Affiliate Programs — How to Join Affiliate Programs
The first decision to make is what type of affiliate program to join — to a significant extent this will depend on the type of web-page you have. On my main site Celtnet I employ some very specific affiliate relationships with single vendors on some pages (such as Celtic jewellry to go with my Celtic myths and legends pages). On the more mainstream pages, I use affiliate links provided by the larger affiliate networks and it is on these that I will concentrate here.
Affiliate Netwroks
Perhaps the easiest way of getting affiliate inks for your website is to use the various large affiliate networks available on the web. These generally have several hundred companies under a single umbrella. Sign-up to the network and you have access to a large range of companies under a single umbrella.
Below you will find links to the major affiliate networks:
- 1. ClickBank is probably the largest affiliate network available at the moment, though it does focus on e-books and virtual marketing rather than physical products. You can join ClickBank here.
- 2. MaxBounty Affiliate Webmasters... Join MaxBounty.com and earn the highest CPAs in the market. Our specialty is maximizing payouts to our affiliates. Click here for details
- 3. OneNetwork Another great affiliate network with a large number of companies available. Join the Digital River oneNetwork 2.0 here. Make money!
- 4. ClixGalore One of my favourites as they allow 'deep linking' into individual products offered by the companies they support.
Join the ClixGalore network here ClixGalore also gives you residual income from any affiliate that you sign-up so you can boost your income quickly from this program
- 4. Alternatively you can simply perform a search for 'affiliate program' in the google serach bar provided at the bottom of this page.
Joining 'Campaings'
The affiliate programs themselves act as 'borkers' for various companies. As a result you may have to physically apply for the particular campaign and company you're interested in. Normally this is little more than a formality, However, depending on the particular demographic you're targeting and your expected monthly traffic you may be turned down by a particular company. However, don't take this personally. Just think of how short-sighted that company was because it didn't chose you as its agent. That company's just lost a large number of sales, but you have the freedom to move on to the next partner along.
Once you have signed-up for the campaigns that you're intrested in the marketing from that ponit onwards is entirely up to you. With any luck, the more effort you put in to effectively marketing the products you're representing the greater the rewards you'll reap. To some extent the affiiate links programs will help you in providing 'creatives'. That is, they will provide basic web links as well as banner advertisements and occasional newsletters as to how to market their products most effectively. Generally you're welcome to ether accept or ignore their advice, as you see fit. For the most part, their advice is sensible but it may not fit with your particular web site and traffic model. This is where understanding your own customer base and marketing model is key. After all, no one should be better able to understand what your website is aiming for than you do!
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Conclusion
As long as you have a web site with some decent content joining an affiliate network is fairly easy and you will have a number of merchants falling over themselves trying to get you to represent them. Chose wisely though as matching the company to your web content is the secret to gaining maximum income from affiliate partnerships.
Finally, there is an emerging trend in affiliate marketing, which is using web logs (blogs) to genrate income, as demonstrated by such e-books as how to create a money-making blog or Building A Blog Empire For Profit