Read Cody Moya’s article titled “What You Need to Know to Make Your Affiliate Program a Success”.


Cody Moya’s article is reprinted here.

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What You Need to Know to Make Your Affiliate Program a Success

Affiliate programs are a great idea for both merchants and affiliates. The idea behind affiliate programs is deceptively simple. Merchants recruit an army of virtual salespeople, who use their web site savvy and marketing skills to promote the great products the merchant has to offer. The affiliate then takes a cut, or “finder’s fee” or every sale made through that affiliate link. The merchant wins, because no money is exchanged until the sale is made. The affiliate wins, because he or she uses an existing web site to boost his or her income. Everyone is happy and everything is great.

Of course, in the real world, affiliate programs are rarely that simple or that straightforward. For one thing, most affiliates do not have an preexisting high traffic web site with which to make those commission checks roll in.

There are, of course, some ways to drive traffic to your own web site, and in turn, to that of your paying affiliates. Unfortunately, most of those methods will cost you, in terms of time, money or both.

For one thing, every affiliate will need to spend money on advertising. Having a perfectly designed affiliate program web site will do you no good if no one can find it. Most estimates put the number of people who actually respond to an internet ad at between 2% and 4%. Of the 2%-4% of people who actually click the ads, only 1% or so of them will actually go on to buy a product. It is easy to see how important it is to not only target your advertising, but to expose as many people as possible to your affiliate marketing message.

When designing your web site with this in mind, it is important to remember that you will want to advertise where as many people as possible see your ad. In addition, the people who see your ad should fit the demographic profile of the people most likely to actually buy the products offered by your affiliate partners. Unfortunately, these advertising needs leave out most methods of free advertising, such as free classified ads and the like. That means that you will need to spend actual dollars to buy advertising.

Most affiliates have found that one of the best and most cost effective places to advertise is in ezines. It is important to choose an ezine with a strong subscriber base, preferably one that is distributed to tens of thousands of people who have expressed interest in your area of expertise.

Ezine advertising is a proven method of generating traffic to your affiliate program, and capturing subscribers for your opt-in list. As your list of subscribers grows, you will have a ready source to provide marketing about your various affiliates and their products.

Of course, if you have more money than time, you can start your very own ezine. Once you have begun publishing your own ezine, you will be able to distribute the articles you create (or the ones you buy through sites like http://www.YourOwnArticles.com) through publishing services. The key is to add your own resource box to the articles you distribute. This resource box will contain the URL of your squeeze page to capture email addresses, a brief blurb about you and your program, and your name. Getting your name and web site address in front of as many targeted prospects as possible is one of the best and most time tested methods of creating a solid subscriber base.

The bottom line on affiliate programs is that they are great for both merchants and web site owners, but only if the web site is able to generate sufficient traffic. Buying such traffic, or generating your own, is not difficult, but it is important to do it the right way. Trying to make lots of money through an affiliate program before you have established your own high traffic web site will result only in failure. Boosting your web site traffic before setting up your affiliate program is vital to both your success and the success of your affiliates.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Cody Moya writes about “Affiliate Program Creation And Management” in his Free Courses on Internet Marketing. You can sign up for his free Courses and get additional information at his website: http://FreeInternetMarketingCourses.com

*IMNewswatch would like to thank Cody Moya for granting permission to reprint this article.

 

 

 

 

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