Affiliate marketing puts all the risk to the publishers and nothing to the advertisers. Bloggers will loose thousands of their impressions or a lot of ad spaces from which they could make some from CPM or CPC networks if they do not make any sales. In other side the advertiser will not loose anything because they only have to pay for the sales.
So many of the people just signs up for affiliate networks, grab a banner and place it on the header of the site. Then they just want to see making sales. When the sales does not come they call the affiliate market fake. But nothing works just like that. They should be shown in such a way the visitors sees the profit on the banner for them rather than your commission from that banners. There are various things to be taken care for that. Here are some.
1. Choose Right Affiliate Program
Some affiliate program pays more and some pays little. Do not only go after money. Try to stick with the affiliate program which relates to the niche of your website. It doesn’t make any sense if you sell sun glasses from a webmaster related website. Nobody will buy it.
2. The Content Is the King
This is not a rocket science I’m telling you here. Everybody says it and its obvious. Definitely nobody will buy anything from a site which does not have any good information or resources for them and nobody will come to your site just to see the affiliate banners. Your should first have good contents in your website to get profit from affiliate marketing as well as all other marketing methods.
3. Write Reviews
I don’t mean the way Johnchow earns from reviewme reviews. There are several new online stores upcoming each days which has affiliate programms. You can pick any of them and write reviews of them. Say some good things about them, write the readers that why they might need the product and embed your affiliate code. Such affiliate links make more sales than a long header banner.
4. Hide Affiliate Links
Webmasters doesn’t like affiliate links. Not only the webmasters, anyone who have little technical knowledge does not like to buy products he they see the affiliate links directly. Affiliate links can be hide and yet the traffics be driven to the site in several ways. You can use url shortening services like tinyurl. And the better way is using php codes to make the link look like the link of the same site. Here is an example:
Create a file called dkhanal.php and with following code
<?
header(”Location:http://www.sitename.com/?ref=dkhanal”);
?>
Now, dkhanal.php redirects the visitor to sitename.com/?ref=dkhanal.
There are a lot of things which should be taken care of. Just make sure, you’re not only using bunch of affiliate banners or links. You should have something on your website so that the visitors can trust you so buy from your website.
And I shouldn’t write about promotion of the website. Promotion is must have thing for any kind of website. Its not easy, you might not see the result very soon, but if you work hard and take care of these things, you’ll see the good result with in few months if not weeks.
