Business Tips :Using affiliate programs

Using affiliate programs

Tuesday,June 03 ,2008

Affiliate programs are a great source of revenue if they are used properly.

How is used an affiliate program?

It depends but normally you must follow their rules, and their rules are usually a way protection for their costumers. Anyway, in this case, on an online business the affiliate program usually give us a HTML code or JAVASCRIPT code that we can paste in our website. Each affiliate program works different. Just to give an example:

Google Adsense works by clicks on their ads also I believe they use page impressions on Image ads.
Others like AdBrite also work by clicking their ads but also by page impressions but also they help you to sell ad space.
Amazon works by commissions like eBay.
Clicksor uses the same method as adsense but this also provides another kind of ad format: Inline ads.

An affiliate program usually shares a percentage of the revenue with their affiliates. That is the way it works, but the most important thing is your website relevance with each affiliate program. Let’s suppose that you have a website about fishing, what do you thing is best option to place advertising in your website. Yes! The answer is simple and logical: fishing related items.

But, what will happen if you place unrelated advertising in your website? Your visitors will not be interested on those ads, and maybe those ads will take away your visitors and we do not want that.

How can I know which affiliate program is relevant to my website?

Most of the affiliate programs are general topic advertising, in other words advertisers choose a category to place their ads. In this case each affiliate program has its own system.

For example:

Google Adsense has a system that scans the relevance of your website based on keyword density, URL and title tags. Adbrite let you choose the topic, Amazon and ebay also let you choose the product and so on. To learn more about visit each affiliate program website.

How much can I earn using affiliate programs?

Well, it depends of 4 main factors:

Traffic
More traffic
Traffic again
How much sales does the advertisers have from your website. This feature is used by Google. If the advertisers are not selling from your website Google gives them a discount which is bad for you, eventually if your site still is not selling anything for the advertisers, Google may disable your account. This feature is called SmartPricing.

So, we have traffic, relevance, what is missing? Oh yes, placing of the ads. The place where you put your ads determines if the visitor will be interested on it, or not. The best place to put and ad usually is within the content, also another suggestion is to blend the ad with the design of your website, let your visitors believe that your ads are part of the content and they will click on them.

Category Online Business

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