AffiliateSupersite Free | Make $$$MONEY$$$ with Your Website Through Affiliate Programs
My personal favorite choices for money making:
click here for the full rankings of affiliate programs... Do you know that I make over $2000 a month from this website on referral programs alone? I'm almost embarrassed to say it since making money was never my intention with this website.... I started it as a collection of links that I could point my friends to (instead of cutting and pasting via e-mail). Well, a year later, I'm making a lot of money in my spare time by running a few web sites with minimal updates (about an hour or two a week). After a bit of trial and error, here are some pointers on having a successful affiliate/referral program. I recommend a couple of great programs. 1. TRAFFIC-- You can't refer your visitors to other sites (and make money) if you don't have any visitors to start. Besides getting in search engines and exchanging links, purchase visitors at services like GoTo.com. For just a penny a hit, you can drive significant traffic to your site. If you make an average of 3 cents per visitor, then calculations tell you should "buy" as many visitors as is possible at one cent each. 2. QUALITY SITE -- A quality site will bring visitors back to your site as well as lend credibility to what you recommend. The more "professional" your site appears, the more likely people will click on links you suggest. 3. BANNERS RARELY WORK -- Notice how I promote various affiliate programs up above. I use text links that blend in with the rest of my content. A banner tells people they are clicking on an ad. A text link is more "personal." 4. PERSONAL ENDORSEMENT -- I don't always send my visitors immediately to another site. First, I tell them a little bit more about the program. That way, they only go if they are really interested. Otherwise I might lose that visitor once they leave my site. I do this for programs where I am paid when someone signs up for a particular program or product. The affiliate program calls these "leads." If I am paid per "hit" only, then I try to get them to go straight to that site. 5. MAKE THEM APPROPRIATE -- Most of my affiliate programs are related to what my site is about. Try to pick programs that would be of interest to those visiting your site. But don't be afraid of adding some programs that are more "general interest" as they might bring in significant revenue. 6. TEST -- Put about six or eight programs on your site like I have done above and test to see how they do over a week's period of time. Drop those that aren't performing and try some new ones. My rule of thumb is that I try to make at least 4 cents from every visitor I send to a site. 7. HITS, LEADS, PURCHASES -- Programs that pay per hits are very safe bets. You are guaranteed to make a certain amount for everyone you send their way. Try to find programs that will give you at least 5 cents for everyone you send their way. Some companies will pay you a large commission for every sale that comes via your site, but unless people are buying often from them, they perform very poorly. I have had great success with programs that pay you per "lead" (like the Free Answering Machine and the Trip to Venice links above). Many gambling site will pay you great money but ethically, I don't recommend gambling so I don't provide any links to gambling sites. 8. GOOD COMPANY -- Sign up with a reputable affiliate company that offers a variety of programs. I have heard about some programs that don't pay their bills on time. I've dealt with a number of companies and I really like Commission Junction and DirectLeads, the best for the variety they offer. It just takes a couple of minutes to sign up with them and you will be on your way to making a decent extra income. (see my recommendations) 9. TWO-TIER PROGRAMS -- There are many two tier programs you can sign up with. In addition to your own sales commissions, you receive a percentage of every dollar earned by those who sign up under you. The two programs I recommend are two-tiered. I'll make extra income when you sign up but more importantly, you'll earn more income the more people you sign up. I make $2100 a month, NOT counting two tier income, so you don't have to rely other people signing up under you to make good money. 10. NEWSLETTERS -- If you have a newsletter, an affiliate program gives you a never ending stream of ads. Plus, since your newsletter usually goes to people who are familiar with you already, they are more likely to check out the items you recommend. Once you have some programs up and running, I'd be happy to take a look at what you have done and try to give you some additional pointers. -- Michael Click to learn about affiliate programs: An affiliate is paid to drive shoppers from its home page to merchants, where users can conduct transactions. Affiliates can be paid per click through, per action ("$2 per signup:), or as a percentage of sales ("10% of visitor's purchases"). This allows individuals to monetize the traffic on their sites--even if they don't have their own e-commerce programs. Lots of the top sites out there - like Amazon, etc. - have affiliate programs. MANY sites make a lot of money through affiliate programs - numerous sites have made $100k, even $1 million, from JUST ONE PROGRAM (and there are thousands out there). This is not a joke. Jupiter research notes "By 2002, 24% of e-commerce revenues will be derived from affiliate programs." I personally know a bunch of folk (I am one) who supplement their income with as much as $10k per month running sites with affiliate programs a few hours a week. Refer-it, a community site for affiliates, lists more than 1,000 potential affiliate programs in which the enterprising Internet user can participate. Just to give you a sense of how widespread this is, Amazon has more than 350,000 affiliates (which they call associates), and BeFree, a technology provider for affiliates, claims relationships with more than 2 million affiliate partners. Large community sites such as Yahoo GeoCities and Homestead.com aggregate these affiliate programs and make them easily available to their users. Yahoo's program is appropriately titled "pages that pay." Vstore is an interesting next-generation alternative to the common affiliate program. Vstore's e-commerce system links more than 130 distributors and allows each Web site operator to open its own store. As opposed to standard affiliate programs, the affiliate's customer need not leave the site to shop; you can close the transaction in your own store. More importantly, by removing the e-commerce provider from the economic value chain, there is more money to pay the affiliates. For beginners, I recommend checking out these places.... they have quick signups, and feature a number of merchants
Once you get the hang of things, and see some commission coming in, you might also want to check out the affiliate programs at BEST SITE TYPES FOR MONEY MAKING The quickie answer for someone willing to do SQL work are Top100/Vote/"Send me Your Traffic" sites, hands down. With some programming expertise, you can throw together some Top 100 (rankings by who sends "vote" clicks to you) and similar pages. Once these things are up, they themselves may get positioned in search engines, but, more importantly, hundreds of sites may be sending you traffic to boost their own rankings. http://www.starpages.net/ is a very good example of one of these sites. They don't do any of the content work… they even hit me up with an automated e-mail to help them fill out a biography. They simply allow sits to register and move up in the rankings by sending traffic that "votes" (and usually stays on your site). "Voting/Rating" sites aren't always ideal to monetize on a per-visitor basis, but this is more than made up for in volume. If done correctly, you may have so much traffic coming out of your ears that 50% less than average may be of little consequence (check out the fan page section below for idea). Eventually, the sites will be looking for you and signing up once you hit critical mass. My suggestion is to first try this with fan sites… the key factor being a huge number of low to medium traffic sites scattered all over the web. I personally had pretty success doing this kind of work manually, but it got to be too time consuming, and I don't really have too much by way of database skills. The Longer Answer The above is the solution that probably works best with your willingness to do SQL work… and once you get one up, you can duplicate the site with a completely different set of content. The only truly free ways to get people to your site ("click-grabbing") is to give other sites an incentive to do so. In my experience, the only real ways to do that is: 1) give them money (the most expensive option) 2) give them traffic back (or at least create that illusion). This is why rankings can be so successful. 3) Search Engine Positioning. Positioning is by far the best "click-grabbing" method, although its not easy, and you can't really automate it. So, on that tip… if you're not willing to do the database work, or at least not right away, here are the choices I would throw out for someone just trying to get off the ground… the best way to answer both of the questions (what to put on the sites - content - what to sell on those sites - affiliate programs) by giving you what, in my experience, are the sites that make the most money per man hour. Some of these aren't truly standalone if you do them "well", but I have tried some of these using "compromise" tactics (80/20, not updating that often, etc.) I use all of these to some degree. The most successful programs for generating huge income in small amounts of time, in ranked order (best first) are: 1) Dating programs REVENUE POTENTIAL: HIGH Dating programs pay surprisingly large amounts, and can be extremely low maintenance when you use message boards - therefore visitors are creating content, and this content can really draw in the folk that would pay decent money (people are generally more willing to shell out money for a dating service than CDs) They also lend themselves well to Search Engine Positioning because MANY people search for them across many different keywords. You may also be able to come up with a way to get people to link to your site (maybe to their profile) to have them help you generate traffic. Here is an expert from a gentleman who has spoken alongside me at conferences: "His network of personals associate sites are the top revenue generating, traffic generating, and commission earners on Ticketmaster's Match.com-One & Only Personals Network, generating more than $75,000 per month with No Advertising Cost." He's not blowing smoke. The sign-up link for that program is: One and Only Network I can't speak from personal experience on that one, but I know the man is doing very well, and the type of promotional sites you can use are ripe for self-maintenance. --------------------------------------------- 2) Free offers - membership to free programs REVENUE POTENTIAL: MEDIUM What's great about these is that the affiliate programs BECOME the content. DirectLeads is a great affiliate network for these kinds of offers…. "sign up for FreeRide and get free stuff" and you get a buck or two per signup. I have pulled a few thousand off of these with a few links, especially in places where other affiliate links don't really seem to work. I generally like the larger sites which sell themselves… CoolSavings ($1), CyberGold ($.40), MyPoints ($1.25), FreeLotto ($1). Its pretty easy to sell someone on a free lottery chance… Content-wise, you can position for free stuff, but, more importantly, you can use these links on any kinds of sites - try Fan Sites below. If you want to go a step further, consider collecting consumer e-commerce discounts -coupons for sites like Amazon, etc. --------------------------------------------- 3) Car Pricing REVENUE POTENTIAL: VERY HIGH Message boards can work here, but you will need to work harder to collect content on the actual buying prices. There are folks out there making over $1 per visitor. If you can come up with some useful statistics to display through the database (a motor trend monthly ranking, for instance, pointing directly at the related affiliate page), you could pull out some very serious income. Many of the car affiliate programs also have content tools that are self-updating. --------------------------------------------- 4) Fan sites REVENUE POTENTIAL: LOW If you want a lot of low-hanging fruit, you may want to try some of these. Its it VERY easy to rank pages dealing with semi-famous celebrities (don't go for the top 100, think 2nd tier folks) and get thousands of hits (one page I haven't touched in 6 months gets 3000 hits a day). Message boards are perfect here. The only issue is that the revenue isn't amazingly easy to come by on a per-visitor basis. You will have to be a little more creative. As I mentioned before, this stuff can work really, really well with the SQL solution I mentioned above. --------------------------------------------- 5) Financial sites REVENUE POTENTIAL: HIGH Financial sites allow you to post "rankings" which don't change that much and can usually link to lucrative offers. www.Gomez.com offers a free updating scorecard and will give you a $15 signup fee, for instance. The only tough part is getting traffic to your site. In the end, any of these offers can get make you money.. .the key is traffic. Sites that create their own content (ala message boards and rankings) are always useful, but you still have to get people there in the first place. Search Engine positioning is KEY; I've never seen a successful affiliate business that didn't do it at least pretty well. Make sure you get up to speed on this quickly. As for tools, Webposition is the industry standard, but just having the software usually isn't enough. You need to keep abreast of how search engines work, and make sure your pages are designed to be ranked high from the beginning… even factoring in to what kinds of sites (content-wise) you choose to create. http://www.searchenginewatch.com is a good place to start on learning about the engines.
Another resource I would check out is Refer-It. Refer-it is the best listing I know of for affiliate programs. They also rate and rank them according to revenue potential, and have discussion forums on topics like this. Set up Your Own Affiliate Program For merchants, a number of providers will help you set up your own affiliate programs. Commission Junction is one of the cheapest to set up (about $800), and has some of the best technology. Be Free, Dynamic Trade, and LinkShare are expensive at around $5,000, but may offer some other features you want. Exclusivity The issue of exclusivity is an absolute showstopper and should be your first concern. At last check, Be Free and LinkShare required exclusive performance-marketing partner status. Anything exclusive is a bad idea, especially since Forrester says some 54 percent of all online marketing dollars will be earmarked for performance marketing by 2004. The legal counsel I've received says that if you are a Be Free or LinkShare merchant and later run a campaign with the likes of a ValueClick, GoTo.com, ePod, or whatever gets invented in the coming years, the standard Be Free and LinkShare agreements could hold you in violation, never mind if you want to join a second affiliate network like Commission Junction, Dynamic Trade, or ClickTrade. Be very careful. Time and Money The next area of focus is your wallet in terms of hard dollars and payroll. On this count, Be Free, Dynamic Trade, and LinkShare are expensive at around $5,000. Commission Junction is $800, and ClickTrade is free (but has many problems). Costs really start to add up in monthly minimums, check writing fees, affiliate recruiting fees, banner serving fees, account rep fees, and so on. It's all the à la carte stuff that can fatten the final tab. Be Free and LinkShare have well-deserved reputations of charging for lots of extras. In particular, watch out for banner serving fees. One program I'm familiar with was paying $0.45 CPM to have its banners served in addition to all the other fees and commissions it was paying. So much for pay for performance. Dynamic Trade, ClickTrade, and Commission Junction include everything for one price. But time might be a bigger issue for you than money; the last thing you want is an expensive solution that's going to consume half your tech department in an eight-week implementation. I have yet to meet a Be Free or LinkShare merchant who didn't complain about the onerous implementation. I've had the Commission Junction service up and running in under two hours. Dynamic Trade and ClickTrade are just about as easy. It's the difference between an ASP and a software license. Support You want real help on the other end of your phone calls and emails. You want a network that's proactive in responding to affiliates. I've found Dynamic Trade and Commission Junction strong in this area. ClickTrade is terrible -- and unapologetic about it. Feedback from colleagues about Be Free and LinkShare has ranged from high praise to sharp criticism. What I've heard is that if you get the right rep, Be Free and LinkShare are world class. LinkShare in particular has a core of excellent account reps, and many merchants are pleased to sing the company's praises. Fraud Finally, what may seem like an odd criterion is don't overlook the dangers of fraud. On this front, most networks are surprisingly quiet, with LinkShare and Commission Junction the exceptions. Good luck -- no matter what option you choose!------ |
