Easily Make Money Online
You have may have read many headlines that sound similar to this one above, or make promises like this one seems to. You might have spent quite a bit of time reading articles with title like this one. When you finished, you may have thought you wasted your time… no way can I make money doing that; I can’t promote that, I can’t put that on my website… or whatever that! IT WILL MAKE ME LOOK SLEAZY!
Done well, it can enhance your brand. I’m going to give you some tips that will give you an opportunity to monetize your website or blog, while preserving your brand. One of the best and easiest ways to monetize your online properties is to join some affiliate programs and advertise them on your site.
Affiliate programs are the answer
Why affiliate programs? Simple. When you promote affiliate websites, you get instant access to products and services that are well supported by professional marketing materials without and up-front development costs. All the work of writing an eBook, or recording an audio track, or programming a software product is taken care of by someone else. But the advantages don’t end there. Also, you don’t have to create marketing materials – those are created for you by the affiliate program owner.
Another big benefit is that you really don’t have to manually keep track of money or finances. Better affiliate programs will provide the members affiliate management tools that are based on one of the leading affiliate software programs. These programs will help you optimize your marketing efforts so that you get the most out of the affiliate program.
Five tips for choosing affiliate offers to promote
- Look good earnings potential – You want to make sure that if one of the people you refer to an affiliate offer buys, that you will make some decent money. One school of thought is that affiliate programs that offer high percentage payouts are the best. My preference is for affiliate programs that offer high ticket items and pay large commissions. This affiliate program for promoting SEO services gives you the opportunity to earn monthly recurring income up to $350.
- Choose programs your readers will like – It is critical that you choose affiliate programs and offers that your audience will appreciate and be interested in. It wouldn’t be too bright to choose to promote affiliate programs and products for chocolate desserts on a site that is dedicated to losing weight. However, if you have a website that helps people find careers is sales, it would be great to promote something like How to Get Into Medical Sales.
- Look for affiliate programs powered by software – When you sign up for an affiliate program it will quickly become obvious if the owner of the program is serious about helping affiliate members be successful. If you are automatically redirected to a page powered by a fully-featured affiliate marketing software program, you can infer that this is a serious affiliate program. If they treat your membership in the affiliate program haphazardly, how do you think they treat their customers. Their are several top name brands like iDev Affiliate, LinkShare, and JROX JAM. My favorite is JROX JAM, which you can get for free here: http://websitesthatdrivesales.com/recommends/free-affiliate-management-software.htm
- Make sure the website is NOT anonymous – What I mean is, make sure that there are real people standing behind the website, people with good reputations, who take customer service seriously. People who let you know who give you contact information with phone numbers are more likely to treat you well. They aren’t likely to try to ‘run and hide’ from you if there is a dispute. If you can find a bio, picture, and phone number of the website owner, chances are they will behave legitimately. You will also be able to search the Internet to find any negative information about their program. Peggy McKee, the Medical Sales Recruiter, is one of the country’s leading sales recruiters – she proudly announces her site ownership on the about pages like this one: http://30-60-90-day-sales-plan.com/about/
- Choose affiliate programs that have support programs – If you are choosing a piece of software to buy, you probably wouldn’t purchase it if there was not support mechanism in place. You should use the similar criteria when evaluating affiliate websites. If the website owner doesn’t have a support system in place – something like a ticket system or help desk software – then they probably don’t care about their customers. When they do, you can be fairly confident that they are trying to delight their customers. If they AREN’T working to keep customers happy, their poor service will reflect poorly on you, and tarnish your brand.
Here are a couple of affiliate programs that meet all these criteria, that I recommend if your site’s visitors would be interested in these subjects. One is an affiliate program for a sales interview tool that targets sales professionals – you can check it out here: http://30-60-90-day-sales-plan.com/affiliate-program-details/. The other is a program that has a broader appeal – it targets people who own businesses that either have no web presence or under performing websites; you can get all the information for it here: http://websitesthatdrivesales.com/blog/home/affiliate-program/
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Tags: Affiliate Marketing, affiliate programs, affiliate software, internet business, Internet Marketing, making money online, monetize, websites