Can anyone make real money with affiliate marketing? The answer is yes, affiliate marketing can earn you a good income better then you regular income. Like any home income venture, success comes not so much from what you choose to do to make money, but whether or not you do what needs to be done correctly and consistently.
Real Facts of Affiliate marketing
The problem with affiliate marketing, like many other home business options, are the so-called gurus and get-rich-quick programs that suggest affiliate marketing can be done fast and with little effort. Odds are you’ve read claims of affiliate marketing programs that say you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month doing almost nothing (“Three clicks to rich!”). Or, they suggest you can set up your affiliate site, and then forget it, except to check your bank deposits.
The reality in affiliate marketing is that it’s like most other work-at-home ventures; there are a few who are filthy rich, a good number who are successful enough to meet their goals, and a ton who aren’t making anything.
Pros of Affiliate Marketing
There are several aspects of affiliate marketing that make it a good home business option including:
Low cost to get started. Most affiliate programs are free to join, so your costs are usually related to your referral/marketing methods.
No need to create a product or service.
Don’t have to stock or ship products.
Work anytime and from anywhere as long as you have Internet access.
Passive income potential, depending on how you market your affiliates programs.
Can be added on to current home business to create an additional income stream. It’s ideal for bloggers, coaches, information entrepreneurs, and anyone who has a website.
Become a Millionaire
Cons of Affiliate Marketing
There are challenges to making money from affiliate marketing, such as:
- It can take time to generate the amount of traffic needed to result in income.
- Affiliate hijacking can occur in which you’re not given credit for your referral. URL masking can help.
- A bad affiliate referral can ruin your credibility. It’s important that you choose quality businesses to work with to avoid this.
- No control over the businesses’ product, service, or how it does business.
- Some companies have been known not to pay, although there are ways to screen and choose quality affiliate programs.
- High competition. When you find a great program, you can bet that many others are promoting it as well.
- Customer belongs to the merchant. Your stats will let you know how many sales were made of what product, but in most cases, you’ll have no information about who made the purchase, which makes it difficult to market for re-sales.
Make Quick Real Money
Can one can achieve success through Affiliate marketing?
- Start right by learning about affiliate marketing and the steps required to be a success.
- Choose only quality affiliate products and services. In fact, consider buying them yourself so you can attest to their quality. You’ll be judged by the product/services you promote, so don’t just focus on the income, but also on the quality.
- Research the programs so you understand how and when you’re paid, and other important money issues you need to know to ensure the program is a good fit.
- Start a blog. An information, how-to, or lifestyle blog offers lots of opportunities to promote affiliate products.
- Choose affiliate items that match your niche or the content on your home business website or blog. For example, if you write about figure skating, affiliate links to motorcycles or a new set of saddlebags won’t do well.
- Mix and match affiliate ads so you don’t overwhelm your visitors. In-content affiliate links usually have the best click-through rates over image links.
- Always disclose your affiliate relationship. Most visitors will probably understand that graphic ad will lead to your getting paid, but if you write a review or use an in-text link as a recommendation, you want your readers to know that may lead to compensation as well. This ensures you retain transparency and trust with your readers, but also, it’s required by the FTC’s endorsement rules.
- Market, market, market. Don’t rely on SEO or social media alone to drive people to your website or blog, and affiliate referrals. Understand who your target market is, where you can find it, and how you can entice it to your site. There are many low cost and free ways to market your affiliate business.
- Start an email list. The most successful affiliate marketers use email in their affiliate marketing. Don’t put this off. Email marketing can increase your affiliate profits significantly.
- Consider using a lead page and funnel system to market your affiliate business. Lure prospects to your email list with a great free offer, and from there you can send them to your affiliate product page. In your email system, you can offer more great free content and more affiliate offers.
- Monitor the success of your affiliate programs, particularly if you have several programs and/or are also using other ad types, such as Google AdSense for making money. Sometimes having too many ads dilutes the site or distracts readers, resulting in lower performance.
Before jumping into starting an affiliate marketing business, learn all that’s involved in making it a success.
Some of the best Affiliate marketing programs are,
ShareASale has been in business for 17 years now, and they’ve definitely kept up with the times. Featuring a plentiful marketplace full of merchants catering to almost everything you can think of, there’s always going to be relevant products for you to promote.
Everyone knows Amazon. The online marketplace that can deliver anything from candy to a fully-functional drone to your door in a day. Every niche has its space on Amazon, which is why it’s such a great starting point for an Affiliate Marketing venture.
Even the user-based colossal marketplace that is eBay wants you to help advertise and sell the items on their platform. All you need to do is find listings you want to help promote, promote them using Ebay’s Partner Network tools, and you get paid!
Shopify is one of the leading eCommerce software used by bloggers and online retailers. As a blogger yourself, you’re likely familiar with it. So, for those of you in niches where your audience will also be trying to sell online, Shopify is a great affiliate partnership for you to point them to.
5. Clickbank
Clickbank is much like ShareASale. A diverse marketplace filled with merchants that you pick-and-choose to promote, based on what your audience would be interested in.
6. Rakuten Marketing Affiliates
Rakuten is a leading online store, stocking everything from high-end electronics to pet supplies. If you need it, you can more than likely get it at Rakuten. And they want to pay you for helping to sell anything sold on their store.
Leadpages an extremely powerful online marketing tool. Giving every individual, no matter their level of expertise, the ability to create landing pages that convert well. They offer a product almost unrivalled in their space. So, if you have a digital audience – they’ll want this.
8. StudioPress Affiliate Website
StudioPress is another rather a niche but very worthwhile affiliate to pursue if you have the digital presence audience. They create responsive, adaptable and highly customisable WordPress hosting and themes, that extend the function and accessibility of WordPress fluidly.
9. CJ Affiliate Publisher’s Program
CJ Affiliate is a platform that knows what they’re talking about. They’ve been in the Affiliate Marketing industry since 1998 and that expertise just shines through in every aspect of what they do. With products in every niche, you’d be hard-pressed to find fault with them.
10. Bluehost Affiliate Program
Bluehost is currently one of the top recommended WordPress hosts available. With affordable prices, flexible packages and a great customer support team – there’s a convincing argument as to why they’re so highly recommended. Maybe it’s time you partnered with them too.
11. ConvertKit Affiliate Program
ConvertKit is a leading email marketing platform. With ideology based around being customisable and uniquely fitting to every user, you can understand why they come highly recommended by many top names in the email marketing industry.
12. MaxBounty Affiliate Network
MaxBounty is a newer, up-and-coming affiliate website that already worked with some high-end brands, such as Norton, McAfee and T-Mobile. They pride themselves on doing things that other Affiliate Networks simply don’t do yet, and it’s working out well for them.
13. Google AdSense
Google AdSense is an Online Advertising Network, not an affiliate platform. However, it is arguably the most popular way to earn off a blog. And it works on the same principles…
Promote something on your site, get paid for the interest your audience expresses in it.
14. Tapgerine
Tapgerine is an Online Advertising Program catering specifically for the mobile user audience. While they’re more limited on what they can offer you, what they do offer in terms of mobile marketing, they do really well.
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