Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing Programs
This page accompanies the book, Hire Your Job, Fire Yourself. This page is referenced by the financing chapter and the marketing chapter. The purpose of this page is to provide additional and fresh information regarding affiliate marketing programs.
About the chapter section, Affiliate Advertising
Here is a segment from the finance chapter regarding the use of affiliate advertising as a source of revenue: Many companies have found great ways to leverage their own websites, brochures, and marketing with affiliate advertising, thus producing residual income. This essentially involves selling advertising space to companies who can benefit from your target customers. There are excellent online affiliate marketing programs that can provide you with residual income through clicks, impressions, or purchases.
Let’s say, for example, that ProFlowers.com, a leading online source for purchasing flowers that will arrive fresh and in the mail of your intended recipient, is offering an affiliate program through a major affiliate business. They might offer you three different ways to get paid, and sometimes they even combine all three (these are FICTIONAL payoffs):
- Impressions. They might pay you $1.00 for every 1,000 views of the affiliate advertising graphic. If you have a high-traffic website and you see a million people a month, this can be a nice little chunk of passive revenue sent to you just because you posted this ad through an affiliate program. The affiliate vendor is going after name recognition with your viewers and is hoping some will click on the link as well.
- Clicks. They might pay you fifty cents every time someone clicks on the link from your website, whether or not they buy anything. In reality, this may range from a few pennies per click or it might be a few dollars, depending on whether your target audience is their target audience. Your ability to recommend the item/company might help encourage someone to click on it, but you want to make sure you maintain credibility by not recommending junk, else your viewer won’t trust you next time. Credibility is especially important in a blog post, Facebook post, newsletter link, etc.
- Purchases. ProFlowers might be willing to give you 30% of an actual purchase transaction that gets finalized because of your efforts to send customers their way. This doesn’t cost the customer anything extra; the retailer is paying you the finder’s fee out of their own revenue. In reality, and depending on the affiliate partner, this can be a fraction of a percent up to over a whopping 70%!
As you can see, affiliate marketing can be a great source of residual income to help you build up revenue while you sleep.
Affiliate Programs
Affiliate programs are popping up all over the place. They vary widely in features so you will want to research and compare the programs to find the best fit for your business model.
- Individual company program. Many larger companies operate their own affiliate program. In some cases, they white label a larger program so the outside world doesn’t know it’s operated by someone else. To find out, go to bottom of the website of a specific company that you want to promote. If there isn’t an Affiliate link there, look around for something related to Partners, Business Partners, Resellers, etc.
- Commission Junction. This is one of the granddaddies in the affiliate program. They have some of the best payment features and one of the largest collection of advertising businesses for you to choose from, assuming your target market isn’t so specialized that you need to be much more selective. The author of the book has an account with CJ (actually, one of his companies has the account). When the author chooses to share specific products and services to help the readers, the team maintaining this website will check to see if CJ happens to have an affiliate agreement with that company or product. If so, the link will be setup to take advantage of that affiliate program (at no extra cost to you). Often times, that affiliate agreement allows you, the reader, the obtain a special discount that you cannot otherwise obtain without using that link. that of Some of the links on this website are indeed affiliate links through Commission Junction.
- We’re researching others…
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