Everyone is talking about them. Almost everyone is a member of at least a few of them. Affiliate programs are hot. You can usually sign up for free and be selling products within 5 minutes. The web sites, sales letters, and order shipping are all done for you. All you have to do is promote.
But…Is anyone making money from these programs except for the affiliate program owner?
It is a surprising statistic when you find out that only around 10% to 20% of affiliate members do enough to ever get a check. Then, only a small percentage of those go on to earn really good incomes from affiliate programs.
It isn’t the affiliate program either. Although some affiliate programs have pitifully small payouts (5% to 10%) and limit their members that way, the real problem comes with the fact that affiliates have no idea how to sell from their affiliate sites. The affiliate owners usually don’t have any idea how to help them either.
I own several affiliate programs myself, so I have spent a considerable amount of time studying my top affiliates and the top affiliates in programs all over the Internet.
The principles below are true of almost everyone of the top affiliates in every program I have looked at. If you want to succeed and earn at least $5,000 or more per month from affiliate programs, then you will have to be following the five steps below. If you don’t, it just isn’t going to happen…and you have no one to blame but yourself.
1. Create Your Own Web Site.
Although almost every program gives you a web site to use to promote with, you really shouldn’t be promoting with that site. The top affiliates always have their own web sites which they promote from. Then, they link to the affiliate program sites.
I never drive traffic directly to any of the affiliate programs. I drive it to my site, get their name on my opt-in list, and then promote affiliate programs. If you are serious about earning profits online, then you will do the same.
Having your own site and linking to your affiliate program gives you some additional advantages as well:
* You can write up a short two to four paragraph endorsement and testimonial for the site yourself.
* You can generate subscribers to your opt-in list first (this is the key to Internet profits).
* If the affiliate program ever stops or changes your link, you still have all the traffic you worked for at YOUR site (this happens quite often).
If you don’t currently have a web site, but want to earn through affiliate programs, you need to get one today.
2. Generate Traffic
You can’t earn a single penny in any affiliate program without generating traffic to your site. No traffic equals no income. Combine the right ingredients of an opt-in list, good site design, and the right sales offer…and your income will be directly proportional to the targeted traffic you generate.
An advantage that I didn’t mention above in why you should own your own domain is getting listed with the search engines. The pages given to you by your affiliate program owner aren’t going to receive virtually any traffic from the search engines. They won’t have top rankings because there are at least 1,000 other pages just like them (from the other affiliate members) and many software programs create pages which can’t even be indexed by the search engines.
Having your own domain will give you the freedom to create web pages which achieve high rankings on the search engines. Each of the major search engines such as AltaVista, Infoseek, Hotbot, and the others have their own ranking algorithms which change virtually monthly.
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