A way to make money online
Have you ever heard of affiliate programs? Affiliate programs
pay people to sell products and services for a business in
return for commissions and payment. You, as an affiliate, simply
promote the affiliate link or advertisement banner that is
provided and when people click it and make a purchase or simply
just click on it, depending on the terms of the program, you get
paid.
The hard part with making money with affiliate programs is
getting people to the affiliate products and ads that you as an
affiliate are promoting. This article will take a look at this
difficulty and how it may be overcome. First, a little bit more
about affiliate programs.
An affiliate program can be run by an individual business or it
can be run by an affiliate or ad network, which are companies
that runs affiliate programs for many different businesses. Once
you sign up as an affiliate with the individual business or
network, you will be given an account and a unique code that
represents your affiliate link or banner that you will promote.
The code tracks your impressions, clicks and sales.
An example of a popular affiliate network is Commission Junction. They offer
cost per action programs in the form of pay per sale and pay per
lead affiliate programs that pay you when someone clicks on your
affiliate link and makes a purchase (pay per sale) or fills out
a form or does some other action (pay per lead). These programs
usually pay you a fixed price per sale or a percentage of the
total sales price.
An example of a popular ad network is Adsense, run by the
search engine Google. This program pays you per click, with no
need for a sale or other action to occur. When someone that is
interested in an advertisement shown on your banner clicks on
it, you get paid.
These are both well known and respected affiliate/ad networks
with popular programs. If you want to make money with them, you
need to make sales or show ads. You can facillitate this by
learning how to make and publish a website. You actually need a
website in order to join Adsense, and many affiliate networks
require that you have a website as well in order to participate
in their programs.
The actual technical difficulties with learning how to make a
website are not that hard to overcome. You can learn html, the
language of websites, and you can buy and use website templates,
which make creating a website easier. You can buy an html editor
like FrontPage to create your site. You can even publish your
website using it.
The hard part with creating a website is coming up with content
for it. First you will need to decide a topic. People choose
topics for websites using different criteria. Some people create
sites with topics that represents a well paying keyword, in
terms of the affiliate products that could be promoted on it
with their respective high commissions or the ads that could be
shown on it. These are competitive areas. Others prefer creating
sites with content built around niche keywords that have little
competition and that may rank easier in the search engines. Some
people create sites about subjects they are passionate about,
creating large sites that tend to delve in many related topics
as the site grows. There are many approaches.
If this is your first site, you may want to consider making a
site about something you are familiar with and are very
interested in and passionate about. This way you can focus on
learning the skills necessary to make and publish a website.
A site requires content. Content is the meat of a site. It is
what the site is about. A good site will contain interesting and
useful content. People create content for their websites in
different ways. Some people pay others such as professional
writers to write content for their sites. Others prefer to
research the topics themselves, using books and search engines
to find related information which they then put into their own
words. Relevant affiliate links, the code you get from the
affiliate and ad networks, can then be added to this content on
the pages of the website.
Good content is important for success with promoting affiliate
programs on a website. This is because a site with useful
content tends to develop traffic through one way links and
through bookmarks as people find the site and bookmark it. One
way links are powerful increasers of a sites search engine rank.
They occur when other websites link to yours, using your site as
a reference for information on their site. This can create a lot
of traffic. This traffic are the people who will be exposed to
your affiliate programs through your content. They may then
click on your affiliate links and make a purchase or click on an
ad that interests them. And that's when you make money.