Why Affiliated Programs?
Why do Affiliate Marketing? Well... it is a no risk way to learn how to survive selling things online. (Well very little risk) See, you get all of the benefits of having an online business, but you don't have to put up the cash to make the content, you don't have to worry about programming, you don't have to hire someone to do your graphics or banners, none of that. All you do is the marketing, and if you can't make anything happen with that site, you move to another one. There is nothing lost but your efforts.
What's the catch? Well we want you to sign up to the sites that we work with as like a protégé. We know these sites make us a ton of cash every month, they are honest, they pay on time, and they know what they are doing. We get paid by these sites when you make them money. We don't get paid when you sign up, we only get paid off of the sites cut of what you make. So if a site pays your 50% of every sale and they get 50% they give us a cut off of their 50%. You make the same whether you sign up under us or not.
We know which sites pay for what you do and which sites will scam you and skim off the top. We know which advertising sites produce paid sign ups and which ones generally produce free sign ups.
The 3 Types of Website Traffic
Where does traffic come from? Now I'm not talking about that stuff we all get stuck in during rush hour. Website traffic is essential, if you have no traffic to your website you are not going to get anyone buying your products or reading your articles. Traffic is one of the key components of your website and is available in these three forms.
1. Pay For It.
You can buy traffic typically using what is known as Pay Per Click advertising. The major names in this market are Google and their AdWords program and Yahoo Network Sponsored Search. There are many smaller companies around also but they all follow the same premise.
You create your account, grab a bunch of keywords and create your adverts. You can define the amount you want to spend per click or per day, what geographical areas you want your adverts to appear in and even what time they should appear.
When someone types one of your keywords into for example Google your advert will be displayed down the right hand side of the natural search results. If the searcher then chooses to click on your advert and gets forwarded to your website you will get charged for that click.
The price you pay for each individual click depends on a variety of conditions such as how many other people are competing on that keyword. The more competition the more it costs to be higher up the ranks. The position you want to occupy. The percentage of people who click on your advert, the list goes on.
Pay Per Click advertising can be very successful but has a steep learning curve, it is essential that you do lots of research into your chosen Pay Per Click vender and in the niche you are in.
2. Borrow It
This option is not for everyone, but in certain niches it can be effective. The first method of borrowing traffic is what is called link exchange. This is where you put links to another website on your site and they put links back to you on theirs. This can be beneficial as you can get traffic from a more successful website reasonably quickly. However this traffic is not always targeted.
The second option in the affiliate marketing world is called a joint venture or a JP. This is essentially where you would contact another marketer or company who had products that complements yours. If they are interested they may send a mailing out to their list or put an entry in their blog alerting their visitors about you and your relevant products.
The key things to remember about borrowing traffic is that you have to give something in return. This can make it tricky when targeting very successful websites.
3. Create Traffic
Creating your own traffic is one of the best ways to start bringing people into your website. There are literally hundreds of ways to start creating your traffic but I'm just going to tell you about two of the most popular.
Articles are a great way of generating traffic. You can write your articles about your chosen niche, offering advice, definitions, explanations, news, reviews just to name a few. Once you have created your articles you can put them on your website or blog as content. You can also upload them to article directories or even assemble a few of them into a white paper or ebook to give away to visitors.
Video is currently the big thing on the internet world. Everywhere you look there are videos for everything. 50% of all web traffic is video and YouTube alone receives 12.5% of all the traffic out there. YouTube has made it possible for anyone to upload their videos for the whole world to see. Just as you can create an article about anything you can do the same thing with video. The best option is to do both: Create it in print and create it in video.
