How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing Programs

Affiliate programs are the best way for webmasters and regular individuals to make money online. More and more, webmasters are unimpressed with Google Adsense revenues, so they are turning to affiliate programs to provide a nice source of revenue to support the cost of their sites or to even earn a living from. There are so many different affiliate programs it’s hard to know where to start. I always recommend joining Commission Junction and Linkshare, then join several hundred programs to see who accepts you and who doesn’t. Then you can start interacting with the merchant’s affiliate managers to find out about the company and what they sell. This can be valuable intelligence and give you a head start on the best way to promote the merchant. You can ask for top-converting keyword files, custom banners for your website or blog, and content for your site.
If you have an existing blog or site, the best way to proceed into affiliate marketing is to build a page for the merchant of your choice on your site. This starts by making the title of the page read something like this: “Macy’s Department Store Discounts and Special Deals.” then you have to write a nice paragraph of unique content about Macy’s and what they sell to include on the page. Then you need to add the banner code to your site or blog in several areas on the page. Once you have done this, the page with get “spidered” or “indexed” by the search engines and that page will start ranking after a few weeks. When people searching the web and find that page and then clickthorough to Macy’s and purchase, you get the commission. Its that easy. Now all you have to do is go and repeat this for as many merchants as you can. You can also build page about the different products Macy’s sells like Home Funishings or Bedding. Make sure everything you write on your site is unique and original copy.
Another tactic is to build a site or blog specifically for each merchant and then build it out with unique pages of content. Over time you will have sites built for several merchants each with hundreds of pages on them! This is how the super-affiliates make their big money. It’s very time-consuming and takes some writing skills, but if you are prolific and pro-active you will start getting great traffic to your sites/blogs and making affiliate sales! This is but one example of how to start into affiliate marketing…now go out and start building blogs and writing reviews!!