October 18th, 2007
by Sunil Setty
If you are an advanced user of the Web and you’re looking for a new revenue source one place to explore is affiliate marketing.
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Affiliate marketing is not for everyone, but if you know how to design webpages and you have a decent understanding of sales, advertising and marketing techniques it may be worth looking into.
For the most part Affiliate Marketing is simply selling other people’s products and earning a commission for each sale. The commission you get paid depends on the product/service you’re selling and who your are selling for. For many Affiliate Marketers the key is driving the right traffic to the affiliate offer page (often called “landing page”). If you are starting a new offer on a new site dedicated to that offer, you’re going to need a method for getting targeted customers to your site. The most common form of driving this type of traffic to an affiliate landing page is via a pay per click (PPC) program. Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter of the three largest players in the pay per click space.
But before I talk about PPC, you’ll first need to sign-up for an affiliate marketing account. Three of the biggest affiliate marketing companies are Commission Junction, Azoogle and Copeac. But there are plenty others from which to choose. Those are just three that I have enjoyed success with in the past.
Signing up with an affiliate network is pretty straightforward. One thing to keep in mind is that each network will likely contact you to verify your application and to find out what your goals are and how plan on using their network. To cut down on fraud and to ensure quality, this application process can take a few days if not up to week, so don’t expect to immediately get approved. If you wish to expedite this process feel free to call/email the network directly and let them know that you are interested in working with them as an affiliate.
In most applications, you will also be asked to provide tax information (have that handy) and a website of yours. If you don’t have a website to your name, again you can call them directly and inform them of your intentions to create a website built around one of the products they offer.
Once you’re accepted into an affiliate marketing network, find an offer that interests you or one that complements one of your websites. What is important is that you choose a niche or product that you are familiar with and one that converts with some regularity. If you know a lot about car insurance than selecting a car insurance offer might be right for you. If you are familiar satellite television, see if there’s a satellite TV offer that might work for you. If you have a blog about weight loss, check out their nutrition/diet campaigns. If Paul, who runs dailyindia.com, was to ever run affiliate I would direct him toward Indian travel, matrimonial and telecom offers.
Most of the top affiliate networks have hundreds of different offers from which to choose so finding one that suits you shouldn’t be a problem. And most of the top affiliate networks offer products from some of the biggest companies on the Internet.
Once you found an offer to your liking find out from your affiliate network how well it converts. For me, I like offers with a conversion rate at 5% or better, meaning that at least 5% of the visitors to the merchant’s landing page convert. That’s not a hard and fast rule, so your mileage may very! But if the offer has a low conversion rate you will probably want to avoid it since you are new in the affiliate game. If, however, you find an offer that converts well the next step is to build a webpage around that offer, which I will get into in a later blog, and then drive targeted traffic to that landing page.
But first, if you’re really interested in affiliate marketing you must sign up for an account at an affiliate network, at either the ones I’ve listed above or just do a simple search on Google, there’s plenty of high-quality networks on the web. A couple things also keep in mind when choosing the right affiliate network, make sure that they run offers that you are interested in, they allow applications from your country and they have a good payment structure, that is, they pay within 30 days and they payout in ways convenient to you. Also see what’s other services the company may offer, some will help you set up your webpage and campaigns while others will assign an affiliate manager to you who will assist you along the way.
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