What Can An Affiliate Program Do For You?

By Jim Pretin

If you have recently started an online business, you are no doubt facing the difficult task of trying to promote your website without sufficient capital to do much advertising. It is a catch-22; you need to spend a lot of money on advertising to launch an internet business so that you can make some money, but you need to make some money so that you actually have some dollars to spend on advertising.

To get money for advertising, you could take on a business partner who is willing to fund the company to get your marketing campaign going, or perhaps you could turn to venture capital to get started. However, unless you already have a lot of solid business contacts, raising money for an internet startup can be almost impossible.

So, what should you do? The solution to all your marketing problems might be an affiliate program. With an affiliate program, anyone who has a website can post an advertisement for your business on their website in the form of a banner or a text link. If someone clicks on that banner or text link and subsequently buys your product or service, you have to pay that affiliate a commission on the sale.

The reason why this is such an excellent marketing strategy is because an affiliate program costs you nothing. You do not have to pay to place your affiliate banner or text link on other websites because you are offering those other website owners a commission on every referral they make, but only if that referral produces a sale.

Not only does having an affiliate program give you an opportunity to make a tremendous amount of sales without spending money on advertising, but it also increases the number of inbound links to your website. The more links to your site, the higher your search engine ranking will be. So, a surge in your link popularity and an additional increase in sales resulting from an improved search engine ranking is a fabulous byproduct of having a popular affiliate program.

Now, you need to learn how to create an affiliate program and how to promote it. To create an affiliate program, you will either need to hire a web designer or programmer who has experience creating these sorts of programs, because they are not easy to set up. The job requires a lot of backend programming work, database creation, and payment tracking so that the referrals and sales that each affiliate produces can be tracked with a special code that is signed to each individual affiliate.

To promote your program, you will need to post ads for it on as many online affiliate directories as you can find. Some of these directories will charge you a small annual fee to be listed, others will allow you to list your program for free. There are literally hundreds or even thousands of different online directories where you can add your listing. The more listings you can create, the more affiliates you can potentially acquire.

I hope this information helps you get your online business off to a good start. The affiliates you recruit into your program are almost like your employees. They are doing your advertising work for you, and it does not cost you anything unless they make a sale. All those websites will be representing you, sort of like a commissioned salesperson. Just make sure you hire a competent web designer to do the programming work, because if there are any difficulties with tracking sales to your individual affiliates, you will have a huge mess on your hands.

Article Source: http://www.articlehighlight.com

Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make an HTML form

Successful Affiliate Marketing Secrets

By Johanna Piittala

There are hundreds of thousands of affiliate programs out there, all of which claim to be the best. Many of them try to give you the impression that all you have to do is use their banners and links then wait for the money to start rolling in. Although this can be the case, this type of scenario normally applies to large sites with a lot of web traffic.

Choosing banners
With most affiliate programs, you are offered a variety of banners to plan on your website, as very few of them will be effective. The problems with most banners are their size. If you choose a banner that is high in size, it will take a long time to implement and use. Therefore, it's recommended that you use banners no more than 15kb in size.

When you select any types of graphical advertising, you should try and keep the theme of your website in mind. Even though graphical ads are meant to stand out and catch people's eye, they shouldn't be to the point where everything else on the page is completely ignored.

Pop ups and unders
A lot of companies will now give their affiliates the chance of using pop up or pop under ads. In most opinions, pop ups aren't the way to go. They can easily annoy visitors and are normally closed before they even have the chance to load. You should instead go for pop unders and those types that only display once per visit.

Text link ads
Once of the most successful means of advertisting is text link ads. They are easy on bandwidth, don't use a lot of space, and they easily be implemented into most types of page layouts. Good text links offer some information as to why your visitor should investigate your offers.

Email advertising
The direct promotion via email has really taken off over the last several years, although it has brought tons of spam with it. If you plan to use email as a method of advertising your products, you should stand behind what you sell and make yourself available to answer any questions.

Patience
If you feel confident that your site can generate great sales for certain company's, you should contact them to negotiate an arrangement. If they don't seem to enthused to begin with, you should remain patient as companies are approaced every day with affiliates looking to make better deals.

The reality remains that most affiliates can't deliver what they promise, and companies are aware of this.

You should always keep in mind that most forms of advertising will take time. No matter what methods you plan to use, give it some time before you make any type of decision. Although something may not happen overnight - it very well could in a few days or weeks.

Article Source: http://www.articlehighlight.com

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What Are The Biggest Mistakes Affiliates Will Make?

By Jerry Leung

People always think that the notion of affiliate marketing is too good to be true. It is difficult for these people to understand why affiliates can work at home and earn much more than they can. And the affiliates do not need to have to care about the inventory and logistic issues. As a result, many people will join this business. However, they may find it frustrated since it is not as easy as what they originally thought. In fact, you cannot make money once you join the affiliate programs. You have to work on your websites and it will take some time for you to really make money.

It will take time for your website to build up the trust from the customers. The customers will only click the links and purchase if they trust your website. And you have to be patient in this matter. You may have heard of affiliate marketers who can make a five figure income but you may not know they have worked for years in order to make that much money. There is certainly no magic and overnight success in this business. You have to update your website from time to time and stick to the programs you have joined. You work on one program on day one and jump to another one on day two. You will not be able to make money if you do this.

Besides, you should not subscribe to too many programs at once. Of course you would like to maximize you profit but as discussed in the above, you will need to take some time to build up your website. No one can manage to design and work on 10 websites at a time. As a result, you should only subscribe to one to two programs at a time. In this way you can focus on these programs and work on your affiliate websites.

Another big mistake affiliate will make, especially for new marketers, is that they would like to make a lot of money in a very short time. This is quite impossible since you are new to the business and you need to learn. They do not realize that it will take time to build up both the website and trust from the customers. Again, there is no overnight success in this business. Affiliate marketers need to work steadily and focus on only a few websites at a time.

In a nutshell, the most important thing is to be patient and to focus. If you can bear these in mind, you are already very close to success.

Article Source: http://www.articlehighlight.com

Jerry Leung is an author. You can learn to Make Money Online Now in his website. He also runs a blog concerning targeted opt-in email marketing safelist. You can also find Tools for Website Analysis from his website.