Before you sign up for an affiliate program, take a little time to make sure that it is a good “fit”. There are basically two ways to do it. You can build a website first and then look for products that fit with the theme of your website. Or, you can decide on a product (or two or three) and build a website solely to promote it. Most people feel that the latter is the better choice.
One of the best known affiliate programs is Google AdSense. It works with any website, because the company chooses ads that fit the theme of your site. If, for example, you built a website about hiking, the ads might include boots or camping gear.
With Google AdSense, when a visitor to your website clicks on a Google ad, you earn a little money. The amount that you earn varies, according to a scale determined by Google. 20-30 cents per click is about average.
Google AdSense is unlike the average affiliate program in that you earn, whether or not someone buys the product. In most cases, money is earned only if the visitor buys an item. That’s when it is best to tailor the website to “sell” the product. Affiliates refer to the web pages as “pre-sells”.
There are thousands of different affiliate programs available. So, the next step is choosing one, which can be a little overwhelming. Here are a few tips.
Since your goal is to pre-sell your website visitors, choose a product or service that you feel good about. If you believed that you had found the best weight loss program on the internet, you would probably want to let people know about it.
So, you tell all of your friends and hopefully they tell all of their friends, etc. Each time that one of them clicks on the link that you have placed on your website and “opts-in”, you get paid.
With internet affiliate programs, you won’t need to rely solely on your friends, as you would if you were selling Avon or a similar product. You can attract visitors online by writing about what you know.
You don’t have to limit yourself to a single website to promote a product. You can create blogs that relate to it or use social networks to attract more business to the company. People that read what you have written are like new friends.
So, the last tip for choosing an affiliate program is to find one that you already know something about or that you can easily learn about and share what you learn with the world.
