So here we are, you have just joined an affiliate program which by the way is a brilliant idea. For the owner of the product, an affiliate program is a way of recruiting an army of salespeople to promote their product, without having to pay them a dime unless they generate a sale.
Check out these intensive online marketing google affiliate network programs
For the affiliate, they’re a great way of earning extra cash from an existing, high-traffic website with virtually zero additional effort.
Only problem is, most affiliates don’t HAVE an existing, high-traffic website and they’re suckered into thinking that it’s a simple matter of signing up for an affiliate program and “driving traffic” to the product owner’s site using a uniquely-coded URL. Well, it is And it isn’t that simple.
If you don’t already have your own high-traffic website, you have to think about how you’re going to drive traffic to the product owner’s site in the hope of generating a sale?
there are a few ways this can be done, but it makes no difference which option you choose, because there is a cost involved, its either going to cost you time or money.
First off lets look at the cost of paying for your advertising and traffic, you may be asking yourself the How much? question already. Estimates vary but, roughly, only 2 – 4% of people who see your ad will actually click on your link. Of that 2 – 4%, only 1% or so of THEM will go on to buy.
In addition, it takes, on average, 7 to 8 exposures of your ad before people will click on it. AND to achieve these numbers its in your best interest if your audience is targeted. This is because affiliate program advertising is purely a numbers game if you want to succeed..
So what does all this mean to you, even if your an advertiser without a website? The best place to start is where a LOT of people are going to see your ad. But not just ANY people. People interested in the product you’re wanting to sell -” in other words your target market”. So this cuts out the free classifieds and FFAs.And it means you’re going to have to spend money on advertising.
Where do you go to advertise then? The most effective form of advertising is in ezines. Take mine, for example. At the time of writing, my subscriber database is around 14,000.
Each week I run an ad for my own opportunity (in addition to running ads from other paying advertisers). I generally get about 500 click-throughs over the course of the 2 or 3 days following publication. That’s a click-through rate of about 3.6%, which is in line with the average.
If you were to pay to advertise in my ezine, it would cost you $70 for a single classified based on my $5 CPM ($5 per every 1,000 subscribers) pricing formula. This is not an uncommon formula for pricing ezine advertising. Therefore your paying around 14 cents per click. That’s not bad.
Your other option is to spend time rather than money. An obvious choice considering what I’ve just said, is to start your OWN ezine.
By building your own list and over time you will have a large subscriber database to put your ad in front of too … and it won’t cost you a dime. But this takes time and it takes work. It’s taken me two and a half years to build a list of 14,000 subscribers. And it takes a few hours to put together the ezine itself including writing the feature article. Every week, week in, week out though it is worth it.
And once you’re publishing your own ezine, it’s a simple enough matter to distribute of the owner of the product you’re selling) which is effectively free advertising for you. Not all publishers accept article submissions though, so be sure to find out whether they do before submitting your articles to them.
think about this for a moment, If you’re doing all this work anyway, doesn’t it make sense fees can be pretty cheap if you know where to go).
Once does so much of the work for you. Generate a few hundred unique visitors a day and you can be getting the same click-through rate to your affiliate site *for nothing* that you were paying someone else 14 cents a click for. EVERY SINGLE DAY. 24/7/365.
So, this is the truth about affiliate programs. They’re great if you’re the product owner and they’re great if you can link to your affiliate site from your own high-traffic site. But if you don’t have your own site, you’re going to have to buy traffic to your affiliate site – either with money, time or both. How many sales are you going to have to generate to earn enough commission to more than cover your time and costs and leave you with a profit?
Bottom line? Setting out to make money with affiliate programs before you have your own site in place is putting the cart before the horse. Yes, you want to make money and you want to do it quickly.
But it just doesn’t work that way. Not with affiliate programs, anyway. So adjust your expectations and do first steps first. It will be slow going at the start. It will take you weeks to create a worthwhile site and then MONTHS to generate the kind of traffic you need. But if you take a long-term approach to your business and take the time now to lay the proper foundation, you’ll reap the dividends for years to come.
Check out this program network local
Find realistic tips to grant proposal examples – your personal guide.