How to Earn Money Through an Affiliate Program

By Jason Smith  

If you are looking for ways to earn an income online, then affiliate programs are just what you need. There are many affiliate programs that people can choose from, and if you have experience with these programs, you will surely be earning huge money. I have tried and tested many like AdSense, and others.

How this works: All you need is your website, blog or a wide range of online friends and connections. These programs offer ads code that can be placed at the back end of your site or blog, and another aspect is that you can copy and paste the readymade message and send to your friends online about a particular product you are marketing.

Each sale you make, or every time an ad that is placed on your website or blog is clicked then you will be credited for it. Whenever someone buys an item from your link or banner ad on your site, you earn a commission. I am using Bigextracash affiliate program because they have a higher payout commission for their affiliates. What you need to do is to talk up the product that you are promoting to all your friend and family. Also, your link to your Facebook or MySpace might be the sure and the fastest means to earn you big income on affiliate program because you are going to reach a large number of people while sitting in the comfort of your room. Remember you get paid every time someone clicks on your ads. There are many different affiliate sites that you can join such as AdSense, ClickBank, Amazon, Yahoo, etc.

There are many different ways to earn money online through internet marketing. You can create and sell your information products. You can place Google AdSense on your sites. Or you could join an affiliate program and make money while you sleep.

Affiliate Terms.

• Passive income.

Affiliate Marketing and Google AdSense advertising have one important thing in common. Both generate passive income. In both cases, you create a website with an affiliate product on it and drive real traffic to your site. When people come to your website and click on one of your affiliate links you earn money even when you are sitting at the table or on the beach. I know of Internet marketing that is still making money from the site he created four or five years ago. It's passive income.

• Commissions.

If you go through affiliate networks such as LinkShare, Commission Junction or Share-sale you can expect to earn 8% commission on what you sell. There are products that pay up to 12%, but this tends to be the exception.

• Sales in two phases.

Affiliate programs can be a good way to make money online. However, this has the disadvantage that the two-step "sells". First, you need to tell your visitors to click on your link or banner to go to the merchant's website. The second phase is a merchant selling something to the visitor you refer form your site.

• Conversion rate.

This brings me to another important aspect in affiliate marketing called the conversion rate. This is the percentage of people who take action after landing on your site. Of course, the action here is to click on your link or banner and go to the merchant's website.

Most webmasters are lucky if they can get a rate of 4% or 5% conversion. This means that for every 100 visitors who land on the website, four or five clicking on a link or banner and go to the merchant website. But what is a merchant conversion rate? If you refer or send 50 visitors to the merchant site, how many of them buy their product? If you know this, you can quickly do some simple calculations and determine the conversion rate should be for you to make money with the merchant.

Basic Steps to Affiliate Marketing Success.

In short, to join an affiliate program can be a great way to make money online - as long as you choose the right merchants and you can get a steady flow of traffic to your site.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways for someone to gets started with an online business. Anyone can start with affiliate marketing easily, and even get a check without spending a single penny.

Serious affiliate marketing, however, needs to understand how to support this activity, and here are the steps.

Step 1: Choose a niche.

The first step in affiliate marketing is to choose a niche market. What is the industry you want to be? It would be a good start the industry that has the least known so that you can understand a lot of the terminology behind the product.

Step 2: Research some products.

The next step is to find and research the products you want to sell. To do this, you can go to the popular affiliate markets such as Commission Junction or ClickBank, then simply search related to the product category. For each product, you must do a comprehensive review of the product to see whether it is worth promoting. You might also want to buy the product yourself, so you know exactly what you are selling.

Step 3: Make your landing page.

This is a step that many affiliate marketers make a profound error. Rather than sending visitors to your site, they send them to the affiliate website. What marketer needs to do is to sell to them again and again and to do so, they need to set up a landing page that convert.

Step 4: Set your autoresponder series.

Now that your landing page is ready to collect e-mail addresses, you must subscribe to an automatic response and follow-up by a mixture of good news and promotions of the products that you have studied. This is the part where your emails you send is ready to make some sales. Remember that the job of e-mail is just to get them click through the website of the affiliate program!

Step 5: Send massive traffic.

Having your autoresponder done, prepared your promotional series of messages the next important thing to do is to send massive traffic to your squeeze page. To do this, you can submit articles and your site to directories, write a comment on a blog putting your affiliate link and using the social media network to promote your website. Once there is enough traffic coming to your landing page you will see the sale coming in.

In conclusion, if you have never tried any online business before I will recommend affiliate marketing to you because it's online business that does not require you to pay any dime before you can earn all you need to do is to search a legit affiliate program to join and most are free to join.

Article Source: EzineArticles expert:Jason Smith