How Websites Earn Good Cash From The Best Affiliate Marketing Programs

Affiliate marketing is a method where you promote other web business (referred to as merchants/advertisers) on your website and in return, you the affiliate ( or the publisher), is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through your efforts.

Affiliate marketing - using one site to drive traffic to another - is the stepchild of online marketing. While search engines, e-mail and RSS Blogs capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliates continue to play a fundamental role in e-retailer’s marketing strategies.

History of Affiliate Marketing

As the story goes, affiliate marketing all started at a cocktail party. Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon.Com, was chatting with a party guest who wanted to sell books on her web site.

This got Bezos thinking. Why not have the woman link her site to Amazon’s and receive a commission on the books that she sold? Soon after, Amazon introduced the "Amazon Associates Program". It was a simple idea. Amazon associates would place banner or text links on their site for individual books or link directly to the Amazon’s home page.

When visitors clicked from the associate’s site through to Amazon.com and purchased a book, the associate received a commission. With that thought, Bezos created Amazon.com’s affiliate program in July 1996.

Global Facts on Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has grown quickly since its inception. The e-commerce website, viewed as a marketing toy in the early days of the web, became an integrated part of the overall business plan and in some cases grew to a bigger business than the existing offline business.

According to one report, total sales generated through affiliate networks in 2006 was £2.16 billion in the UK alone. The estimates were £1.35 billion in sales in 2005. Marketing Sherpa's research team roughly estimates affiliates worldwide will earn $6.5 billion in bounty and commissions in 2007.

The increasing number of internet businesses in combination with the increased number of people that trust the current technology enough to do shopping and business online caused and still causes a further maturing of affiliate marketing.

Payment Methods

81% of affiliate programs today use revenue share (Cost per sale) as compensation method. The remaining 19% use Cost Per Action.

Cost Per Action

Cost per mile (CPM) requires you to only load the merchants advertisements on your website and show them to your visitors in order to get paid commission.

Cost per click (CPC) requires one additional step in the conversion process in order to generate revenue for you. You must not only be seen to make visitors aware of the displayed Ad, but also pursue them to click on it and visit the advertisers website.

Google uses the CPC method to pay commissions to affiliates who display Ads for its Ad-sense affiliate program.

Cost per Sale or (Performance Marketing)

CPS requires that referred visitors from your site do more than visiting the advertisers website in order for you to get paid a commission. The advertiser must convert that visitor into a sale first.

It is therefore in the best of your interests to send the best targeted traffic to the advertiser as possible in order to increase the chance of a conversion. In other words the risk and loss is shared between you and the advertiser.

For this reason affiliate marketing is also called "performance marketing", in reference to how employees that work in sales are typically being compensated.
Employees in sales are usually getting paid sales commission for every sale they close and sometimes a performance incentive for exceeding targeted baselines.

Affiliates are not employed by the advertiser whose products or services they promote, but the compensation models applied to affiliate marketing are very similar to the ones used for people in the advertisers' internal sales department.

Required Website Standards

95% of web visitors use search engines like Yahoo, Google, MSN, ASK Jeeves, and so on to look for information before committing their credit cards. Like wise, search engines gain prominence by listing websites with the most relevant information to a surfer.

Sites made up mostly of affiliate links with limited information are usually badly regarded as they do not offer quality content.

In 2005 there were active changes made by Google whereby certain websites were labeled as "thin affiliates and were either removed from their index, or taken from the first 2 pages of the results and moved deeper within the index.

In order to avoid this categorization, a web site owner who subscribes to affiliate marketing must create real value within their website that distinguishes their work from the work of spammers or banner farms with nothing but links leading to the merchant sites.

Affiliate links work best in the context of the information contained within the website.

For instance, if your website is about "How to maintain healthy teeth", within the content, an affiliate link leading to a merchant's ISP site would be appropriate. If your website is about sports, then an affiliate link leading to a sporting goods site might work well within the content of the articles and information about sports.

The idea is to publish quality information within the site, and to link "in context" to related merchant's sites.

Way To Go

If you have a website aimed at other website owners or just selling/publishing your services, join tried and tested affiliate programs to earn lifetime referral and Ad commissions.

Cash from affiliate marketing will definitely make up for your efforts and keep you motivated to even give more information.

Dr. Ken Evoy's Site Build It ranks highest at Number 1, where it belongs.

Our site earns descent commissions from Ken's affiliate program now, with only minimal maintenance.

Ken is a truly amazing, multi-talented individual. Among his achievements, he has taught medicine, designed toys and games which earn millions of dollars in royalties.

SiteSell's fast-selling Site build it (SBI) is our top most commission earner.

It makes it easy for you to create your own website simply and easily, even if you have no technical knowledge at all. It analyzes which themes will be most profitable for your website.

Even better, it helps you optimize the pages for the main search engines and turns promoting your site into a push-button task. This remarkable tool also generates your Google and Yahoo! Sitemaps and automatically submits them when necessary so you don't have to!

Site Build It! doesn't just teach you search engine optimization. It teaches you Internet and affiliate marketing in detail.

Most important of all, it teaches you how to be successful. No wonder SBI! has thousands of happy users.

Dr.Ken Evoy explains how SBI changes lives

Ken Evoy was the first to introduce the concept of PREselling to affiliates. This is the process of building relationships with your visitors and putting them into a warm, willing-to-buy mood so they are much more likely to make purchases based on your recommendations.

The Site Build It! Action Guide will show you how to master this technique to drive your affiliate conversions through the roof. You won't just be building a website, you'll be building a long-term web business.

There's an incredible private SBI forum where SBI owners and users share tips and help each other. There's nothing else like it on the Internet.

SBI! sites succeed. 61% of SBIers end up in the Top 3%. And only SBI! sites prove success. You'd think that others would if they could, wouldn't you? See the proof

As well as offering fantastic value for money in their affiliate marketing program, SiteSell President Ken Evoy works extremely hard to help his affiliates earn money. You can trust him to OVER-deliver on his promises.

The SiteSell affiliate marketing program offers:

• Outstanding value for money. You can feel comfortable promoting excellent products.
• Lifetime commissions. You don't just earn a commission on the first sale. You earn a commission on every purchase by that customer - for life. Think about that. You sell once, earn indefinitely!
• Two-tier commission structure. You earn revenue on the sales made by the people you refer to Ken.
• Limited number of affiliates. Your efforts are protected.
• A fair contract, which has non-terminatable/non-modifiable features. Ken looks after YOUR interests.
• FREE Ultimate Link Tracker. You save time and effort by quickly learning which ad campaigns work and which ones don't.
• The BEST manual for affiliates - 224 pages packed with useful ideas - totally FREE. You receive excellent advice to get you started earning money.
• A site that SELLS!
  Ken's site makes the sale for you.

All these features ensure this program is a long-term winner.

Ken writes THREE newsletters which consistently offer the most detailed, helpful, step-by-step advice for affiliate marketing.

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Join the SiteSell 5 Pillar Affiliate Program here.

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