Clickbank is one of the easiest ways to get started promoting products as an affiliate. Unlike other affiliate networks, you don’t have to have a website in order to be approved as an affiliate. In fact, you don’t have to do much of anything to sign up aside from have an email address. You can use clickbank.com as a means to generate easy links that you can use in any number of different internet promotion strategies.
Many businesses don’t want to manage their own affiliate programs so they sign up with companies that manage their affiliate program for them. These are affiliate networks that manage the relationships between the businesses and the affiliates. This means that as an affiliate, you can get access to several businesses through one affiliate network. Depending on the network, you may still have to apply to be accepted by each business individually.
Another popular type of affiliate marketing is called CPA which stands for Cost Per Acquisition. This is a scenario in which the company whose products or services you’re promoting is going to pay you for a lead. So, when a visitor to your site completes some action, you get paid. This may be as simple as someone putting in an email address all the way through someone completing a survey or multi-page application.
If you were to take your links from Clickbank and try to find a place to start promoting affiliate programs, the easiest would probably be online classified ad websites. There are some major disadvantages. The main one being that because it’s free, there are a lot of other affiliates trying to do the same thing so the number of clicks you get back to your affiliate program may be relatively small compared to other sources and the conversion percentage may suffer. The important part to promoting on classified sites and anywhere for that matter is to make sure you’re using and keeping a record of the tracking IDs. Make a unique tracking ID for every site or advertisement that you use. If you don’t have a way to track your results, when you start getting sales, you won’t know where they came from and won’t know what to duplicate.
Article marketing is one of the best ways to promote affiliate products. Depending on which article directories you use, the idea is to write the article on a topic that is related to the product you’ll be trying to promote and submit that article to article directories. The idea is to submit unique articles so that the search engines rank those articles which gets traffic to the articles and clicks to the links in your “resource box” or “author profile”. I’ve found from personal experience that the click through rate for people who click on the links in your resource box is anywhere from 5 to 15% depending on the article and the specific call to action in the resource box.
You can use social media websites to promote an affiliate program as well. Some social media sites that are easy to use and easy to setup are Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com, Ning.com and several others sites similar to this that allow individual users to setup free accounts and create pages with whatever content they choose. These social sites typically have guidelines and some have regulations that might affect what you do to promote specific affiliate products. If you provide good solid advice and content, you’ll be ok with most of these types of sites.
Another way to promote affiliate products is through blogging. Some people use the blog to specifically sell their products, other people will use a blog as a means to get traffic usually for some controversial topics or instructional topics then promote products as advertisements on their sites. Blogging can be a great strategy to help you get traffic to your affiliate promotions.
A more “traditional” or “old school” website can work as well. I wouldn’t recommend this method for most people as the automation and upkeep is typically not very easy and your ability to leverage other people’s work is diminished significantly. If you want to run your own website, I’d still recommend that you consider a blog platform, such as wordpress that will help you manage your content, but not have to rely on knowing any html and the look and the feel of the site is very customizable.
Pay per click advertising is another way to drive traffic to your website or affiliate program. This is one of the methods that can have the best results based on the ability to track visitors and what actions they take based on what words they just searched for. With this knowledge comes significant power because if you can approach pay per click advertising scientifically and make this a “numbers game”, you’ll always be able to get traffic, test what converts and what doesn’t and keep what works and drop what doesn’t. This is a sure way to be profitable if you can get past the initial expense of the learning curve.
These are only a few of the methods of promoting affiliate products. My advice is to pick one, spend a little time learning more about it and then start doing. There are things about affiliate marketing that you’ll never know until you try. Plus, you can’t make any money by just learning about this stuff. Come up with a solid plan and start promoting. Start with the options that don’t have a high cost and go from there. Good luck!
In addition to writing articles similar to this one, I also promote affordable web hosting and bluehost coupon. I have started podcasting again. You can find me by searching for Brian Armstrong in iTunes.
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