Affiliate programs are easy because they allow people with no computer experience, and no business experience, to jump online and start making money almost instantly on the Internet.
An affiliate program is something many Web sites use to attract new visitors.
Companies allow you to sign up as their affiliate and promote their product for them.
Should you help them sell anything, they pay you a commission for your sales.
They track their sales typically by using a cookie they set on the Web visitor's browser when they first arrive at the Web site.
As an affiliate, if you send a customer to the main site, even if they return at a later date and purchase, as long as they still have the cookie on their computer, the sale is tracked to you.
That's right, you can make money online without having to process any orders, employ anyone, deal with customer service issues, or any other time consuming tasks.
If you're familiar with affiliate programs then you probably already know that the whole key to making high commissions is through getting quality traffic, and a lot of it, through your affiliate link.
How you go about this is going to be different for whatever product you're promoting.
I strongly believe one of the most lucrative ways is through pay-per-click advertising.
The nice part about PPC advertising is that you can carefully pick your keywords for pennies and promote only programs that can pay you in dollars.
The best way to turn a profit with affiliate programs usually requires some type of budget to buy advertising.
You cannot be afraid to spend money to make money.
There are a couple of other ways to make money promoting affiliate programs that cost nothing.
You can create a free blog at Blogger and write about subjects that relate to the products you're promoting.
You can also write informative articles and submit them to places which will index them and include your affiliate link.
And another popular and free way is to hang out in forums that relate to your target demographic and post to highly active threads.
If you answer people's questions honestly and provide a value to the forum, people will not only read what you post, they will click on your signature and see the Website you're affiliated with.
These are a great free ways to get traffic to your affiliate link.
They take a little more time and patience than writing a two line PPC ad, but are completely 100% free.
Some affiliate networks and Web sites require you to already have a Web site to join.
If you're just starting out and don't have a Web site you can use to promote your affiliate link, start with signing up with places, such as, Clickbank.
If you promote products for a company like Clickbank, not only do you not need a Web site to join, but you can market thousands of products they sell and only sign up once.
This means you can have an affiliate link for any of the products they have, open an account with a PPC search engine (e.g. Google) and be in business in only a matter of minutes.
Most people new to online marketing have no idea how quickly they can sign up as an affiliate, open a PPC advertising account, and immediately start getting traffic through their affiliate link.
If you pick a network like Clickbank they'll provide you with details regarding which products sell better than others. This is where many people make the mistake of signing up for one of the top ten affiliate programs and try to go out and market it.
There's a reason why a product is the highest selling product at the time, it's because everyone is already promoting it. When there is a massive amount of competition, it means that you'll sell less product and make less money per sale.
I've found that the most lucrative programs to promote are the ones that are several pages deep into Clickbank's catalog. The less competition, the easier and quicker you'll start to see sales.
Clickbank is only one out of hundreds of affiliate networks.
You can search almost any store you can think of along with the word "affiliate" and chances are they have some kind of affiliate program.
Also, run a search for affiliate programs and affiliate networks and you'll stumble onto a ton of companies that want you to promote their site.
Your opportunity to start making money on the Internet immediately has never been easier.
Affiliate programs allow entrepreneurs to share in the profits of large corporations and other web based businesses with little effort.
With the large amount of affiliate programs available today, and the rapid growth of the Internet, there has never been a better time to get involved in online marketing.
Cheers Patrick Huggins
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