How To Sign Up For An Affiliate Program
Just like any other marketing venture, you need to be doubly careful in the selection of an affiliate program to promote. The beauty of an affiliate program lies in the easy way it opens up for you to make money with very little effort.
Instead of having to come up with a product by yourself, you just send people to a partner’s product and take a cut.
TIP: The key to your affiliate marketing success is to choose the right program right from the beginning.
Note: Several commercial sites run affiliate program because they know that they only have to pay a commission only if a sale is actually made. They know it is a proven way to generate revenue without risk. This means that there will be several affiliate programs for you to choose from.
However, while it might be tempting to go for programs that pay the highest commissions, you won’t be paid a dime if your users won’t go to the website or don’t buy if they get there. You must be certain that the people you are driving to a site you have a partnership with have a genuine interest in the product. With Google Ads, you can always target your advertisement to a given group of people who are already looking for the product you have.
Three ways to make money from Affiliate programs
1. Sign up for an Affiliate program and advertise it on Google. This is certainly the quickest and simplest approach and can earn you money the first day you begin.
2. Look for a profitable affiliate program, and then build a website around that area. Finally you can then submit your website to the top search engines like Google.com, Yahoo etc and then get free visitors to your site.
3. Look for an area you are interested in, then build a website around it, look for affiliate programs that are related and then put them on your site.
I will undertake to take you thoroughly through the first method, the other two methods you can do after you learn the first.
Hints to selecting an affiliate program that is right for you and that will make you money:
•Look for affiliate programs where you make at least $25 per sale.
•Find out if they have a comprehensive statistics page listing the number click throughs, sales and your earnings so you can know how well you are doing in your campaigns.
•Find out how often you will be paid. And decide if you will like their payment schedule. Some like www.ClickBank.com pay as often as every 2 weeks while others like www.Amazon.com pay quarterly (www.clickbank.com has my highest recommendation, they specialize only on digital downloadable products and their commissions are very high).
•Model success: use the methods that other successful affiliates use to get the best results.
•Do they offer top level support? If they won’t answer your questions satisfactorily and in time, you don’t want to work with them!
Some very lucrative affiliate programs.
•Information products: These include e-books, softwares and all digital downloadable products. They have very high profit margins and hence are very lucrative to promote. You can earn up to 70% of the purchase price of a product in this category. The website www.clickbank.com specializes only on products like this.
•Electronics: This is a highly competitive industry with low margins. Sales are usually bigger ticket items not purchased often.
•Consumables: These include products that are used regularly and must be purchased continually. You will be better off with program under this category that offer recurring/residual commissions.
Top Searches.
Always be on the lookout for what’s hot. What are the new topics coming out and what products do you think are related to these topics? Places to look for the top searched keywords are Wordstream, Google Trends and then subscribe to www.wordtracker.com‘s weekly newsletter that sends you the top searched keywords every week.
Look into the future, what trends do you see coming. What new products do you see coming into the market? The first people to pioneer in a niche make lots of money.
More Ways To Identify Extremely Profitable Affiliate Program
a. Is the product desirable?
As a matter of fact, if you seriously want to make any money from an affiliate program, you must have to sell it to lots of people. This implies that the product you are promoting must be desirable. If the product is good, then it will sell itself, the only thing you will need to do is to present it to the customer.
b. Is the website reliable?
You will have to make sure that the company has established a presence online – that they have been online for a while and are trusted. This is important since you would want to be paid what you have earned and on time too.
c. Consider a multi-tier program
Actually, selling products or having people sign up for a product through you are not the only ways to make money from affiliate programs. Someone can actually make quite a living without having to sell a single product. How? You can join a multi-tier affiliate program and recruit other affiliates to promote that product.
Under this type of arrangement, you earn a commission when any of these affiliates you recruit under you make a sale.
Below is an illustration of the benefits of a multi-tier program
Level 1: (10 sales) = $20 x 10 = $200 (when commission for each sales = $20) Level 2: (25 sales) = $10 x 25 = $250 (when 2nd level commission = $10) Level 3: (30 sales) = $2 x 30 = $60 (when 3rd level commission = $2)
Here you earned only $200 from your personal effort and a whooping $310 came from the people you recruited.
d. Do they offer real time online statistics?
You need to be informed continuously on how your hard work is paying off. If you’ll have to wait a long time to see your stats, then you’ll be more likely to lose interest in the program. You will have to look for affiliate programs that offer you real-time, instantly updated stats that you can access online anytime. It is always very encouraging and morale boosting when you see how your sales and commissions are piling up. It gives you the encouragement to promote the program further.
e. Do they offer opportunities to earn residual income?
Earning residual income means your ability to earn commissions on the subsequent times a user you brought to a site earlier comes back to make another purchase. It is in your best interest to look for programs that offer opportunities for residual income.
f. Do they use ‘Cookies’?
Cookies are small computer programs a website uses to save information on a visitor’s computer which can be recalled whenever the visitor comes back to the website. Affiliate websites will normally save cookies on every visitor’s computer which indicates who referred the visitor to the website.
What this means is that if the visitor doesn’t buy immediately, you will always be credited with the sale whenever the visitor comes back.
g. Are the terms clear?
A legitimate and trustworthy affiliate program should spell out clearly what you will earn for your efforts. Unless a merchant spells out exactly what you will receive for your efforts avoid them.
More Tips On Choosing Profitable Programs
•Does the affiliate program offer a free way to join without you having to buy their product or services?
•Is the product or service related your target audience?
•Can they notify you by email when a sale is made? (You may not want this feature when you start to make a lot of sales – those $25 sales notifications can start to be like spam except that each time you receive them you’ve just received another $25!)
•Do they offer back-end products so that you can get repeats sales from the same person?
•How often do you get paid?
•Do they offer 24/7 support?
•Do they offer a customer several ordering options so that you won’t lose sales simply because their payment method wasn’t convenient for the customer?
•Do they use a reputable system to track your ads?
What Does The Highest Earning Affiliate Earn?
An indication of your earning potential is to find out how much the top affiliate earns from the program you are trying to promote. This should give you a good idea of your earning potential from that affiliate program. From the earnings of the top affiliate you should be able to figure out if it is worthwhile to spend your time on the program or not.
Return On Investment (ROI)
While promoting any affiliate program you choose. It is important that you get a proper return on your investment (ROI). Now assuming that you clinch a sale after every hundred clicks and your Cost Per Click is 10 cents. This means that it cost you $10 to make a sale on the average and so you should be making at least $25 from each sale for it to be worthwhile. However, this depends on the particular product you are promoting, if you have a product where you make 5 sales from every 100 people, you can promote such a product if it pays you as little as $5 commissions per sale and you will still end up with some good profit.
Where Do You Find Affiliate Programs?
Once you have a clear understanding of the kind of affiliate program you wish to promote, your next task is to find these affiliate programs. Luckily for us there are many online businesses that have affiliate programs for us. There are also affiliate Networks and Directories that have several affiliate programs under them.