How to Make Money Online without Breaking a Sweat
I’ll bet you have read a lot of headlines that sound like the one above, or make claims like this one. You might have spent quite a bit of time reading articles with title like this one. When you finished, you may have thought you wasted your time… who in the world would ever buy THAT… or whatever that! IT WILL RUIN MY BRAND!
If you to it right, it can enhance your image. I’m going to give you some tips that will give you an opportunity to monetize your website or blog, while preserving your brand. One of the best and easiest ways to monetize your online properties is to join some affiliate programs and advertise them on your site.
Affiliate programs are the answer
Why affiliate programs? Simple. Affiliate programs allow you to sell products and services without having to build or create them yourself. All the work of writing an eBook, or recording an audio track, or programming a software product is taken care of by someone else. But that’s not all the advantages. You don’t have to create any marketing materials - those are all created for you by the person who builds the product and is running the affiliate program.
Another great benefit is that you really don’t have to keep track of money or finances. Most of the better affiliate programs will provide the members affiliate management tools that are based on one of the leading affiliate software programs. These programs will help you optimize your marketing efforts so that you get the most out of the affiliate program.
Five tips for choosing affiliate offers to promote
- Look good earnings potential - You want to make sure that if one of the people you refer to an affiliate offer buys, that you will make some decent money. One school of thought is that you should find affiliate programs that offer high percentage payouts. My preference is to look for opportunities where you can make a large commission from a sale. This affiliate program for promoting 30/60/90 day sales plan templates gives you the opportunity to earn almost $50 per sale.
- Choose programs your readers will like - It is critical that you choose affiliate programs and offers that your audience will appreciate and be interested in. It wouldn’t be very effective to choose to promote affiliate programs and products for chocolate desserts on a site that is dedicated to losing weight. However, if you have a website that helps people find careers is sales, it would be great to promote something like How to Get Into Medical Sales.
- Look for affiliate programs powered by software - When you sign up for an affiliate program it will quickly become obvious if the owner of the program is serious about helping affiliate members be successful. If you are automatically redirected to a page for affiliate marketing software program, they are probably serious about their affiliate program. If they don’t have a managed affiliate program, it should give you pause. Their are several top name brands like iDev Affiliate, LinkShare, and JROX JAM. My favorite is JROX JAM, which you can get for free here: http://websitesthatdrivesales.com/recommends/free-affiliate-management-software.htm
- Make sure the website is NOT anonymous - What I mean is, make sure that there are real people standing behind the website, people with good reputations, who take customer service seriously. Website owners who let you know who they are, give you contact information with phone numbers aren’t very likely to be fly-by-night. They are more likely to be legitimate business people. If you can find a picture, bio, and phone number of the website owner, chances are they can be trusted. You will also be able to search the Internet to find any complaints about their program. Peggy McKee, the Medical Sales Recruiter, is one of the country’s leading sales recruiters - she proudly announces her site ownership on the about pages like this one: http://30-60-90-day-sales-plan.com/about/
- Choose affiliate programs that have support programs - If you are choosing a piece of software to buy, you probably wouldn’t purchase it if there was not support mechanism in place. You should use the similar criteria when evaluating affiliate websites. If the affiliate program owner doesn’t put support systems in place - something like a ticket system or help desk software - then they probably won’t care about any problems that you might encounter marketing their product. If they do, then you can be rest assured that they are trying to delight their customers. If they AREN’T working to keep customers happy, their poor service will reflect poorly on you, and tarnish your reputation.
Here are a couple of affiliate programs that I recommend if your site’s visitors would be interested in these subjects. One is an affiliate program for a sales interview tool that targets sales professionals - you can check it out here: http://30-60-90-day-sales-plan.com/affiliate-program-details/. The other is a program that has a broader appeal - it targets people who own businesses that either have no web presence or under performing websites; you can get all the information for it here: http://websitesthatdrivesales.com/blog/home/affiliate-program/
