How hard is it to Make Money with Affiliate Programs?

It is scaringly easy to make a living online, and one way to go about it is using what is called "affiliate programs".

What this means: You sell products via various means (more about this later) and you will get commissions for every sale.

Why is this good?

You sell products or services without actually needing to have the products in question yourself. All you need to do is promoting the products or services for a 3rd party vendor - the purchases, shipping and everything else is handled by your vendor. You dont deal with the customer - you "only" convince them to buy the product through you. You make money without all those hassles.

Signup as an "affiliate" is usually extremely easy - basically everyone can do it and immediately start "selling" whatever product. You can sell real goods like via amazon.com, where people order real goods like books or cds, or you can even sell digital goods, like ebooks, software, signups to sites or whatever service a seller offers.

The biggest known affiliate programs are amazon.com, ebay, clickbank, commission junction, regnow, paydotcom. All those offer a huge variety of products for many, many different niches. This could be health related products, CDs, movies, software, you name it. Some of those programs itself have many known brands under their roof, eg. if you sign up with Commission Junction you can sell products from buy.com and many, many other known brands.

There are huge differences in payouts which certain affiliate programs offer. With some its easier to make money than with others. Amazon for example or Commision Junction offer relatively small commissions - with CJ it depends what rate a particular vendor offers. Usually, their payouts are rather small, in the range of a few percentage points.

Make Money - But look at the payouts

A huge difference makes Clickbank, PaydotCom and Regnow.com, with MOST products giving more commission to the affiliate than what the creator of the product actuallly earns! We are talking about 50%-75% commission. 75% is very common at Clickbank. This means, you as the seller make MORE money than the creator.

The vendors do this since they depend on a huge number of affiliates. If the affiliates see a product being offered in a program with a 75% payout, many thousands of people all over the internet will sell this product. Even if the vendor only gets the smallest share - it still adds up for him since many, many thousands of affiliate partners willingly will promote the product for him on their own sites, because of the high commission. There is good money the affiliate programs.

Basically, you dont occur any significant costs by promoting a product as an affiliate, it's on you how to make customers to buy things  from a 3rd party via you as an affiliate. There are certain ways to start selling which dont cost a thing:

You can make blogs on blogger.com or squidoo.com and write reviews where you use your given links to direct a site visitor to the affiliate programs in question. If the site visitors buys, you get credited the commission.

You can write articles and press releases with reviews of a particular offer and distribute the articles all over the net. On big article directories like ezine they get big exposure and you will sure get the one or other click.

If you are slick, you dont write the articles yourself, you hire someone cheap who writes and distributes the articles, and you hire someone who makes you blogs and websites <-- :)

Aside from the many free ways to promote, you can also use Ads on google or yahoo, so called "PayPerClick" ads. You would get your product from the affiliate programs, set up a website with your review, you set up an ad on Google and you would pay for each click when a visitor clicks to go through your site.

The possibilities to make money with affiliate programs are literally....endless.

There are super affiliates which make a few thousand (!) dollars a day, just by having websites where they have ads and banners for some affiliate program where they get commission for each sale. On a lower scale, earning a few hundred dollars a day is very much doable. It needs some skills and trial and error, but from all ways of marketing affiliate marketing is just really easy since everyone can do it and it is only a matter of work you put in promotion, blog, articles, or how much you are willing to pay for ads.There are so many programs out there it shouldnt be a problem to pick interesting offers. 

All you need is your PC - and in a  few months you can make thousands while you sleep, literally.

G.

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