I’ll bet you have read a lot of headlines that sound similar to this one above, or make claims like this one seems to. You have might have read some of those articles all the way to the end, clicked on some of the links in the article and read all the information on those links. BUT, the article might not have measured up to the headline… that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard… or whatever that! IT WILL RUIN MY BRAND!

That isn’t necessarily 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 programs allow you to sell products and services 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’s not all the benefits. Also, you don’t have to create marketing materials – those are 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. Really good affiliate programs will provide you with affiliate management tools that are based on one of the top affiliate software programs. The software programs will keep track of all kinds of metrics that will help you optimize your affiliate marketing effort.

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. Some experts recommend that you look for high percentages. I would prefer to find affiliate program that sell high ticket items and pay large commissions. This affiliate program for promoting music teacher websites offers the opportunity for you to earn $200 for a sale with monthly recurring income of $10.
  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 smart to choose to promote affiliate programs and products for knitting and crochet products on a site that is dedicated to professional football. 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. Personally, I wouldn’t waste my time marketing affiliate products that aren’t managed with affiliate software. 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. Affiliate program owners who tell you who they are, give you contact information aren’t very likely to be fly-by-night. They aren’t likely to try to ‘run and hide’ from you if there is a dispute. If you can find a picture, bio, and phone number of the affiliate site 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 programs. Affiliate website program owners that don’t put support systems in place – things like a ticket system or help desk software – probably won’t care about any their products or customers, nor will they care about supporting your marketing efforts. If they do, then you can be rest assured that they are trying to keep customers happy. If they AREN’T keeping customers happy, their poor service will reflect poorly on you, and tarnish your brand.

There are a couple of affiliate programs that meet all these criteria, that I 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/

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