Making Money With Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are a system where a merchant or advertiser pays other sites a commission for sending visitors to their site. Commissions may be calculated on the basis of the amount of sales, leads (usually some kind of free sign up like a customer giving his details, but in some cases may be more demanding like applying for a credit card, etc.) or for each person who click-thrus from your site to the advertiser.

The big advantage of affiliate programs is that you do not to deal with order processing or customer service yourself. You simply build a web site and drive traffic to it.

The obvious disadvantage is that you make less profit per customer than if you did deal with customer service. Further you will most likely need quite a lot of visitors to your web site(s) to make a significant income (it is best to build many web sites over a period of time as it each one should ideally operate on “auto-pilot”).

A key element of success in affiliate programs is the programs you participate in should tie in with the theme of your site. This way visitors will be more likely to respond to the ads. Some people even find the affiliate programs first before creating their site.

There are both advantages and disadvantages to affiliate programs:

The advantages include:

- No customer service.

- No potential limit on your income.

The disadvantages include:

- You need to be good at attracting (lots of) visitors to your site(s)

- You need to find affiliate programs that fit in with and work on your site (potentially time consuming)

- You generally earn less money than if supplying the product/service yourself (example: a percentage commission on the first sale to a customer only).

By S. Tanna. First published at http://www.marketingapprentice.com/start/affiliateprograms.htm