Best Affiliate Program, Bang for the buck?

I'm new to the whole affiliate program for websites thing...how exactly does it work?

Can someone explain it to me in detail and provide some directiona s to how to get started? Thanks

 

Go to our site at Affiliatebot. You can click the link at my signature. You can learn a lot from our site. We even have a forum that will guide and instruct you on ways of affiliate marketing.

 

Sign up at http://www.shareasale.com or http://www.cj.com. Ad some banners (related to your site) and then starting earning some money. Go back and analyze. Which programs worked the best? The worst? etc
Know your target market and the product very well. Good luck.

 

You should also check out www.clickbank.com, there are lots of products to promote.

 

whatsthedeal

Affiliate programs are a way of earning money from you site. Basically if you build a website there are 2 ways to make money without selling something yourself: Advertisements, and Affiliate Programs.

Affiliate programs work by having you place a link/banner/etc on your website. When somebody visits your site and clicks on the link/banner they get sent to a merchant website (usually an online store). If that person then buys from the merchant website, you get a commission, which is usually a percentage of the total sale (which can be up to 100% depending on the merchant).

To get started, the best thing to do would be to join a few affiliate networks like drig linked to. The main ones are:

cj.com (commission junction)
Shareasale.com
Linkshare.com

There's hundreds of other affiliate networks, but those are the top 3.

Affiliate networks let you join hundreds of affiliate programs easily. With your single account you can promote books and movies and cars and just about anything else.

Once you've joined the network, you can search for related programs and join them. Once you've joined a program, you can download banners, links, and a bunch of other promotional material that you can use however you want.

The affiliate networks track your sales and send you the cheque.

Once you have gotten more experience, it's more profitable to work directly with each individual merchant. But that requires alot more knowledge of how websites work and not usually recommended for starters.

After you have spent time working with programs, you can get into more advanced things like data feeds (basically a way of automating the product advertisemtns and some content on your website), multi-tiered programs (you get credit if you refer other people to join the program), API's (custom coding that lets you get anything you want from merchants, great for building custom websites but you need alot of programming knowledge), and speciality tools (i.e. Amazon.com has a tool that will detect and display releated products on your website automatically so you don't need to constantly touch the site).

You can also get into other ways of promoting merchants, such as PPC (paying for people to visit a website), advertising, email marketing, coupons, etc. But again, it's not an easy step so try just the basics mentioned above first.

I hope that helps

 

Great response, thanks!