May 11, 2008

Ways to Make Your Affiliate Website Successful



One of the most important functions in any online business is the ability to sell your product. Many small businesses fail not because they have a bad product or service, but because they do not know how to sell their product. One of the easiest ways to sell a product or service is to put together a list of leads or people that fit your market that may be interested in your product.

Many salespeople work hard to put together a list of possible customers. Putting together a list takes lots of time, smarts and plenty of hard work. One of the easiest ways to put together a list is just to buy one, while some lists are a good value, if you are selling a certain product or to a certain list of people, you may find that lists are extremely expensive and usually worth the time and effort to create one yourself.

There are many ways to put together a list. One of the easiest ways to create a list is to set up a web site on a specific topic and offer a free product, service or newsletter. However, in order to get the newsletter, the visitor must submit his or her email address. Depending on the amount of traffic, over a few months you can receive hundreds or even thousands of email addresses that are interested in receiving information on products or services. If you are looking to build your business by developing your contacts, check out the above tips on putting together a list.
An affiliate website is defined as a website that sells other's products or information for profit. This is one of the best types of investment sites simply because you do not have to product any of the products, just the website to market them.

Here are a few ways that you will maximize your profits from your affiliate website.

1) Join affiliate programs that offer high commissions. Each affiliate program is different, especially when it comes to the amount of money is paid for each referral. If you are only going to make a fraction of a penny each sale, why bother when they are thousands of other programs that offer much more?

2) Join 2 or 3 tier programs. A "tier" program allows you to not only sell their product or service for profit, but it also allows you to recruit others to do the same. Once you recruit others, you then gain profits for each of their sales as well. A 3 tier program allows you to collect profits for the people your recruit AND the people they recruit. Essentially, you make money off of their efforts.

3) Join affiliate programs that offer lifetime commissions. Lifetime commission means that you not only make money on the initial sale, but you will also earn commission each time that customer comes back and buys something additional.

4) Join Google Adsense. Google Adsense is by far one of the most profitable and well known affiliate program on the internet today. Instead of making money based on sales, you make money based on when someone clicks on the link. Perhaps one of the best features is the fact that the ad generated by Google Adsense is targeted towards the content on your website. This means that the customers that visit your website are more likely to click on the ads because they pertain to what they were looking for in the first place.

Alternatively, Google also allows you to place a search box on your site, and you will be paid each time someone uses it and visit a link.

Because Google Adsense changes its links to match the content on the page in which it is found, it can be used easily on every page of your website, including pages with other affiliate links on them.

5) Join affiliate networks. An affiliate network is a website that offers a wide variety of products and services to sell on your website. This allows you to easily search for affiliate program in which you want to market. It also will monitor all of your commissions from the various programs, add it to one account, and then send you one check once the amount in your account exceeded your specified amount. If you have ever tried to manage several affiliate programs at once, you will greatly appreciate this feature.

6) Optimize your website. You will want to make your page friendly for both search engines and your visitors.

Search engines use bots to scan and track your website in order to index it. You must provide these bots with easy to read code, keywords, and content. Use keywords and information that describes the product you are trying to sale.

More importantly, you will want to make your page friendly for your visitors. Make sure you have a clear, easy to read website that remain constant throughout.

Make sure that your pages load quick, as you may have some customers that are on dialup. Make sure you include a navigation menu on all pages of your website, which leads not only to the type of product that they are looking for, but also other categories as well. You never know if some may be looking for a specific item, but may also stumble on something they were technically looking for, but something they are still interested in none the less.