By Peter
Dobler
Remember the day when you made the ultimate
decision to change your life? Yes, it was the day when you decided
to start your own home business. Gosh, I remember the anxiety when I
uploaded my very first web site, waiting for something to happen.
It’s like going onto a stage and performing in front of a large
crowd.
Ok, what has this to do with affiliate programs and
how to make money with them? Not much other than this is the primary
reason why people spending money online. Emotions are the number one
selling factor, period. And newbie web masters are loaded with
emotions.
When you started your home business, did you have a
product to sell? Neither did I. That’s why affiliate programs are
perfect for startup home businesses. In a nutshell, an affiliate
sells products from somebody else and keeps a commission from each
sale. An affiliate id responsible for all the advertising and only
gets paid whenever there’s a sale.
Take a break and think
about this for a minute. Every day there are thousands of people
online, searching for products and ideas to make money with. They
know that there’s big money to make and they are eager to get
started. When you started your home business it probably never
crossed your mind to sell your own products and to run your own
affiliate program.
If you’re in the online business for a
while with mediocre results it is time to switch sides. Why should
you carry most of the risk with your advertisement spending with
less than satisfactory sales results? Not to mention that you’re at
the mercy of somebody else’s reliability to send you your hard
earned money.
If you don’t have a product to sell, go out
there and search for products with master resale rights. This will
grant you the exclusive rights to sell the product and keep 100% of
the profits. Selling the product through affiliates doesn’t violate
this, because you’re paying your affiliates for the advertising
efforts, the final sale is still made by you.
Of course there
are a million products with master resale rights available. Choose
your product wisely. You don’t want to start an affiliate program
with products that are already over marketed and maybe available for
free or as part of a bonus package. This takes some time and
research, but it is well worth the effort.
One source is to
research the public domain sector and compile your own information
product. There are numerous publications available on this topic.
Another source is to join a membership program that sells master
resale rights products. Make sure that they offer unique products
and check their rules. Many offer a trial membership, take advantage
of this.
Once you have your product start your affiliate
program. Don’t join one of the many services that offer affiliate
program services for a monthly fee. Here’s why. Having thousands of
affiliates advertising your product is a great thing. Having
thousands of free links to your web site is priceless.
Create as many advertising samples for your affiliates as
possible. Have these samples point to different entry points to your
web site. Banners are the worst advertising tools, but newbie web
masters love them. They are easy to implement. What do you care, you
got your free link to your website. Make sure that you use search
engine friendly affiliate links. Affiliate links with a “?” are
recognized as such. Better are the affiliate links that look like a
directory structure. The easy way to implement this is to use PHP as
your language of choice.
Guess what will happen after a few
months running your own affiliate program from your website? Your
own web site will skyrocket in rankings on any search engine,
because you got so many links to your web site without having a link
farm on your own. This is every web masters dream. Now you have a
choice. You either aggressively promote your affiliate program or
you promote your products. Either way you win.
If you’re
still skeptical, go to Google or Yahoo and search for links pointing
to your favorite affiliate program. Simply type ‘links:’ and your
affiliate program’s domain name into the search field. Make sure you
don’t have any blanks. This will return all the websites that are
linking back to this affiliate program. Check out the number on the
right upper corner where it says ‘Results 1 – 10 of about x’. x
stands for the total number of links. Now do the same for your
website. Hmm, you got nothing? Well, that’s the difference. I hope
you see the power of this by now.
Before you go out there and slab together your
own affiliate program. Do your homework and research as much as
possible. You want to get it right the first time. Good luck to you
all.
