Affiliate Programs

Welcome to our mini website about affiliate programs. This website is designed for the webmaster who is new to affiliate programs and is thinking about joining some programs in order to make some money from his or her site. Here you will find information about the affiliate programs which are available today. Here we also provide an Affiliate Programs Book Store, which provides books about affiliate programs and search engine optimization. Finally, we also provide a chat room about affiliate programs and related topics.

Affiliate programs only work for a publisher if consistent large volumes of traffic, and the right traffic, comes to his or her site. Therefore, for affiliate programs to work, you need to understand search engine optimization. And this is why we have included some books about SEO in our book store. A discussion about SEO is outside the purview of this site, but it is suffice to say that you need to know it if you want to be successful in terms of marketing your website. That being said, lets discuss affiliate programs.

What is an affiliate program? An affiliate program is where you run ads for a commercial website and when your visitors clicks these ads, which take the visitor to the commercial site, you can potentially make money for running the ads. I say potentially make money because whether you make money is dependent upon the type of ad you have running.

If only a click is required, you will make money from the click. If further action is required, such as buying a product or service, then you will make money from your visitor taking that action. It all depends on the type of advertising the commercial website wants to run. The probability of making money is greater for a click compared to some action that needs to be taken by the visitor. But if action is taken by the visitor, the publisher usually makes more money from the action, and less for the click. In general you will see a higher probability and less money to the publisher for a click, and lower probability but more money to the publisher for an action.

An ad that just requires the visitor to click to make money is called a “pay per click” ad. An ad that requires some sort of action by the visitor, such as a purchase, filling out a form, or requesting information or the like, is called a referral ad. These are basically the two types of ads that exist. Companies that provide affiliate programs to publishers allow you to run their ads on your site, and when you drive visitors to their site, you as a publisher will make money. The type of ads that the company runs on your site depends on the type of affiliate program they have running. The question arises, what are the best/most profitable affiliate programs to join, and secondly is it worth your time and energy to get involved in affiliate programs.

Lets answer the second question first. Yes, it is absolutely worth your time and effort to join an affiliate program. There are publishers who are making a very good income from running affiliate program ads. The amount of money you make is really dependent on the amount of effort you want to put into the program. There are basically four sets of skills needed to make money from affiliate programs. These are as follows:

1) Webmastering and therefore web programming skills such as HTML, CSS, and other as needed programming skills. To be a webmaster, the bare minimum is HTML and CSS.

2) Related to the webmastering skill is the writing skill. You need to be able to enjoy writing and be the type of person who is prolific and have the ability to write large amounts of interesting content.

3) You also need to know Search Engine Optimization, which is needed in order to rank your sites well in the search engines.

4) Finally, you need to have an understanding of how to market your websites, which of course is related to skill set number three. The point I am making here is that there are other ways to have people view your sites besides search engines. But you need to have your sites ranked well in the search engines, since this is where most of your traffic will be coming from.

You can make a good income through affiliate programs in one of three ways.

1) Have one or just a few large sites running where you are running affiliate ads.

2) Have many small/mini sites running where you are running affiliate ads.

3) Have a combination of one or two large sites running concomitantly while running many smaller sites.

The key is to get your sites up and running as soon as possible. But of course this could take some time, depending on the number and size of sites that you want to run. This is important because search engines today look favorably on sites that have been up and running for a longer time compared to new sites.

Building sites is really like building a foundation, the greater the number of total pages that you can put affiliate ads on, the greater the foundation. It is extremely important to remember that you should not build a site or page just to run affiliate ads. You should build websites because you want to provide a benefit to your visitor. This benefit can be information about a product, service, and any information that you have organized in such a way that can be a benefit to your visitor.

After you build your sites you can then move into the second phase and that is the marketing of your sites. This is where a knowledge of search engine optimization is important. If you do not rank well in the search engines, all the work you put into building your foundation of sites would be futile. There is enormous amounts of information online about search engine optimization. Just make sure you look at the source of that information and develop an understanding as to what the consensus is.

There are some myths floating around the Internet in terms of search engine optimization. You need to work your way around the myths and determine what the consensus is among the established experts. Before studying in this area you should make sure you know who the experts are. But also remember, marketing of a website is not just search engine optimization. There is copious amounts of information about how you can market your sites online.

So as you can see, in order to make money from affiliate programs, there is more involved then just throwing up some ads on a page and hope for the best.

Lets now look at the second question in terms of the premise of this article, that is, which affiliate programs are the best or more specifically, the most profitable. There are many affiliate programs available. If you are a webmaster and you are new to affiliate programs, you probably should start by using the Google Adsense Program.

As far as contextual advertising, Google is the powerhouse. To get involved in the Google Adsense Program, you simply need to have your first website approved. Once your first site is approved, you can then place their code on your other sites, as long as you abide by the Google Guidelines for Webmasters. Google makes it very easy for webmasters to run ads through their system. All you need to do is copy and paste the code. Google has been the king of contextual advertising, but they now also have a very good referral ad program (where the ads are non-contextual). Why is Google worth billions, it is from advertising, and advertisers are attracted to Google.

How much can a webmaster/publisher expect to make from the Google Adsense Program. In terms of contextual advertising, Google does not publish what the percentage a publisher makes from a click. But Google does publish Quarterly Reports. Data from these reports indicates that for 2007, Google paid 21.5% to it’s publishers. This is actually considered pretty good. But even more important is the fact that Google attracts more advertisers compared to other programs, and therefore more advertisers that want to run ads on your pages. This means a greater diversity of advertisers and no matter what content you are running on your site, it is highly likely that there will be advertisers who want to run ads on your page.

Of course there are many other affiliate programs available, and some of these programs pay a much higher commission to publishers. The draw back to the higher paying commission affiliate programs is that they are usually some what restricted in the content of ads that they offer. But if your content matches what they offer, you would be wise to pursue these as well. Just remember to not create a conflict by running Google contextual ads with other contextual advertising. This goes against Google’s Guidelines for Webmasters. Other then Google, what are some other top affiliate programs. The following is a listing of some of the most profitable affiliate programs:

Amazon Associates
Chitika Affiliate Program
Commission Junction
ClickBank
LinkConnector
Site Build It
Niche Content Products With Private Label Rights
How To Create Your Own Products In A FLASH
33 Days to Online Profits
Kontera.com
PayDotCom.com
clixGalore.com

So there you have it. The above affiliates are some of the highest paying in terms of commission that you can find any where. Some of these act as an interface between publishers and advertisers. Those that act as an interface have thousands of merchants to select from, and therefore you should have no problem placing advertising on your site or sites which closely matches your content. Targeted advertising is the way to go if you want to maximize your conversion rate.

We have discussed what is needed in terms of skill sets in order to make good money from affiliate programs. We have also looked at some very profitable affiliate programs. Combining the proper skill sets with the most profitable affiliate programs, along with persistence and hard work, can result in success.

The following book is a must read for any affiliate who wants to make a good income.

Read the amazing true story of how one woman, with no previous business experience, earned $436,797+ in 2002 and now earns MUCH MORE than that … just by selling other people’s stuff online!

In her down-to-earth, sincere and often humorous style, Rosalind Gardner guides you through the entire process of building an affiliate marketing business on the ‘Net.

Frequently revised and updated to reflect industry changes, the Super Affiliate Handbook now consists of 236 pages and 124 screenshots that will show you step-by-step how to become a Super Affiliate. You’ll learn how to pick the best affiliate programs, negotiate a commission raise and save time, money and effort on everything from affiliate software to web hosting.

To learn exactly how she does it, Click Here.