So you have a website or blog and want to start getting a little return for you efforts. How does one do this? It’s easy and it’s free. It’s called Affiliate Programs!

Affiliate Programs are not the only method, but they are the easiest by far. Literally, within minutes you can be running ads on your website and turning those visitors into sweet beer money (or it can be your entire income if you are good at it). Before I go forward on this subject let me go over what an affiliate program is.

Businesses advertise on the web. That’s not news to you I’m sure. But how do these businesses find all those thousands of websites and convince them to run ads on their site? Well, actually they don’t. They wait for webmasters like you to come to them and sign up for their affiliate programs. Once signed up, you are given an identification code which represents your account. That code can be placed into the <a href> tag of any link or banner. The company (know as a “seller”) will offer you a list of links and banners with your code already embedded into them. You simply place those links onto your site and when a visitor clicks the ad and arrives on the “sellers” website, a tracking cookie is placed and you receive a percentage of any sales which that customer might make. So, if the customer you send spends $100 and your getting a 15% commission, then you have just earned $15. The cookie (assuming that the visitor has cookies enabled on their computer) will persist on the customer’s computer and credit your account with sales made for a period of time should they return to the seller’s website (usually 30-90 days depending on the program). That’s the basic gist of how it works. You advertise for them and they give you a percentage of the sales which are delivered via your ads.

So how to find these affiliate programs? There are two major methods to find an affiliate program.

1. The first requires you to “hit the pavement”. Find businesses that sell the type of product or services that you are interested in advertising on your site, and look over their website. If they have an affiliate program they will usually have a link at the top or bottom of the page directing you to it (also look for “webmasters” links).
2. The other method is far easier and that is to sign up with a major affiliate marketing company. These sites gather hundreds of affiliate sellers together into one single site (and one account for you). From within your account you have access to all the programs, links, and many other features like sales tracking, traffic reports, advertisement click-through ratios all of which can help you to home in on which ads are working and which are not. The down side to this format is that some of the really good affiliate programs out there don’t sign up with these conglomerate companies,,,, they prefer to run their own programs. AND, you will usually receive a lower commission from these type of sites because the seller has to pay a commision to you and the conglomerate.

What kind of things can I sell? The world is your oyster. I’m not kidding. There are affiliate programs from banking services to diaper companies to gambling to web templates (ok yes that last one is a plug. You can sign up for our template selling affiliate program here).

How should I start? First you will want to decide what kind of product or service will appeal to your audience. You certainly don’t want to sell pet supplies on your Fitness website. Likewise if your website already sells a product or service you may want to avoid competing against yourself by advertising for companies which duplicate your own business. Once you have decided what kind of product/services you might wish to sell, it’s time to sign up. I would suggest starting with a “conglomerate” affiliate program. These are usually easier to learn and will offer you a great variety of seller options to get started. Then after you have found your niche and learned to really sell, you can start looking around for individually run programs that might suite your needs better (or maybe they won’t,,, but it doesn’t matter, you can be signed up with as many as you wish). Here are a couple of the best conglomerate programs in my opinion. I’ve worked with both of them for many years and found them to be very effective.

• Commision Junction (all categories)
• Link Share (all categories)

Here are some of the best single category programs that I know of. I have personally used them all and made good money from each of them. They also have very effective easy to use systems. I plan to make a complete list of programs available soon so you can easily find good direct affiliate programs for dozens of different companies, so keep subscribed so you’ll know when it goes live.

• Joe Bucks - Herbal remedies and nutrition
• Blue Gel Template Reseller - Web design templates
• Reseller Panel - Hosting services

Food for Thought -

1. Your options for promoting these sellers are many. They all provide for basic direct links and banners; however, many have pre-built stores that you can set up with all their product in it. These you can run from your own domain name. Others even allow for database feeds which will display all the product right inside your own web pages allowing you to essentially run an entire store without ever dealing with the products or customers directly. So look into the seller’s options before signing up.
2. % payout - Be sure to look carefully into things like percentage payout (average is between 10-%-20% but some are much higher.
3. How are you paid? - Some programs will send you a check, others use direct deposit, still others use paypal or similar payout solutions. Decide how you wish to be paid and make sure that the programs you sign up for can accommodate that method.
4. When are you paid? - Some programs pay monthly, other only quarterly and others by minimum flat rates. The most common method is to make a payment to you once per month IF your balance is over a set amount (usually around $100) otherwise the balance will rollover into the next month. So be sure to read the fine print. You don’t want to sign up for a program that won’t pay you until you reach $500 (because maybe you don’t do so well and never reach that amount, but you still want to get paid for the sales you did make).
5. Keep up to date on your links. Some programs like to rotate their banners and text links and will “turn off” old ones. In those cases if you are running an old ad, you may not be receiving credit for the customers you send through the link. Good programs will inform you by email when they make these sorts of changes.
6. NEVER sign up with a program that asks you to pay money or make any other concessions in order to join. They are scams. All legitimate programs are free. You are doing them the favor.

So there’s your initiation brief into affiliate advertising. There is a great deal more that can said on this topic so please feel free drop a comment on this blog and I will answer each question directly so we can all benefit.