There are now a ton of affiliate programs on the internet and everyday more and more new programs are being created. Affiliate marketing is now one of the best ways to make money online and for good reason. You do not need your own product to start with and you can choose almost any industry to start with.
However there are some affiliate programs that provide better results as far as income is concerned than others. One of the most popular affiliate networks is Clickbank. They offer digitally delivered products like e-books and software. The advantage with Clickbank is that they offer large commissions, often as high as 75% since the products are digital and there is very low cost to produce them. The challenge with Clickbank is the massive competition you are faced with at least in the main categories of ‘marketing and ads’, ‘health and fitness’ and ‘business’.
This does not mean you cannot make money with Clickbank, it just means that it will require an advanced level of skill to succeed. So if you are new to internet marketing you may want to look at the other categories that are not so competitive and promote products that are not already being heavily promoted by other affiliates. Look for products with a gravity between 10 and 40. The gravity number is simply an indicator of the number of affiliates promoting the product. The higher this figure the more affiliates there are that are currently promoting it.
Commission Junction is another great affiliate network you may want to look into. The great thing about commission junction is that they have many fortune 500 companies like Lending Tree, HSBC etc that have affiliate programs. The best kinds of affiliate programs to pick from commission junction are the pay per lead programs. These kinds of programs will pay you certain amount usually between $10-$70 for every lead you send them.
The ‘Loans’ and ‘Credit card’ categories offer these kinds of high paying lead based programs. It is not hard to have someone fill in a form so I highly recommend you look into these kinds of programs. Also you have the major benefit of associating with brand name companies that people will recognize and trust. This again will help with improving conversion rates. Make sure that when you go to apply for these programs, you have a site that is highly relevant to their category.
If you do not have a site, then register a domain that contains the category name in the domain name. So if you want to apply for mortgage loans affiliate programs, pick a domain name like ‘learnaboutmortgages.com’ or ‘mortageloansinfo.com’, or something similar and make sure to add relevant content to that site. You can get great relevant content from article directories like Ezinearticles.com or Goarticles.com, so throw a few articles onto your site.
Also make sure your site looks professional as many of these fortune 500 companies are very picky about their affiliate partners. Just do a search for free templates and pick one that looks similar to the site of the program you are applying to. Use their site as a guide as to what your site should try to look like,
The challenge with these programs is the sheer competition you are faced with both in Search engine optimization and in pay per click. So it is a good idea as far as pay per click is concerned to look at the smaller pay per click engines as you may be able to get traffic cheaper due to less competition. Also check out Adbrite.com as they offer pretty cheap rates also for advertising on their network.
With Search engine optimization, do not be intimidated by the competition. Check out some of our SEO articles and learn what it takes to dominate a market. In time if you use those strategies, you can rank well for almost any keyword you choose, it just comes down to putting in the effort to create a well optimized site and also using articles to get both traffic and backlinks. Another useful affiliate network is Linkshare.com and Azoogle.com, they are similar to Commission Junction so check them out too.
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