of times a banner is seen by users. This is usually the same as "page views," but counts the number of times the banner is actually downloaded rather than the number of times the page is downloaded. Some users click away before the banner finishes loading.
• Clicks/ Click Throughs — Banners are operated by clicking the cursor over them. Not too surprisingly these responses are called “clicks” or “click throughs.”
• Click Through Rate (CTR) — The percentage of users who see the banner and click on it.
• Conversion Rate —The percentage of people who visit your site and actually give you money. The higher the better!
• Cookies — Small files placed on a user’s computer. They’re used for all sorts of reasons and by all sorts of sites. Banner ads use them to make sure the user hasn’t seen the banner recently, which banner brought them to the advertiser’s site, and even which adverts they’ve seen recently.
• CPM — "Cost Per Mille." The amount you pay for every thousand times a banner is shown—the usual way of charging for banners.
• Hits — The number of times a server receives a request for a Web page or an image. Not a great way to measure interest. One page can have lots of images and get lots of hits, even if it’s only seen once. Often, people will say "hits" when they really mean "page views" or "impressions."
• Page Impressions or Page Views —The number of times a Web page has been requested by the server. Much more accurate than hits: each view is a potential customer looking at a page of your site. But not necessarily a different customer...
• Unique Users — The people who download a Web page, counted by IP address. You want to bring lots of users to your site so that you can create a broad customer base. The same user clicking on a banner a dozen times could cost you money without increasing your sales. Most reputable sites will check the IP address of the person clicking on a link and only count it once in a 24-hour period. If a site doesn’t do this, don’t advertise with them.
  

Banner Economics

Business online, like business offline, always boils down to math: the difference between cost and revenue. If your banner campaign is costing more than it’s earning, you won’t be in business for very long. To figure out how your campaign is doing, you’re going to need to know your Cost Per Mille, your Click Through Rate and your Conversion Rate. These are your basic tools. If you don’t know them, find out!

Let’s say your CPM is $20, your CTR is 1%, and your Conversion Rate is 4%. (So you’re paying $20 every 1,000 times your banner is shown, it brings you 10 new users, and you make one sale for every 25 users the ad brings). The question you need to ask yourself is how much are you wasting on the 24 users who don’t buy.

Cost per visitor = $20 / 10 = $2 So each visitor costs you $2, but you need 25 visitors to make one sale, so...

Cost per sale = $2 * 25 = $50 ...if your product is worth less than $50, you’re making a loss.

That’s pretty simple, and as you can see, there’s not a lot of room to maneuver here. Margins are tight on banner advertising and that applies to both the site selling the advertising space and the webmaster buying it.

Of course, hard cash isn’t the only way to measure the success of a banner ad, and one reason they’re still popular is that they’re a pretty effective branding tool. After all, advertisers spend millions on billboards without expecting motorists to drive straight through them and make a purchase! On the Web, those advertisers can even be reasonably sure that the people who see their ads will be interested in them. But branding costs money—lots of it—with no guarantee of results. It’s usually best left to the big boys.

The banner ads on my sites usually send users to my affiliate partners, and the banner ads I place on other people’s sites usually come from my affiliate programs. They don’t cost me anything and as long I’m making the sales to pay my affiliate partners, everybody’s happy.

If you do decide to purchase banner advertisements though, and if you have a very specific market in mind, make sure they are strategically placed—on sites where the traffic will most definitely be interested in your product or service. Find a site that suits exactly your specific product and you’re going to be appealing directly to your target market.

That’s it for this week. As you can see, banner ads are not the guaranteed money making tools that they once were but they can still be used effectively if targeted properly. Is banner advertising for you? Only you can determine that.