People struggle every day trying to figure out how to monetize a website properly so they can be rewarded properly for their hard work. One of the most common programs that people will start out with is an ad network owned by Google called Adsense. But it can be hard to earn money with Adsense, at least hard to make a solid amount, especially for bloggers that are just starting out. This is where affiliate marketing comes in.
If you are looking to make some real money online, you need to start looking into affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a business model where one company offers you money to market and sell their products online, and you are paid either a flat amount per sale, a percent of a sale or a flat rate to generate leads.
Here are a few things you can do to be a better affiliate marketer:
1. Display Your Own Banners
Learn from Adsense. If you display Adsense ads on your site, you can see what Ads are being displayed on your site to better understand what ads are performing well on your site. You can use this information to understand what niches and topics interest your audience and find products in those niches or topics that you would like to promote. You can then go ahead and contact the company that sells those products and ask if you can be their affiliate. They will almost always say yes. If you use this method to find products you will have a unique advantage over other bloggers because you will most likely blog about products that are not generally blogged about.
2. Build an Email List
One of the secrets of the pros is to build a huge email list that you can consistently sell to many times over. If you have an informative website that people actually find useful, put an email subscription box up and keep them updated with a weekly email of solid information. Also, you could give away a free ebook on the subject of your website in addition to get even more subscribers quickly. Once you build up a trusting relationship with your list, you can start to subtly push some affiliate products to make money whenever you decide to send out an email.
3. Don’t Buy and Buy Lists
A pro strategy is to build a don’t buy list as well as a buy list. The thing about this is that it earns your users trust. It shows them that you are not just trying to use them to make an extra buck but you are actually looking out for them and are trying to make sure that they do not run into any trouble. This trust then carries over when they look at your recommended list. The trick is to be genuine in building your don’t buy list. Fill it with a few products that many people are uncertain about that you know for a fact are not worth the money. If any of your audience has actually used one of these products and has had a bad experience, then they will feel like they can really trust your judgment.
There are a ton of different ways to make money with affiliate programs. Experiment with these methods and be sure to try new things. And if you think that you do not need to monetize your blog by being an affiliate, think again because becoming an affiliate marketer will help diversify your blog income and make it much more stable.
Mark Trueman is the founder of multiple online businesses and enjoys creating and sharing useful content with his fellow webmasters at ZenSpill. Mark has been acquainted with the webmaster world for many years and is an addict of everything and anything SEO, CRO and Social Media.
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