How can you make money with your website without even trying?
I’ll bet you have read a lot of headlines that sound like the one above, or make claims like this one. You have may have even read some of those articles all the way to the end, even clicked on some of the links in the article and read all the information on those links. When you finished the article, you may have thought to yourself, “That just won’t work”… no way can I make money doing that; I can’t promote that, do that, write about that, endorse that… or whatever that! IT WILL RUIN MY ONLINE BRAND!
Done right, it can enhance your image. 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. Affiliate marketing allow you to sell products without having to build or create 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 there are more benefits than that. You also don’t have to create any marketing materials - those are all created for you by the person who builds the product and is running the affiliate program.
Another advantage is that you don’t have to manually keep track of ROI or conversion rates. The best affiliate programs will probably provide you with affiliate management tools that are based on one of the top affiliate management programs. These programs make it easy for you to follow how the ads you place on your site are doing, and how much commission you are earning.
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. Some experts recommend that you look for high percentages. My preference is to look for websites that offer high ticket items and pay large commissions. This affiliate program for promoting music teacher websites offers the opportunity for you to earn $200 for a sale with monthly recurring income of $10.
- 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 chocolate desserts on a site that is dedicated to losing weight. 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 redirected to a page powered by a top-tier affiliate marketing software program, they are probably serious about their affiliate program. If they don’t have software they may not have an accurate way of keeping track of sales and commissions, 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 tell you who they are, give you contact information aren’t very likely to be fly-by-night. They are more likely to be legitimate business people. If you can find a picture, bio, and phone number of the website owner, chances are they are trustworthy. You will also be able to ‘Google’ them 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. It would be wise to use similar criteria when evaluating affiliate offerings. If the affiliate program owner doesn’t put support systems in place - something like a ticket system or help desk software - then they probably won’t care about any problems that you might encounter marketing their product. When they do, you can be fairly confident that they are trying to delight their customers. If they AREN’T working to keep customers happy, their poor service will reflect poorly on you, and tarnish your brand.
There are a couple of affiliate programs that meet the important criteria, that I could 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/
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