I’ve been sitting at home for a week straight and now I get paid to do it. How is this possible? Well, I have a deal with several online merchants who pay me every time someone uses my website to find their products. You may have heard of this before; It’s called affiliate marketing.
With the cost of primetime TV skyrocketing, savvy businesses are turning to the Internet for a more consistent audience. Amazon set the standard when it launched its affiliate program in 1997, and it’s caught on in a big way: now, everyday people like me can help out and bring in some extra cash.
First I had to make my own website. It’s pretty easy to do, although I was a bit intimidated before I started. Once I started looking around, I discovered that there are many sites dedicated to helping businesses and affiliates get connected. Affiliate management programs guide you step by step and have comprehensive lists of merchants who want your help. They’ll also walk you through creating a website from scratch and host it when you’re done.
If you want to find out for yourself, you can get a free site builder like HTML Writer or Spider Writer. It takes a bit of time if you’re not familiar with the script, but once you get the hang of it, it’s easy.
After creating your web page, it only gets easier. You just need to get noticed by discovering what people are looking for. There’s a free Google keyword suggestion tool that’s perfect for this: It tells you how many people on average are searching for a particular phrase, and how many websites there are that use the phrase near the top of their page. The lower the competition, the better chance your page will make it near the top of the stack.
Once you’ve grabbed their attention, you need to deliver by showing your traffic where to go next. When they click on a link to a merchant, you get paid! Many companies pay affiliates only when the customer buys something, but you can also find pay-per-click offers. The more pages you have, the more people will go through your site; it’s only a matter of time before people buy.
If you want to get into the newest marketing technique today, click on the affiliate links you see all over the web. Once you’re set up, you can sit back and let other people earn your money.