Become An Affiliate And Make Money Online
If you have a blog or Web site, you may be able to earn money by doing little more than you’re already doing. It’s called affiliate marketing, it’s simple, it’s very popular, and it’s free.
You only have to do two things: Keep up your site (known as an affiliate site) and let online companies use it as a kind of billboard for their advertisements. When visitors to your site click on the ads and do business with the companies on the other end, you get paid.
There are at least three different kinds of affiliate programs: The kind where companies such as Amazon.com work directly with affiliates to distribute their ads; the kind where online affiliate networks, such as ClickBank, connect affiliates and the companies whose ads they run; and the kind in which third parties, such as Google AdSense, distribute ads for a variety of other companies.
In the first kind of program, the simplest, you sign up with a company such as Amazon, display its ads on your pages, and get paid when your visitors click on the ads and buy the company’s products. Amazon’s program is very popular, and it’s one of the oldest on the Web.
In the second kind of program, ClickBank and other affiliate networks let you make your own decisions about which products you want to have advertised on your site. You’ll have to do more legwork with this approach, researching products and making sure they jibe with your site’s content, but the earnings possibilities can be greater too.
The third kind of program is epitomized by Google AdSense, which pays you to host ads for a wide variety of companies. Under this approach, search technology is used to make sure specific visitors get ads relevant to their individual interests. AdSense, for instance, uses visitors’ geographic locations, together with the nature of your site, to tailor ads to the visitors’ tastes.
One of two formulas are used to calculate commissions in most programs: pay-per-click or pay-per-impression. Pay-per-click counts the times visitors click on your ads and uses this as the basis for payments; pay-per-impression counts the times ads show up on visitors’ screens. What you pull down financially will vary based on what you do with your site and the kind of affiliate program you go with.