How To Continually Grow Your Affiliate Checks
As an affiliate, all that is required of you is to simply place the merchant's ad on your website. Then after that, you virtually do nothing but wait for anyone to click on the merchant's ad and later collect your profits. Easy, right? Well, not quite often. Many affiliates earn almost nothing from their affiliate programs simply because they do nothing. Remember that affiliate marketing is but another form of marketing, and you'll definitely need to market your merchant's product for you to earn something.
Successful affiliates in any affiliate program simply don't sit there and wait for money to come. Why? Because there is no money in simply sitting and waiting. If you want to be successful in affiliate marketing and if you want to continually grow your affiliate checks, you've got to do something. Think of ways on how to promote your merchant's business and products better. Think of ways on how to induce other people to click on the link or ad provided to you by your merchant. Think of ways on how to make your affiliate sales increase!
So if you're new in affiliate marketing and you try to follow the easy go lucky pit that most unsuccessful affiliate marketers follow, then you're definitely on the wrong track. But we're not advising you to stop right there. No. Rather, we want you to take some steps to make your affiliate program work better and gain more commissions for you. How? Here are a few guidelines that may help you to continually grow your affiliate checks:
* Become an expert on your affiliate product.
You can promote your merchant's product better if you know a lot of things about it. To become an expert, the best thing you can do is purchase your merchant's product yourself. This way, you can tell your customers about your first-hand experience using the product. You can even write a testimonial or a personal endorsement ad about it. But if any condition does not permit you to purchase the product, you can at least make a thorough research about it.
* Host your own website.
Or at least have a domain name that is short and easy to remember. You certainly wouldn't expect a visitor to remember a very long and incomprehensible URL. And if that's so, you also wouldn't expect him to visit your website any time soon. That means less traffic for your page and the less chance for your affiliate ads and links to be clicked.
It is also a good idea to create a private website and offer access to it to anybody who clicks on any of your affiliate ads. Visitors usually get interested with these private websites. Private websites also gives you a venue to promote your back-end affiliate products.
* Write your own affiliate ads.
Many merchants usually wouldn't mind if you write and design your own ads for their products, for as long as you ask permission from them and present them your ad before posting it on your site. This gives you a greater advantage over a lot of other affiliates who must be advertising the same affiliate products.
* Participate in chat rooms, discussion boards, and forums related to your product.
If you use to ignore them before, then it is time for you to start focusing your attention on them. You can start your own chat or join an existing chat related to your product. You don't have to promote your affiliate product at once, but find the chance to advertise and promote it as you go along. The same would be true for message boards, discussion boards and forums.
* Create a free ezine or newsletter.
Ezines and newsletters are periodical publications whose aim is to inform a group of people about a certain subject. In your ezines and newsletters, you don't always have to promote your merchant's product for this may greatly annoy your subscribers. Rather, find a way to insert your affiliate ads and links on some portions of the letter. Also, don't forget to promote your ezine or newsletter on your website.
These are but a few guidelines on how you can increase your affiliate sales and continually grow your affiliate checks. Sure there can be a lot of other tips that out there, and if you think they would work, we won't discourage you from following them. What's important is that you be able to find a way to: attract more traffic to your site, induce your visitors to click on the ads on your site, and be able to promote your merchant's products even outside the boundary of your website. If you can do these, there's no reason for you to fail in affiliate marketing.
Where's The Money? Adsense vs. Affiliate Programs
The main question I get from my clients when coaching them on building content sites is wether they should use Adsense or affiliate programs. It's a great question, and one that I haven't seen addressed often. Hopefully this information will help you in making your decision.
My rule of thumb is always go where the money is, but in making the decision to use Adsense or affiliate programs, there are a few things you should look at. Let's take a look at those things right now, so you know exactly what you should be putting on your site. Google Adsense or affiliate programs.
First, it will depend on your niche. If there is an affiliate program for your niche that converts well and pays well, then you should take the affiliate program route. I'm sure you would rather make dollars than you would cents, so using an affiliate program in this situation would be your best bet. However, if there isn't an affiliate program, using a pay-per-click service such as Google Adsense will at least allow you to earn a little money from your content site.
This leads to another question though. How do you tell if the affiliate program you are looking at is a good one or not?
The answer to that question will take some research, but will be well worth your time. The first thing to do is to contact the site owner or affiliate manager and ask what the average conversion rate is for the affiliate program. You could also ask if they have any affiliates that would be willing to email you their experiences with the product. Once you have the answer to that question, visit a few affiliate marketing forums and ask if anyone has promoted the program before or if they have any experience with the owner or affiliate manager of the site. Usually if it's a bad program, many people will tell you about it.
Now, if you don't find any affiliate programs for your niche, then I would use Google Adsense or any of the other programs like it. Always check though to make sure you can't make more money from something else. You don't want to be making pennies on a site you could be making dollars from. Most of the time Google Adsense just pays pennies per click. So if you got 100 clicks on your Adsense ad, and made say $5, but you got 100 clicks on an affiliate link and made $50, wouldn't it make more send to use the affiliate link on your site?
Using this as a guide will help you, but you still must test and track what works best for your site. You could put Adsense ads on your site for a few weeks, and then replace them with affiliate links for a few weeks. See what does better, and use the one that makes you more money. Just remember to keep testing and tracking!
Source: Free Articles
Best Affiliate Program
Selection of best affiliate program is the most crucial part of your business and it has to be the most rewarding choice.
There are so many affiliate programs to select from and it becomes difficult decision to come at decision which program is worth to sign up. Thus it becomes most important aspect of your online business. Clickbank is one of the most comprehensive and high making affiliate programs. Generally they send a cheque twice a month for the commissions.
In case you like to receive commissions from paypal then you can go for pay dotcom. This has a huge affiliate centre with marketplace of products which you promote.
While selecting an affiliate program choose the one which is specifically related to your website content and target audience and then promote your products as an affiliate. It is suggested to choose that affiliate program with which you are familiar. This way you can easily recommend it to others. Case you are selling something and you know nothing about it then how can you urge someone to buy it from you.
As most companies offer free affiliate programs so the best choice would be to have a look and take decision on the basis of your websites. Some companies allow only affiliates to sell their products. Which ever websites you see, just go to the bottom and look at the affiliate link. So you can come at a decision on the basis of seeing various alternatives of different alternatives placed on difference websites according to their theme and content etc.
Source: Free Articles