Okay, you’ve set up your website or blog, and you’ve been working on getting traffic to your site. Visitors are coming to your site, and they love it. But the site isn’t making any money. If you do not have your own product to sell, you can always sell other people’s products on your site and make a commission on each sale. But how do you find the proper affiliate to promote.
Affiliate marketing can take two forms. You can have a website dedicated to promoting affiliate products, and earning a commission from the products. You can also have a site or blog simply to inform people of a particular topic. On these sites, you may just want an occasional affiliate link to bring in some extra money. Whether you have an info site or a site dedicated to affiliate products, you need to find the proper affiliate partner.
The first thing you will want to find is merchants that match the topic of your website. If you have a blog about kayaking and canoeing, you will want to find merchants that sell kayaks and kayak accessories. It would not do you much good to add affiliate links promoting lawn care products. Do a search on your favorite search engine to find merchants that sell products or services related to your topic.
One quick word on affiliate products. You will need to know what your site visitors will be likely to buy. Will they want physical products, or do they want information, or something like an online learning course? You can find merchants selling everything, whether your visitors want products, services, or information.
There are several affiliate networks where you can find hundreds of merchants offering affiliate programs. These networks make it easy to track the number of people clicking on your affiliate links and more importantly, to track your affiliate earnings. Affiliate networks also make it easy to find links and to add them to your website. Some of the popular affiliate networks are Commission Junction, Shareasale, and Clickbank. Clickbank is an affiliate network where the merchants exclusively offer information products, such as e-books, and software.
When you add the merchant’s links to your website, be sure to place them in a prominent location, where visitors to your site will see them. A well placed, enticing link will generate more revenue for your website than a link that is hard for people to find. In some cases, a text ad within the text of an article on your site will generate good results. In other cases, a colorful banner ad on the side of the website or on top will generate a good click through rate.
Finding a merchant to promote on your website is not difficult to do. Just make sure that the merchant sells what the visitors to your website want to buy. Make sure that the products or services match the topic of your site. And experiment with the links, to generate the highest click through rate, and the highest revenue.
