Affiliate Marketing Opportunities and Tips

As you are probably aware, affiliate (aka associate) marketing is when one internet business/website offers a commission per sale, or other criteria, for each visitor that came from the other website’s affiliate link. These programs have proven to be very successful for some and not so successful for others. The good thing about these programs is that you do not keep any product inventory on hand and there is normally no expense, other than for maintaining your website. You are just the middle man, getting paid for referring a customer to the receiving site.

One of the lesser known, and a personal favorite is the Gomez PEER program. This is one of the few that runs on a pc and is not ran via a website. You can earn some pretty decent money for doing nothing but having an active internet connection and running your computer with it in your system tray. The most sought after affiliates for the Gomez Peer program are those people with computers anywhere in Australia, South America, or Mexico, and any computer with dial up connections in the USA, parts of Asia, and Europe.

Gomez Peer program

An excellent resource for the various affiliate programs is Associate Programs dot com. Associate Programs has an extensive list of affiliate programs, broken down by topic. Also, they also have a very nice selection of articles for the beginner all the way to the advanced affiliate.

Important Tips for Affiliate Marketers:

Need ideas? Look at what is selling well and getting great reviews. Maybe it’s something new on the market. Well, visit the manufacturer or seller website and see if they have an affiliate program.  If so, you could be one of the first to use it, which could mean a great start for you because you may not have much competition.

Once you’ve decided on a few possibilities, take the time to investigate the seller and their program. I don’t mean just look at their site, but look for reviews about the program. You don’t want your visitor to leave your site happy, only to become upset with the result of the other site and their service. There are way too many great affiliate programs out there to saddle yourself with a bad one. Just because they may offer a high commission does not that they are worth it.

The Design. Once you have narrowed it down to one or more affiliate programs, then you begin putting the links in your website. There are a variety of things to consider. Sometimes it would be appropriate to make the affiliate link look less like an advertisement and more like just a simple picture or text link. Usually this means blending the text link colors with the surrounding parts of the web page or putting the picture or banner near other pictures of similar size. Other times, you may want to be upfront with your visitor that this is an affiliate program. If you point out that the money from them buying via the affiliate link would go toward this, their favorite website, or toward a great cause, then they may feel like buying through you as apposed to going direct.

Presell the products. That is when you “warm up your visitors” to the idea of considering the product that the seller sells. You do not sell the product to the visitor, that is the job of the seller. It is your testimony or opinion that the visitor wants. Then they decide to investigate the offer by clicking on the link. Your job is done, until next time.

Unlike the example I am setting right here, do not bother trying to sell others on the idea of becoming an affiliate. There are thousands of sites out there already trying to do that right now. Instead, sell the product to the customer, not the idea of becoming an affiliate. In other words, create about the various products and then sell those via your affiliate links. If you have a trusting audience for your site, they will consider your opinion as an endorsement of the product. This goes back to my point that I made in the previous paragraph, that being, ‘don’t sell something that you wouldn’t use yourself’, better yet, ‘don’t sell a product you haven’t used yourself’.

Be creative. Don’t repeat the same old methodologies of other sites. That’s not to say that you should reinvent the wheel in terms of designing a website or page in an efficient or logical manner. What I mean is; try to make the experience of visiting your site memorable or at least worthwhile. The preferred thing is to have the visitor come back again and maybe even tell a friend. This may include interactive things on your site, such as games or web-based tools for them to use.

Already selling your own stuff? If you have your own products to sell, affiliate programs can be a great way of increasing the types of products available without increasing your own expenses or taking up room with inventory. You could then direct your customer to the other businesses that compliment your own.

Go get em tiger! Rawr!