The Internet has made is easier than ever for webmasters to earn money on the side with part-time effort. Sometimes all you have to do is help drive traffic to another site and other times you simply need to help other companies make sales from their site, almost acting as a sales representative for the company. You earn a fee for the traffic you provide or make a commission for the sale you help the company make. The way to make money that I am referring to is called an Affiliate Program.
An Affiliate Program is an advertising program offering a monetary incentive for webmasters to drive traffic to the publisher's website or to help them make sales. This eliminates the necessity for the publisher to find websites with related content to list their banners. It also increases the response rate by giving the "affiliate" websites a stake in the response rate.
Thousands of companies are offering different types of Affiliate Programs, whether it is to simply drive traffic to their site or to help them make sales. Either way, the great part about becoming an affiliate is you can easily create a website that targets the publisher's content and not have to worry about shipping products, following up with customer service calls or focusing to grow a business. You can simply add a few banner ads to your site, and if your content is intriguing enough, can probably acquire a few sales for doing minimal work.
This article is going to explain three simple steps to get you started. The ways I describe below are not the only method, but they will help you gain an understanding and set you in the right direction, which will help you to figure out what type of Affiliate Program is right for you.
1. Find an Affiliate Program that Interests You
The first step is to find an affiliate program that interests you. A great website to start looking through is Commission Junction. CJ Access, their self-service solution, provides small to medium-sized advertisers, access to their global network of publishers, educational resources, and sophisticated reporting tools. CJ Access delivers all the functionality needed for the general management and administration of your performance-based marketing program – all on demand.
Upon registration, you will gain access to Commission Junction's large database of publishers. Once you signup for your account, you can pick and choose which publishers you would like to advertise with. CJ will provide you with all the tools necessary to get you started advertising almost immediately.
2. Build your Site and Develop Content that Relates to the Publisher's Business
After you've selected the type of Affiliate Program that's right for you and you've chosen the Publisher(s) that you would like to target, the second steps is to build your site and develop content that targets and relates to the Publishers type of business. If you're targeting Dell as your Publisher, then you would need to develop a site that targets Dell products and has topics that relates to Dell's business. After your content get's indexed in the search engines, people will be looking for topics that relate to Dell and happen to come across your site. As they read through your site, they will come across the banner ads, which you have strategically placed within the site and hopefully, click them to be directed to Dell's website.
Now because you signed up with Commission Junction and let's say Dell signed up as a publisher, Dell will know when someone is coming from your site to theirs because you receive an Advertisers Affiliate ID and this will be passed to Dell when someone clicks on the banner ads within your site. So when someone visits the Dell site from your site and they purchase something, then you will receive the commission that was agreed upon by Commission Junction and Dell.
3. Market your Site and Increase your Traffic
The third and final step is to market and advertise your site to increase your traffic. Without a good amount of traffic, it will be difficult to earn money through an Affiliate Program. There are hundreds of different ways to advertise your site, whether it's setting up an automated Google Sitemap, signing up for Google AdWords or posting articles to an article distribution website, be sure to start with something.
Also, make sure to continue and add more content on a frequent basis to keep your site up-to-date with your publishers site. This will also help tremendously in the search engines. Remember, traffic is the key to be successful in an Affiliate Program and with good quality and quantity of content, you will be sure to increase your traffic.
You may also want to add Google AdSense to your website. Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads on their website's content pages and earn money. Because the ads are related to what your visitors are looking for on your site or matched to the characteristics and interests of the visitors your content attracts, you'll finally have a way to both monetize and enhance your content pages.
This article is an introduction to Affiliate Programs to help you get started. As you learn more and educate about Affiliate Programs, you will sure to increase your knowledge and begin to realize the various ways that you can earn money as an Affiliate with part time effort. I wish you much success.
Click here to automated your Google and Yahoo Sitemaps today.
Hudson Horizons is an e-business product, solution and marketing company specializing in creating highly sophisticated customized websites, web-based software applications and providing e-marketing services for small and mid-sized businesses.
Our vision and ultimate ambition as a company is to always strive to be "The New Light for e-Business."
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