Earn income from your website with little or no effort
What is affiliate marketing you ask? Sounds too good to be true. Gotta be a scam! If your expectations are to make thousands per month and live off your revenues, maybe it is. However, if you'd like to generate a small income that pays for your hosting say, or your web designer's monthly maintenance bill, it might be worth taking a look at. Affiliate marketing promotes products your customers might be looking for anyway - and you earn a small commission when they find it on your website.
What affiliate marketing does
Everyone is trying to sell something - a product, a service. And many are willing to give you a commission just for referring to them. Commissions vary widely, and can be quite large or very small - depending on the company offering the commission and what's typical in that industry. If you are a basket company, you need something to put in the baskets you create, right? You don't want to own a gourmet coffee company, a florist and a chocolatier - but those are the things that are used to fill your baskets. The next best approach is partner with these companies and sell their products for them for a commission. They fit well with your baskets, and can even increase your basket sales if people know where to go get these things - so you both win. And all you had to do for this is put a small banner or text link on your website letting people know they exist. Easy!
What happens next is magic! One of your basket customers decides she'd like some chocolate to put in the basket she buys from you - so she clicks on the Chocolatier and buys some gourmet chocolates for $20 - cha ching - you just earned a couple of dollars for sending her there. The promoter of the chocolate link tallies up your earnings for the month, and sends you a check (or deposits it directly into your account). It's that easy. In a few months you have enough to pay for your hosting, or those web edits you've been longing for, or a Mercedes...it all depends on what and how you are promoting the links. In the end, should you get near the top of Google and generate a lot of buying traffic you might just get that Mercedes (but no promises here!).
Another plus is a few affiliate links can make a dull, boring site a little more active and interactive. Many banners can be color coordinated or chosen by size. Your Affiliate manager such as Commission Junction, ClixGalore, or Shareasale along with our expert managers take care of everything. You just have to instruct your web developer where and the type of banners you'd like added. We can even manage your campaigns for you - taking care of ending promotions and adding new ones as they become available.
Another type of generalized advertising is Google's adsense. They aren't the only ones promoting link advertising, Miva is another provider of this service, but Google is the best known. What adsense does is put a strip of link (or video) ads on your site promoting paid links based on the content in your site. It's even easier than affiliate advertising because you don't have to choose the links - they choose them for you. You can screen out competitors to some extent, but generally they change constantly and are based on the content you already have on your site. You'll see these everywhere:
Every page view, every click (whether someone purchases anything or not) earns you a few cents - and if your site is quite popular, it can earn you more than a few pennies. If Google doesn't have anything pertinent to your content, it can run public service ads until something becomes available. So you are a good samitarian too...nothing wrong with that!
Easy, pain free, and potentially very profitable for your website. You no longer have to think of your website as a drain on your advertising budget. Instead it becomes another stream of income for your company.
Contact us about adding some Affiliate income to your site?