Making Money With Affiliate Programs
So Lets Kick It! off with Affiliate Programs.
I am going to break down this post into two individual posts, the first part will focus on what exactly affiliate programs are, and how they work. The second part will present you with a blueprint that you can use to start making money with affiliate programs.
In order to truly understand how affiliate programs work, and how you can make money with affiliate programs lets get you some of the basic information about affiliate programs, how they work and how they can make you money.
Think back to retail sales - I’m sure everyone has done some retail in their time. I’ve worked several retail jobs - most positions were hourly wage + commission, while some were hourly wage only (those really sucked sometimes).
The sales positions that were hourly wage + commission were great - the more I sold, the more I made and each item carried a different commission rate. The commissions were anywhere from 5% of a product to as much as 25% of the product, but you should also remember that many of the products had HUGE markups. For example a computer cable (any type) were purchased for around $0.50 each and sold for well over $9.95 to as much as $19.95.
Sales + Commission jobs were usually a win-win situation. If the sales person is good at what they do, they make great commissions, otherwise they just get an hourly wage — but most companies do expect their sales people to meet some quotas, so you can’t really sit on your backside expecting a job for long.
Affiliate programs are sort-of like your sales job but you get only a commission, no hourly wage.
Like the sales job, you are only as good as the products you try to “sell”, and how well you promote your products. The more competetive the product, guaranteed the more competetive the keywords would be to sell that product - that’s why you see so many people resort to spamming (think about all those viagra and discount pharmacy e-mails you get). If someone could send out 50,000,000 e-mails for viagra and they happen to get a 1% hit who happen to buy - they’ve just made a few dollars.
Affiliate programs allow you to sell hundreds of different products without knowing a thing about the products. You could set-up one or a hundred websites selling everything from fruit baskets, to meat and wine, to construction equipment or consumer goods. Some products will need more finesse, and in some cases you could even create your own affiliate program (we’ll talk about this later) even if a company doesn’t have such a program.
Affiliate programs are nothing more than revenue sharing opportunities.
Here is an example of how an affiliate program works.
Suppose I enjoy golf. I’m a golf fanatic. I live and breathe golf, so naturally I’d like to make some money off of my addiction… er, hobby.
So I set-up a golfing website or blog and I post regularly. I’ve amassed quite a readership, but I’m not monetizing the visitors nor am I doing anything to monetize my regulars.
So I sign-up to a few of the top affiliate networks out there and sign-up for several of the best rated golfing programs.
Initially I just slap on the advertisments on the blog, and though I make some money it’s nowhere what I could be doing. So rather than just post advertisements, I make the advertisements part of the posts. I include ads at the start and end of the posts, but I also try other things.
For example, I decide to do a series of posts on how to improve your swing and in the course of the posts I also have someone video tape some lessons - perhaps teasers, perhaps freebies (you do know what I’m getting at, don’t you? I won’t go into it here - but will save this discussion for another post). But as I post the series, I ensure each set of posts is keyword rich for specific keywords.
Each of the keywords that I am targetting is then linked to a specific affiliate program - because the keywords are phrases that are searched on there is a very high probability that they pages will get picked-up by the search engines and if I’ve done my job right then I may get into the top 3, 5 or 10 listings.
Each time someone clicks on the link they are redirected through my affiliate link (which includes my special tracking ID) and if they purchase an item - I get a commission on it.
Now I may only make $5 or $100 per item (or even more) but if I can direct 10,000 people to my site daily and out of that I manage to interest 10% of the people to click on the links (so that’s 1,000 people) and out of that 1,000 people 3% buy something (so that’s 30 people) then I get a commission on their purchase. It could be a few dollars to as much as $300 or more (for example, treadmill sales regularly result in commissions in excess of $100 — redirect and sell 10 of those per month and you’re making some good money).
Affiliate sales are a numbers game - you need to drive visitors to your site and your content needs to be good enough to have them return and click on the links.
Something else you want to do with any affiliate site you run (especially if it’s something you enjoy) is to further monetize it:
- Set-up e-mail subscriptions/lists
- Create personalized or general training guide or videos
- Create and develop physical products
That’s only the tip of the iceberg - there is so much more that you can do with an affiliate site.
I will expand on this article to go into more detail on how you would pull all this information together to create a tight, well developed website that is guaranteed to make you money (well, I can’t really guarantee you anything).
As always I welcome your feedback and questions!
Take care!
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Tags: affiliate links, affiliate marketing, affiliate sales, affiliate site, how to make money on the internet with affiliate prograOne Awesome Website
…ok, I haven’t posted an awesome website in a looooong time.
This is one site you simply must check out! One of the cool things about my BlackBerry Curve (well, all the BBs that I’ve had) is that you can sign up to VIIGO and download RSS feeds to your BB. I found this great site and have been reading it diligently for weeks now.
If you’re looking for a time out and some interesting trivia then check out…
This is one of the coolest sites I’ve come accross in a long time!
Here are just a few of the great posts…
From the interesting post of Percy Fawcett and The Lost City of Z, to something more macabre like 7 Famous Executioners or how about 10 Plundering Politicians (you ought to read about some of these despots antics, like Jean-Bédel Bokassa how crowned himself a King). I really enjoyed 7 Bizarre Unsolved Mysteries.
If you like something slightly off beat you could read about 6 Historic Figures That Were Celibate or for the more obscure and slightly (well, very) off beat 8 Historic Figures That Were Pederasts.
Regardless of what you like, I’m quite certain that you will enjoy reading http://ty.rannosaur.us!
Enjoy!
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I/We Are Back
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18 Ways You Can Start Making Money On The Internet
Here is a short list of 18 Ways That You Can Start Making Money On The Internet.
- How to Make Money Online with Affiliate Programs
- How to Make Money Online with eBooks
- How to Make Money Online with Your Own Niche Directory
- How to Make Money Online Selling Stock Photos
- How to Make Money Online Interviewing Experts
- How to Make Money Online with a Classified Advertising Site
- How to Make Money Online with a Local Real Estate Portal
- How to Make Money Online Creating Your Own Software
- How to Make Money Online with Telesminars & Webinars
- How to Make Money Online with Audio eCourses
- How to Make Money Online with Video eCourses
- How to Make Money Online as a Coach or Consultant
- How to Make Money Online with a Content Site
- How to Make Money Online as a Virtual Assistant
- How to Make Money Online a Local Online Mall
- How to Make Money Online with a Social Networking Site
- How to Make Money Online Providing Helpdesk Support
- How to Make Money Online with Your Own Membership Site
This is only a teaser for you. We will be going into each of these items in more detail over the next few weeks.
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Tags: how to make money, how to make money on the internet, make money on the internet, make money onlineMore Insight Into Resale Rights Products
Earlier today I spoke about Understanding Different Types Of Resale Rights - in a continuation of the post we’ll go into the types of resale rights that are available and when you’re buying rights what you should look for and what types of resale rights you should offer when you’re selling rights to your product.
First lets get something very clear - depending on the type of rights you are offering, you are NOT SELLING and possibly NOT BUYING “the product” — which would include the copyrights to the product. In most, if not all cases the copyright to the product is normally held by the author and very few relinquish that right. Private Label Rights products are generally those where the author is going to relinquish the rights to the product - but even then you need to ensure that that is clearly stated; DO NOT ASSUME ANYTHING!
In most cases, the resell rights products that I’ve been exposed to generally DO NOT OFFER private label rights. So you have permission to resell the product, modify the sales letter, graphics etc., however you do not have permissions to modify the e-book or any other material.
These types of products will drive traffic away from your site and in most cases the entire e-book is one BIG sales letter for the author because many of the keywords linked in the e-book will point to affiliate programs that the author belongs to or to their website.
Here is a very typical disclaimer that you will find on most resale rights products that do not offer private label rights:
The product that I swiped this from contained affiliate links on every page of the e-book, including headers and footers. The problem was that because of the way the PDF was assembled, it did not retain the links - so they just looked pretty (pretty useless…). I’m sure the author didn’t do any testing at all before they released the product - too bad, so sad.
Another technique that you will find is that authors will give FREE resell rights to a “lower end” product. This allows those that sell Resell Rights Memberships to get you in the door with stuff like “free gold level resell rights memberships” and then try and suck you into upgrading for hundreds of dollars to their platinum or enterprise memberships.
In fact in preparing this post I signed up for about a dozen FREE resell rights memberships and in almost all cases the products were close to identical in all memberships. When I visited the sales pages of the sites mentioned in the e-books, they were offering their product for free and in a few cases were also advertising that it came with free resell rights — but in ALL cases each product that was being offered contained a disclaimer like the one above and each had dozens and dozens of links back to the authors primary site or affiliate links to other products and services.
Buyer Beware - TANSTAAFL - Caveat Emptor
TANSTAAFL = THERE AINT NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH
You get what you paid for (or what you did not pay for) when it comes to resell rights products. Generally many resell rights memberships will offer free “gold” level or “platinum” level memberships and they may sprinkle in a few jems amonst the clutter but in order to maximize the membership and get the good stuff you almost always have to pay to upgrade your membership and memberships can range from $27 per month to $97 per month or even one-time fees of anywhere from $147 to $997 or more. Again - BUYER BEWARE!
What kind of rights should you offer? That really depends on what your goal is — your goal should be to make more money so you need to think along those lines. Ideally you want to add resell rights to a product which will be picked up by many people and you want to lead those people to your website where you can offer them additional items.
When it comes to resell rights, I would suggest that you research some of the resell rights memberships out there and offer your product to them for inclusion. Not only do you expose yourself to a marketer that probably has thousands of people on their e-mail list but you also expose your product to the members of the service.
Resell rights is easy to maneouver and make money from - you just need to now what you’re doing and how to go about doing it.
I will continue this series of posts over the next few days. If you want to see something specific, submit a comment!
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Tags: resell rights, resell rights products, what are resell rights productsStatPress - Real Time Stats For Your Wordpress Blog
As you know Robert and I are stat freaks. We look at our stats incessently every 15 minutes. If I could, I’d have them e-mailed to my Blackberry.
A few weeks ago we found a great Wordpress plugin called StatPress. We still use SlimStat but decided to install this one as well to see how it performs and the results. While we are still trying to make up our minds, we can say that StatPress is one colorful and very useful plugin. That’s pretty subjective, right?
Seriously StatPress provides you with a lot of good information. You get graphs like the one below found on the overview page (these stats are from another site that I also run):
On the overview page you also see the following information:
- Last Hits
- Last Search Terms
- Last Referrers
- Last Agents
- Last Pages
- Last Spiders
On the StatPress menu, you have several options:
- Overview
- Details
- Spy
- Search
- Export
- Options
- StatPressUpdate
Details are equally as interesting. You are provided the hard numbers, along with graphs. On the details page you can see:
- Top Days
- Operating Systems - on the site that I’m presenting the Top Operating Systems were Windows XP and Linux
- Browser
- Feeds
- Search Engines
- Top Search Terms - we LOVE this one!
- Top Referrers
- Countries
- Spiders
- Top Pages
- Top Days - Unique Visitors
- Top Days - Pageviews
- Top IPs - Pageviews
Here is the Top Browsers for one of my sites:
Next on the menu is SPY. It does give you some good information, but I didn’t find it very useful atleast not on the site that we’ve installed it on.
Search is pretty self-explanatory, as is the export feature.
Options are pretty straight forward:
…not much needed to configure the plugin.
Installing is super easy. Unzip, place into the correct location and let ‘er go!
We were quite impressed with StatPress and think that you will also. You can download StatPress from the WordPress - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/statpress/. The plug-in is very popular with over 64,000 downloads to date.
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Tags: statpress, wordpress stats, wordpress stats plugins
