How to choose Affiliates for your Niche Website to make money online

Okay you have just created and published some really wonderful articles, now you are getting interested in generating some money using your content. There are many options to making money online. In this article I will briefly discuss affiliate schemas that can generate you some passive income. My assumption is that you have already signed up with an article publishing directory like Hubpages, if not then click here and signup quickly, remember mother of all evils and trifling extra income is due to procrastination – if only we all jumped up and took action each and every time a money making idea came into our heads, we’ll all be making money like the founders of Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and many more.

For you to make any money with articles that you place on websites, blogs and article directories, you will need a variety of good affiliate links that will help you to generate revenue. It is important that you know where to find affiliates and that you choose the best affiliates for you and your niche site.

When you pick an affiliate, it is important that you determine which companies and products you will profit best from based on the frequency that the product is likely to sell, the demand for that type of product, the affiliate schema on offer from the company. There are several types of affiliates and some will offer you more money or commission from a sale than others. Before you get obsessed with pound signs, remember some products are bound to sell more than others.

“This may seem simple, but you need to give customers what they want, not what you think they want. And, if you do this, people will keep coming back.”
John Ilhan

Earning potential using affiliate programs depend on many factors take for example, if you sell one product four times a year from a small company that gives you £100 per sale and you select another program which is from well known product supplier and you sell 3 times a week at the rate of £10 per sale, you are then likely to make much more money with the £10 per sale product over year then with the first product. Quite often large well known companies will offer a very small payment or percentage earning per sale because they are established and know that their product is likely to sell well.

The most important rule when picking affiliates to promote on your site is to pick products that would be of interest to those who would likely visit your site dedicated to a particular niche. Otherwise you will be promoting a product to a group of people who do not even want nor need it. If your niche site targets parents of young children, then promote products that are relevant to that group of people rather than products that is not for that niche. If your site targets teachers as a niche, then promote teaching products. If you promote gardening products to teachers, you are seriously reducing your chances to making any online passive income no matter how much money the affiliate company offers for a sale.

There are two main ways to find an affiliate company for your niche website.

(1) You can sign up with a company that manages the accounts of hundreds of companies, big and small, and apply for the products within these accounts

or

(2) You can do a web search for companies that would match well with your niche, visit their websites, and see if they advertise an affiliate program and join them.

The answer to that will be a big YES. But it is not an easy task, and you will need to be patient, persistent and imaginative in your efforts.

There is no point creating a web page and publishing it, but then leave it on its own, using that method may not get you the rewards you want. It is important to get into the habit of tendering some TLC (Tender Loving Care) to your web pages, articles and web sites. Learn to optimise your web activity to enhance your ability to increase the traffic to your site. Learn techniques that will allow you to pre-sell products to your viewers, look at page layout and advertising placements to further refine your ability to increase the traffic flow into your site to targeted sales.

There are many to choose from, I am not going to provide you with an endless list, you could easily get them by searching on Google. Affiliate networks provide an opportunity to the internet marketer that is you to make money by promoting other people's stuff. An Internet entrepreneur can start his/her own online business at minimal investment. Affiliate networks works as a middle man between you the publisher and the merchants.

Affiliate networks provide facility like affiliate management, click, sales and lead tracking, recruitment of affiliates to a merchant. They are also helpful to publishers as they can join multiple programs under a single roof and can make money by promoting different offers available in the network.

There are basically three types of Affiliate Networks.

1. CPA Affiliate Networks
CPA Affiliate Networks which are also known as Revenue Share Affiliate Networks works on the basic model where the publishers get rewarded for each action. This action can be Sale or Lead. 80% of the total affiliate networks work on this business model where the publishers are purely paid on performance only.

2. Cost Per Click (CPC) Affiliate Networks
These type of networks pay affiliates for the clicks they refer to the merchants. Affiliates or Publishers are rewarded for each valid click they refer to merchant's website. Here the affiliates are getting paid for Clicks and not for the actions like leads or sales.

3. Cost Per 1000 Impression (CPM) Affiliate Networks

This type of network pay affiliates for placing banners on their website or blogs. The banner impressions are automatically updated from the ad servers.

Here’s the two that I use and have been happy with the services they have given me.

One thing to remember is, do not signup to all the affiliate accounts out there, select one or two that provide you with the best mix of revenue earning facilities, like cash per click, cash per sale, cash per impression and cash per lead and so on (I only use cash here because it’s not costing me anything, but from my perspective ‘Cost-Per-Click’ is ‘Cash-Per-Click, just to confuse you, if you’re not already). Also note that there is no point putting in adverts or links if they do not attract attention from your visitors. Make sure to fine tune your affiliate marketing initiatives one at a time before moving onto other projects. I know the temptation is to put mash together my pages as possible with as many adverts of differing products on pages which just look vulgar and do nothing to entice viewers back, never mind getting them to order.