Affiliate Marketing Intro

By Derick Yung

Affiliate marketing can be very lucrative if you know what you're doing. If you become an affiliate for a company, you get paid a commission when you send visitors to their site who buy. Some companies will also pay you for other actions, like referring new members to a program or newsletter.

When you apply to become an affiliate for a company, make sure you read their terms of agreement. Read their terms to find out what you can and cannot do. That way, you minimize your chance of rejection. And if you do get accepted, you don't want to do anything that could get you into legal problems.

You can become a member of a large affiliate network. One advantage of these large networks is that they have a large selection of merchants. You'll more than likely be able to find relevant programs to associate with. Large affiliate networks include:

PayDotCom
Commission Junction
ClickBank
Performics
LinkShare

You can also look for any individual companies which have affiliate programs. To find these companies, search the web for companies that offer products relevant to your site's theme. On these sites, see if they have an affiliate program. You can search for "affiliate" as a quick check.

Even if a company website doesn't explicitly state that it has an affiliate program, it may still have one. It may be an invitation-only program. You may have to contact these companies to find out.

You can also find potential affiliate programs by looking for similar competing sites in your chosen topic. Browse these sites and pay special attention to their links. See what affiliate programs they link to, if any.

When you join an affiliate program, you'll get a special link to use so that visitors from your link can be tracked. How you want to use your link is up to you. You could put text links on your website, post banner ads, send out emails, and more.

If you've joined a large network, you'll have to look for merchants who sell high quality, popular products in your site's topic of interest. If your selected merchants sell a huge assortment of items, you'll have to sort through them to find out what's best for your website. Then you'll have to determine where to put the links on your website. If your links are product-specific, make sure each link points to the proper product page. And sometimes, product pages disappear or get updated, so make sure your links work on a regular basis. You don't want to lose out on a sale because your link doesn't work.

If all this type of works seems too tedious, there are tools that can automate these things. For example, ContextCash was developed to solve this type of problem. It's a neat tool that dynamically transforms keywords in your content to affiliate links with your IDs automatically embedded.

Finally a system that truly helps YOU get paid!

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