Creating an Income Stream with Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs (also called Referral Programs orPartnership Programs) are essentially commission-based salesschemes. You recommend a site to your users and pick up apercentage of any sales those users generate. You benefitfrom the commission and the site benefits from sales itwouldn't otherwise have made. If you've ever gone to awebsite and seen links to Amazon, those were affiliatelinks.

You can run an affiliate program from a site you've alreadyset up, or create a site specially to promote a product orservice. As long as it brings in more cash than you spend onbuilding it and buying traffic, you're laughing.

Affiliate ads work two ways: you can join them to makemoney, or you can run one to attract users.

Joining An Affiliate Program

As with any marketing venture, you need to be careful in theselection of an affiliate program. The benefit of anaffiliate program is that it gives you another way to makemoney from your users. Instead of selling them a productyourself, you send them to a partner and take a cut.

On the downside though, your affiliate ads will take theplace of a different ad that you could have put in that samespot. You have to make sure that each advertising positionon your site is bringing in the maximum revenue possible. Ifyou're not getting the most from your site, you're tossingmoney away.

The key to success is to choose the right program, rightfrom the beginning.

Now, a lot of commercial sites run affiliate programs.That's because they know that they only have to pay acommission if a sale is actually made; it's a proven way togenerate revenue without risk. What that means for you isthat when it comes to choosing an affiliate program, you'regoing to have a huge range to choose from. What it all boilsdown to though is product and price.

While it might be tempting to go for the program that paysthe highest commissions, the program won't pay you a pennyif your users won't go there or won't buy once they getthere. You have to be certain that the service you'repromoting is of genuine interest to the kind of users youbuy, whether you're buying them from search engines oranywhere else.

Sure, you can work backwards: You find a high-payingaffiliate program and create a small site to send users toit, but do you know where to buy users for a program likethat? You're going to have to research the field, check outthe most popular sites, and negotiate banner campaigns andlink exchanges.

That's fine if you want to invest the time and the effort.But it's much easier to find an affiliate program operatingin a field you're familiar with, and use that program toearn extra cash.

For example, suppose you had set up a dating site. You mightmake bit of money selling subscriptions, but you might makeeven more by joining Match.com's affiliate program andselling them your users. Unless you're planning to be theInternet's biggest dating site, you're not going to be ableto compete directly and beat them, but you can join them-andearn money.

Or rather than sell your users directly to a 'competitor',you can look for services that complement your own. Visitorsto your dating site, for example, might be interested inbuying flowers, books on relationships or tickets on singlescruises. Instead of selling just one product-membershipsubscriptions-you'd be selling a whole range of differentgoods to the same people, and increasing the sources of yourincome.

Here are some tips to selecting an affiliate program that islucrative and right for you:

* Don't accept less than 25% commission. You can find

affiliate programs with great payment structures and high

percentages of the purchase price in just about every

field.

* Look for comprehensive statistics pages that list the

number of click-throughs, sales and earnings so you can

see

how you're doing. The information should be broken down

by month.

* Look for programs that offer a wide variety of

promotional tools to put on your Web page, including text

links, banners and graphics.

* Find out how often you will be paid and make sure that

the payment schedule meets your expectations. Some

programs pay

monthly, others quarterly; which is best for you?

* Look for examples of marketing methods that successful

affiliates are using to get the best results.

* Make sure that top level support is given. If they can't

answer your questions promptly and intelligently, you

don't want to work with them.

Affiliate programs offer a viable solution to competingagainst larger competitors and still make money. As thesaying goes, if you can't beat them, joint them!Until next time...

Best Regards,

Stephen Russell

Stephen Russell hails from Georgia, plays in an up and coming rock band, and creates liveable income streams using internet marketing.