Beginners guide to affiliate programs

How affiliate programs work

Brief description: You send people to a web site. They buy something, or sign up for something, and you are paid a commission.

Affiliate programs are revenue sharing arrangements set up by companies selling products and services. As a web site owner, you are rewarded for sending customers to the company.

For example, by February 1998 Amazon.com, one of the affiliate marketing pioneers, had attracted more than 30,000 webmasters giving Amazon.com wonderful publicity in exchange for a small commission on sales. (By 2004, it was over the 900,000 affiliate mark.)

You also need some unique content to your website:

We strongly recommend you write your own material, or if you can afford it - hire someone to write it for you You do not need very much text, but the text you do have is perhaps the most important factor for your page. Not only does your written content improve your visitors experience while visiting your site, it makes the search engines go wild. It is recommended that you use at least 200 words on every page designed to target keywords. Of course you can find more information regarding SEO - and the importance of content - thru out the web. If you need more content for your pages, try an article or two.

Quality pictures

For your page to look alive, you should add some pictures to it. You can take pictures yourself, using a digital camera, or you can use some of the free photos on the web. A small list of sites offering free pictures can be found here.

Graphics

In addition to pictures, you should consider adding other graphics as well. This includes banners, buttons and perhaps a few customized dividers. Carefully thought out graphics is an easy way of making your web page look like you made an effort with it.

You need an affiliate program to send your visitors to

When you are done building your web page, it is time to figure out how to make money from it. If you offer a product or service for sale or rent - you already have a way of making money. But for those who do not have any products or services, there are others - with sites selling products matching your visitors needs - who are willing to pay you for sending them customers. It works in various ways, but the principle stay the same: You are marketing their products for a profit. Some of them pay you a percentage on every sale, others a fixed amount per click. Others still, are paying you a small amount every time your visitors see their banner. The possibilities are endless, you can often combine several affiliate programs to earn multiple incomes.

The process of choosing an affiliate program can be 10 seconds or two years - all depending on the depth of research put into it. You can search for a program and look at the top three. That way you know you have a very competitive affiliate program, and you are likely to earn a quite deal of money - assuming you are driving traffic your way. But, for those of you who are thorough enough to look deeper, it is possible to extend your profits even further. This takes a bit of research and testing, but often you will end up with a very profitable website.

First you need to find out as much about your visitors as you can: Who they are, how they found your website, their age and if they came from a search engine, what search term did they type in? When you have a better view over what kind of people your site is attracting, you can start looking for the ultimate affiliate program. A good tip is to use your most popular search term in the search to see what you can find. Often these will be top contenders for the final affiliate program. Use the "overall rankings" to get a grip on how your keywords - and the affiliate programs associated with them - compares to other businesses. Do not be afraid to try programs not directly related to your topics, as long as you see a connection or you somehow consider it likely to appeal to your visitors.

Once done, you need more visitors

When you are satisfied with your site, it is time to look for your visitors. There are numerous ways of driving traffic to your site - some good, some not so good. Depending on your audience, there might be different ways of getting more visitors, but no matter what type of site you are promoting, one thing is for sure: You need incoming links! Pretty much ALL search engines calculate the importance of a specific site using the number and relevance of the links pointing to your page. As earlier mentioned, the ways of getting these links are many, ranging from hand picking sites and mailing them - to joining link exchanges and more or less automated programs. A good page of ways of getting inbound links can be found here.