How to make money selling other people's stuff!

You may have heard the words 'Affiliate Marketing' and not really known what it was.

Affiliate marketing is basically placing links to companies or to specific products offered by companies. When your site visitors click on the link and make a purchase, you make a percentage of the sale. That's how it works! You don't have to do anything else except lead the customer to the sale. You get paid for the lead or sale you generate.

There are many websites that offer affiliate marketing - essentially they are affiliate marketing networks where the advertisers pay to have their affiliate marketing advertised and managed.
You as a person putting the links on your site or blog, are referred to as a 'publisher.' As a publisher, you should never pay to be an affiliate. I want to stress again, that you do not pay to be an affiliate.

There are several places you can sign up to be a free affiliate publisher. My favorite is Commission Junction, because it has many major retailers, and I am able to find advertisers and product links that work well with certain pages of my website or blog topics. Once you sign up, look through the advertisers by category to find good matches for your website. Look for companies whose product line is something you think your site visitors would enjoy. I think that is a key of affiliate marketing, if you gear everything toward your site's visitors and not your own needs, you will do well.

Linked products or companies should be associated with what you do a little bit - for example, if you sell handcrafted candle holders but you don't make candles, you can link a company that sells candles, or better yet, show picture links of candles or make an entire 'store' page of candles. It ties in. It is hard not to be tempted by advertising an i-pod, because that's an expensive product, but that wouldn't do very well on a page of candleholders...see what I mean?

I also have an affiliate account with ShareASale.com but I haven't done very well with that one. They do tend to have quite a few smaller companies with unique items.

Amazon.com also has an affiliate program but they call it being an "Associate."
To sign up on Amazon.com's affiliate program, click HERE
The nice thing about Amazon's program is that you can easily modify the links to coordinate in with your website's colors. You can link to any Amazon product. More and more attractive affiliate link options are being added all the time.

How much can you make doing this? It starts out pretty small and depressing, I'll be honest with you. This is something to begin working on when you have some quiet downtime in your business. If you've never done it before, I wouldn't recommend trying to start it in your busiest time of the year. Start at your quiet time of the year, just start with one company - again, I recommend Commission Junction because it has so many companies you can link and try.

I make about $30 per Quarter with my affiliate links. It's pretty small beans I know, but once your links are set, showing the right company or products in the right spot, you can just leave it alone. When your account gets to the dollar amount you've set, they automatically send you a check. The amount you make is directly related to the amount of your website traffic. Put links on the busiest pages of your site whenever possible.

So if you want to get started, here are the steps and tips:

• Sign up

• Browse companies and products and think about where they would fit well on your site or blog

• Apply to programs

• Set up 'Channels' - this is setting up identifiers for your pages so statistics of the site will tell you where your hits are coming from.

• Add the links. If they don't have a link you can use effectively (need a different size, etc), don't be afraid to email the company affiliate manager and ask for help. They are there to help the affiliate program be successful so they love to hear from you. Remember there are real people behind each program!

• Return to the affiliate website to check statistics of hits. If you don't have hits from a certain page or location on your blog, perhaps you will want to move it to a different page or location, or remove the link altogether and replace with something that will be more active.

• Remove any inactive links (advertisers who have left the program... you might still have their link on your page, but purchases won't earn anything for you because the advertiser has closed their affiliate account) So you don't want those left on your site...your space is money.

• Think seasonally, what products could you link for different times of the year?

• Don't let your website become a horrendous pile-up of affiliate links. It looks tacky, makes it look like you aren't serious about your main business. Allow a maximum of one banner link per page of your site. (I mostly have mine in my links pages of my site and only occasionally put a banner on my main page).

• Links should complement the colors of your website, not exactly match it. For instance, if your website background is dark green, then links with background colors would do well if they were light green because that coordinates but will still stand out. Don't put orange links on dark green background just because they will stand out. You wan the links to stand out, but not be too overbearing. Set it up so they blend but are still noticeable enough that people will click. Here is an example from my site: LINK
  

There is really too much about affiliate networking to be able to put it all in one blog post, but I hope this will be enough to help you get started. It gets a lot easier to do the more you work with it.