How to make money with an affiliate program

Illustrative impression of affiliate program

You can make money with an affiliate program by earning a reward from a business for each visitor or customer you bring by through your own website. So you generate extra traffic and/or sales for the advertiser in exchange for a monetary reward. It is not exactly a new concept, but it still proves its value these days. How do you start up an affiliate program yourself so can make money online too? We’ll tell you!

What is an affiliate program?

Determine which niche market you want your website to focus on and look for a suitable domain name. Then you can check out Amazon and eBay for interesting affiliate programs. They offer partner programs with which you can relatively easy generate a passive income through an affiliate program. And most important, make sure you have enough affinity with the topic, because a project like this does require a lot of time and motivation. Then it is more than welcome to have a sincere interest so you are able to keep on working motivated and dedicated. Examples of interesting branches could be: retail, financial, travelling, telecom and energy however it depends on the country you are in. Anyhow, it can take months before significantly making money. Luckily, as a starting affiliate you don’t have lots of costs either. Choose your niche and be patient. Do you need help in discovering a potentially interesting niche market with promising keywords? Then SE Cockpit can help you identify thousands of valuable keywords within a few seconds!

Choose an appropriate Content Management System (CMS)

As concerns the choice for a CMS, you can go for the open software of WordPress amongst others. This software is user friendly, is updated continuously and Google loves it. Not feeling at ease yet with building a website in WordPress al alone? Not a problem. You can consult one of the many online tutorials where it is demonstrated step for step how to create a website and go live. To a certain extent WordPress is completely free of charge and you can make use of templates and handy plug-ins. Tools like Mythemeshop offer unique WordPress themes and plug ins, with which you are assured of originality. Another interesting CMS choice is localBizproft, which offers very clear instructions and a lot of templates. This program is easy accessible which makes it very suitable for beginners, although the more advanced users can also work with it excellently. Your website can go live within no time! Read more about choosing a suitable CMS here.

Create high quality content

Make sure you have high quality content and keep monitoring your website with Google Analytics. If necessary, adjust your content as a result of your analyses so your texts become better than those of your competitors. Ensure you offer added value compared to other websites and don’t bother too much (yet) about your income. When thing start to run and your traffic is increasing you can sign up at various affiliate networks.

Look for appropriate affiliate players

Well known affiliate organizations are Daisycon, TradeTracker en FamilyBlend. Discover if they offer programs in your niche market and sign up. Accepted by an advertiser? Then you have to replace the regular links for affiliate links. For example, try to figure out where a hotel stay in Milan is offered the cheapest or has the best service. Then you can present this on your website and receive a reward when someone books via your website or link.

The affiliate rewards

With affiliate marketing the ‘no cure, no pay’ principle is often at play. That means: no visitor, sale or lead? Then no reward. There roughly are 4 types of affiliate rewards:
• Cost per sale (CPS)
• Cost per lead (CPL)
• Cost per mille (CPM)
• Cost Per Click (CPC)

What we think about affiliate programs

Do you want to make money with your website via an affiliate program? Then first focus on the product you want to offer and try to find a niche that offers chances. Proper preliminary research is key here. Also, dive into the power of your potential competitors. Tools like SE Cockpit offer interesting functionalities to perform competition analyses. Find out what kind of rewards are common in your product category to be sure you can earn something. Affiliate marketing is a revenue model that has stood the test of time and nowadays can still be profitable. Be aware however, that competition often is well represented and it can take a while before you make actually make money. Can you succeed in being patient and investing enough of your time? Then affiliate marketing might become very interesting for you in the long run!

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