Six Ways to Make Money Online with Affiliate Programs

 Six Ways to Make Money Online with Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are an excellent way to make money online, and you’re probably already familiar with many of them. From Amazon’s associate program to the iTunes affiliate program and more, you can find affiliate programs in just about every niche market under the sun, making them one of the best ways to start generating money from your website or blog once it’s up and running. If you’re looking to make money online with affiliate programs, here are six ways to do so effectively.

Finding Products

The most important step of affiliate marketing is choosing a product. Product choice can make or break your business. It all boils down to how well you know your audience and what they need, like, and use. One of my favorite tools for getting products you can recommend (and actually use) is called Jungle Scout. As an extension for Chrome, you’re able to see if products are selling well or not right away by seeing its BSR (Best Seller Rank). If a product isn’t popular, don’t sell it! Products that aren’t moving won’t be profitable in affiliate marketing so it might be best to save yourself some time and find a different niche/product that will move better. Making Sales: When people buy from Amazon, they go directly to Amazon's site. That means there's no website necessary for them to visit after clicking through from your link. There are lots of ways to optimize sales with affiliate programs but one tactic I really like is sending them straight to Amazon using exit intent popups. Exit intent basically means you have a popup on your page that pops up as soon as someone starts leaving (clicking out) your page. This gives them one last chance to convert before leaving which results in higher conversions rates than popups used elsewhere on a site.

Understanding How Affiliates Get Paid

The first step in making money online with affiliate programs is understanding how affiliates get paid. Most of them are paid on cost-per-action or cost per sale models. Cost per action (CPA) is where an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor they drive, while cost per sale (CPS) pays affiliates only when a purchase is made. Typically you’ll earn less under a CPS model than CPA, but it doesn’t take as much traffic to achieve results. There’s also other factors that can determine which payment structure you receive, including your marketing methods and customer base size. If you want to start making money online with affiliate programs, be sure to choose one that fits your needs. For example: Amazon Associates – This program allows anyone who has an Amazon account to sign up as an associate and advertise any product from their site(s). Associates will then earn 4% back from customers referred from their site(s), 2%-10% from products sold via their promotion efforts and .5% – 3% for all other purchases. With millions of active customers buying thousands of products each day through Amazon alone, there’s plenty of potential profit! It takes a little work though...to become eligible, you need at least 5 articles published within 30 days (on different sites) along with 10 unique pages linked back to your own website.

Getting Approval to Become an Affiliate

There are hundreds of affiliate networks out there (think Amazon and other big-name retailers), so you’re going to need approval from an affiliate network before you can begin selling a company’s products. The easiest way to get approval is by choosing a niche that’s popular, because these tend to have less applicants for companies who are looking for affiliates—but if your niche isn’t super-popular, don’t worry.

Writing Your First Product Review

If you want to make money blogging, write reviews. It doesn’t matter whether your review is of a physical product, service or restaurant—writing reviews is one of easiest and most lucrative ways to get started making money blogging. However, it’s also time-consuming and can be difficult if you’re new to product reviewing. To help you out, we put together a step-by-step guide on how to start writing your first product review. What are you waiting for? Let’s get started! Write about something that you know well: You don't have to have extensive experience in order to write about something. When I was younger, I made my own web design business from scratch (it only lasted a year). In hindsight, I wish I had documented all of my processes because that would be valuable information now. But that's not necessary for starting an affiliate marketing business; just some basic knowledge will do. Think about what you know already and find an angle where you can give people useful information in exchange for an affiliate link. This could even be through humor! There's no reason why being funny needs to come at the expense of giving good advice :)

Creating a Sales Page

Once you’ve figured out which products and services you’re going to talk about in your online space, it’s time to make a sales page that serves as your landing page. This is where new customers come and look around—so it has to be engaging, actionable, and high-quality. Put together a sales page that talks about why you’re offering what you are (this is usually called your unique selling proposition or USP), why people should listen/buy from/hire you, what benefits they will get when they do business with you, and how they can contact you. In other words: exactly what would someone want from reading one of your posts? What can they expect to gain from doing so? Why should they trust you enough to buy something from you? If there’s an obvious answer here, write it down. If not, think on it until there is. You need a clear idea of who your target audience is and what your value proposition is before creating any kind of sales page.

Tracking Your Efforts and Making Adjustments

It’s hard to succeed as an affiliate if you don’t keep careful track of your activity. Use a spreadsheet or simple app like Every Dollar or Mint to create a log of everything you do on a daily basis. This will let you see where there are opportunities for improvement, and things that didn’t go quite as well. Seeing what did and didn’t work is one of the best ways for you improve your results in future efforts.