A Million Little Pixels

You have might have read a lot of headlines that sound similar to this one above, or make promises like this one seems to. You have might have read some of those articles all the way to the end, even clicked on some of the links in the article and read all the information on those links. You might have finished the article and then broken up into hysterical laughter… do they really expect me to sell THAT… or whatever that! IT WILL RUIN MY REPUTATION!

That doesn’t have to be so. 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 marketing allow you to sell products 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 isn’t the end of the benefits. You also don’t have to create any marketing materials – those are all created for you by the affiliate program owner.

Another big advantage is that you really don’t have to manually keep track of ROI or conversion rates. Most of the better affiliate programs will provide the members affiliate management tools that are based on one of the leading affiliate software programs. Software management of affiliate program means that you won’t have to ride herd on the affiliate program owner.

Five tips for choosing affiliate offers to promote

1. 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 affiliate programs that offer high percentage payouts are the best. My preference is for affiliate programs that offer high ticket items and pay large commissions. This affiliate program for promoting sales interview tools gives you the opportunity to earn almost $50 per sale.
2. 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.

3. 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 powered by a fully-featured affiliate marketing software program, you can infer that this is a serious affiliate program. If they don’t have a ‘welcome’ screen that lets you know they are using a software program to manage the program, you might want to re-think your membership. 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

4. 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 tell you 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 on the up and up and deal with you fairly. If you find a picture, bio, and phone number of the website owner, chances are they will behave legitimately. You will also be able to research them to find any complaints about them. 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/

5. 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 same criteria when evaluating affiliate website offerings. 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. When they do, then you can be rest assured that they are trying to keep customers satisfied. If they AREN’T working to keep customers happy, their poor service will reflect poorly on you, and tarnish your image.

There are a couple of affiliate programs that I could 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/