This is a guest post from Joel Carl. If you’re interested in writing an article for this blog, feel free to use the contact form. You will be linked to appropriately.
We saved the best for last! When it comes to making serious money from your blog – affiliate programs are your cash cow.
Affiliate Marketing In A Nutshell
Affiliate marketing is connecting customers to merchants and taking a commission. A website owner will promote a product on their website and each time a visitor clicks the link to the merchant’s site and buys, the website owner gets a commission.
How do we find products/services to promote?
The best way to find affiliate programs is through affiliate networks such as Commission Junction and Clickbank. You sign up for an account, search the database of products/services, once you find the product you want to promote, you simply add the links or banner to your website.
How is it tracked back to the website owner?
When you sign up for the affiliate program, you will be given a special link which contains your affiliate ID, so it can be tracked back to you.
Types of Affiliate Incomes
Recursive – You may be promoting a monthly service to your customers such as website hosting. Often you will receive a monthly commission for as long as that customer is paying for the service.
For example – You may refer a customer to a hosting company and the customer signs up for a $20/month hosting plan. Each month you receive a $5 commission. Sure $5 is not much money, but imagine if you sign up 100 people during the year. Now you have $500 recursive passive income. You literally do nothing to earn this money, it just keeps coming in!
CPA(cost per action) – With CPA offers, you will get payed only once for refering customers. You can be paid if your customers buy a product, take a free trial, in some cases they only need to enter their email address into a form and you get paid.
I promote a membership product on one of my blogs, each time a customer takes a 7 day trial membership for $1.95, I get paid $30. Not a bad deal at all! The membership site converts enough “trial members” to “full members” that they can afford to pay $30 CPA.
It is always a good idea to know the product well before you start recommending it to your visitors. It needs to be relevant to your blog niche and genuinely useful to your visitors. Don’t promote crap or you will lose visitors.
Right now, I am not promoting affiliate offers on Bizboink. I am focused on building up quality content and a loyal following. If I were to start promoting products, I would promote products such as:
- Hostgator – A website hosting company. They have an affiliate program, it is recursive. I use hostgator myself and they are a fantastic service, so I would have no problem promoting them.
- Wordpress Themes – There are some awesome wordpress templates packages which I could promote. I have bought many of them, so I know which to promote.
- SEO software – I could promote keyword research tools such as Micro Niche Finder. I use this software everyday and it has helped make me alot of money. I would provide video tutorials on how it works and how to get the most from it.
That should give you some ideas on how to promote affiliate programs.
Always Remember
As a blogger you are not here to solely promote products – you’re primary focus is your readers. Focus on providing value and entertainment, if you can do that, you build readers trust and loyalty and when you occasionally promote a product – you will have your readers respect and attention.