Get More Money From Your Website – Affiliate Programs

Are you promoting any affiliate products or programs on your website? If not, read on to find out how you can get more money from your website while helping your visitors by promoting the right affiliate products and programs.

What are affiliate programs? Affiliate programs allow you to earn a percentage or set amount on sales of a product or service that you refer a new customer to. Thousands of businesses offer affiliate programs. You get to decide what products or services you’d like to promote.

How to Choose an Affiliate Program

There are 3 important things to consider when choosing which affiliate programs to join.

1) Do you truly recommend the product and company? Never promote or endorse a product you aren’t confident is helpful and valuable. Never promote a product for a company that you aren’t sure is ethical or honest. If it’s an ebook, buy a copy before you become an affiliate—and read it! Once you’ve read or used a product or service and can say it’s great, it’s much easier to promote effectively and authentically.

2) Is it worth your time and effort to promote? How much is the commission? It’s probably not worth it to promote a product with a very low commission rate. If you’d only make pennies… you might want to keep looking. Find a product or service that will be worth your time.

3) Will it sell? If your market is designing websites for restaurants, there’s probably no good reason for you to promote a product about house breaking your puppy dog. But you might do well with products about marketing for food service companies, or even interior decorating if you can tie it into what your clientele is looking for. What problems or questions do your clients have? Find a product that offers the solution, see if it really works. If it does, sign up as an affiliate.

If the answer to all three of these questions is “Yes,” then go for it! If the answer to any one of the three is “No,” then keep looking until you find the programs when you can answer “Yes” to. Otherwise you’re either compromising your integrity or wasting your time. And you don’t want to do either of those.

What can you promote as an affiliate?  There are lots of options!

• Think about the products or services you’re already promote to your customers and see if those companies offer an affiliate program.
• Check with the colleagues you’ve worked with and who you know provide high quality products or services.
• Sign up with Amazon or Barnes & Noble and create a “recommended reading” list of books.

Any products that your clients could benefit from are an opportunity for you to create a win-win situation by helping them find a good, reliable company to provide a service they need while building a stream of income for you as well.

Where can you promote these products and programs?

Here are several ways you can promote affiliate products and programs without filling your website with spammy or flashy huge ads.

• Create a “Recommended Resources” page and add links and reviews of products/services there.
• Add a little note at the bottom of an article or blog post to an affiliate product/service that provides a solution related to the article or blog post.
• If you run tasteful banner ads on your site, add your own ads for the affiliate products/services you promote.
• Add a section in your ezine/newsletter for ads and include the ones for the affiliate products/services you promote.

Note: Be sure to always disclose when any link to a product or service you promote is an affiliate link.