If you’re sitting there racking your brains trying to think up your first product for selling on the internet, there’s an easier way to start making money online. Your best bet is to sell someone else’s product. This is called Affiliate Marketing.
Racking Your Brain?
The simplest way to do this is join an affiliate network. This is a website or service where the Affiliate Network Company offers affiliate programs and have multiple product owners/vendors wanting affiliates to sell for them.
Sign Up With An Affiliate Network
You just need to sign up with the affiliate network on the website and then you’re provided with an affiliate id. You’ve got to fill out all the normal stuff like name, address and email, and also give details of the most important bit, where all that lovely money you’re going to make will be sent to.
Once you’ve signed up, you get to see all the products they have on offer on that network site. Then you can search for a product you’re interested in promoting – having done your research first. You’ll probably have to contact the vendor to sign up as their affiliate. You do this through the affiliate network site, and it’s just so the vendor can get some details of who their affiliates are and give you access to their promotional materials.
It should be a win-win relationship between you and the vendor.
It’s in their best interests to be nice to you, as you’re making them money! Most reputable vendors give you a website that has banners and text ads that link to their site. You just display these ads on your website to promote the product, and get paid whenever someone clicks on the ad and buys the product.
Using Adwords
Another way is to use google adwords (those little ads you see on the right hand side of the screen when you search on google) to create an ad pointing directly to the vendor’s website. Once again you pass your affiliate id when someone clicks on the ad. This can be very well paying, but has become quite controversial.
Google frowns on using opt-in pages, where you ask someone for their email address in exchange for a free gift.
This is mainly to do with google wanting content on a website. As an optin page doesn’t provide any content, they get a bit upset. So before you go down this path you need to do a bit of research, or maybe see if your vendor allows linking directly to their landing/salespage. I would also check out the forums on www.warriorforum.com before using adwords this way.
Google frowns on optin pages with no content
The process when your website visitor clicks on the ad for the product you’re promoting is really simple. The affiliate id you got when you signed up for the network is passed through to the vendor’s site. If your visitor buys the product you were promoting from the vendor’s website, the vendor knows the sale came from you and you get paid a commission on the sale.
To put it another way, you’re displaying ads for the vendor on your site and sending visitors through to their site, with your affiliate id passed along in the process. What’s good for you is that you don’t have to do anything after that. The vendor deals with getting the product out to the customer and dealing with any queries they have so you can just relax.
What About Payment Disputes With Vendors?
You’re probably wondering what happens if you get a vendor who doesn’t pay you. Well if you’ve signed up through an affiliate network website, the affiliate network will handle all the transaction details between you and the vendor., and resolve any disputes.
Clickbank
One of the most popular and most trusted affiliate networks is www.clickbank.com. They’re huge and have over 12,000 digital products and more than 100,000 active affiliate marketers. You can search their products by category, and they also give a weighting to which products sell the best, so you have a better idea of what’s currently hot. The commissions on Clickbank are anything from around 30% to 75% so it’s possible to make some quite serious money.
But in order to make money online as with anything else, you need to put some hard work in. You also want to have a decent stream of traffic going to your site, which I’ll talk about in another article.
