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Making free money online with little effort - too good to be true? Sometimes. But with affiliate programs, sometimes you really can.
Just think about it. Someone else does all the work in writing, producing, and making sellable a product. They want sales...lots of sales. That's where you come in. You are rewarded financially (called the commission) whenever you bring a paying customer to a vendor's site.
Sounds good, right? But your challenge is to actually attract paying customers to those products.
How do you do that? By carefully picking and planning your affiliate offerings. You'll have a far higher rate of success if you target your affiliate products to the thrust of your site. What's more, your customers won't be confused, will trust you more, and your site will have more focus.
For example, let's say that you sell health and fitness products, and have pages on your site about Super Slow Power lifting, Free Weights vs. Cardio, and the like. If you start adding affiliate products that make your car shiny or focus on free lottos, chances are you're not going to get many sales. Why? Because your site's visitors are targeted towards health and fitness.
Instead, you'd include affiliate products that focus on staying healthy...things like increasing your endurance, or safe plans for losing weight.
But should you just willy-nilly add any products in keeping with the subject matter of your site? Not if you want your customers to trust you. Ideally, you shouldn't be offering them anything you haven't read and approved yourself. Ask yourself if the products are worth the price. If you don't think they're a good value, how are your customers going to feel?
So where do you find specific products tailored to your audience? The good news is there are tons of directories for affiliate programs, such as http://www.refer-it.com, http://www.cj.com, and http://www.linkshare.com, to name a few. The not-so-good news is, it will take time to go through each one and determine which products are right for you and your site. (MyEZsale.com will be offering a directory of these programs with explanations of the benefits of each).
To get credit for any sales, you ensure your own affiliate ID is encoded in the link to any products. With one site in particular, Clickbank, at http://www.clickbank.com, you can have a single affiliate ID and use it to market all your affiliate products. Within Clickbank reside tens of thousands of electronic products that you can pick and choose to include on your Web site. Once you've signed up, you know what any affiliate link would look like (it's a combination of your affiliate ID and the affiliate ID of the vendor).
Including targeted offerings on your site can increase the amount of income you generate online. You can even experiment with multiple targeted offerings. For example, I compiled a collection of "Instant Online Stores" that center around a dozen different topics like auctions, B2B, sports, sex, marketing, family and more at http://www.virtual-coach.com/instant.html.
Like anything online, however, the money you make depends upon the people who know about it. So
don't rest on your laurels; make sure your site is known by your targeted audience through high search engine visibility, productive participation on community forums, and the like. Remember, the only person you can ultimately depend on to make you money online...is you.
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