According to Wikipedia “Affiliate marketing is an internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.” What does this mean for you?
It means that you have the opportunity to market other peoples’ products or company’s products and make money for your effort. Virtually anything today can be sold through an affiliate program and offer you the opportunity to make money online. All you need to do is generate traffic to your website and advertise a product. If the individual browsing your website believes they need that product and clicks over to purchase it using your dedicated link then you make a portion of that purchase.
It is as simple as that. However, like everything in sales it is a numbers game. In order to generate a decent income from affiliate marketing you need to first generate traffic to your website or blog. But if you are able to generate a sufficient amount of traffic then affiliate programs could provide a substantial boost to your income.
Here we will attempt to give you information of some of the companies you can use to make money online through affiliate marketing. It is free to join all of the affiliate programs.
The mother of all ebook sales can be found at ClickBank. ClickBank has a marketplace of thousands of ebooks, software, membership programs, etc created by other individuals. They have formed an agreement with ClickBank that allows them to leverage to power of affiliates to sell their product. In return you get a sizeable portion of the sale. There are many instances on ClickBank where you receive anywhere from 50% to 75% of the product sale. Imagine the power of this. If you were only working as an affiliate for five different products and your website was only able to generate one sale per week for each of the products and your commission averaged $35 per sale, you would be making $175 per week. Now begin to dream about adding more products or making more sales. The potential is endless and could be just what you were looking for.
PayDotCom.com is a competing service with ClickBank. They market very similar products. The service was started by Mike Filsame because he had some issues with ClickBank. So he started his own service. PayDotCom.com also has a unique aspect to it because they will pay you an affiliate commision if you direct someone to their site and they take advantage of some of the great deals that they offer them when they join for free.
Commision Junction is a little different of an affiliate program than ClickBank or PayDotCom.com. It has partnered with major retailers and allows you to market their merchandise on your website. Do you want to market the new iPhone. They have an agreement with Apple. How about a laptop computer? You could use Apple, Dell, or Hewlitt Packard. Do you enjoy the home improvement sector? If you do, then you can partner with HomeDepot. Just a few others include Blockbuster, Staples, Buy.com, Best Buy, PetCo, Ebay, Hooked on Phonics, etc. The list seems endless. Imagine the possibilites of your little website leveraging the power of the world’s largest companies. Not too bad of a deal.
LinkShare is much like Commission Junction. The are an affiliate program with a network of over 600 well known companies. Here is a small list of some of the companies that they have an agreement with: Macy’s CompUSA, Office Depot, 1-800-Flowers, AVON, Champion (Athletic Gear), deLia’s, AT&T, Disney, Footlocker, Land’s End, NetFlix, Walmart, Radio Shack.
This is another great company. They primarily deal with lesser known companies but great companines nonetheless. You can find something to sell in basically any niche that there is. As a benefit to me they even have an affiliate program with the Washington Redskins (I am a die hard fan). The also have a few pay per click and pay per lead programs in their network. An added plus is that they have a page maker that you can plug in what merchant you want and it will automatically create an html page for you to upload to your server. Very nice.
Google also has their own version of an affiliate network with some well known companies. A few of them are Verizon, Kohl’s (my wife’s favorite store), Barnes and Noble, Sears and Target.
Other Affilate Programs
Of course there is a multitude of other affiliate programs out there as well. Probably the most well known is Amazon.Com. Amazon sells virutally everything you can imagine. You need to sign up for their Associate program.
