How to Make Money with Affiliate Programs: Marketing Strategies Explained

The first strategy to make money online is building a list.

This strategy is the most important step to continue to make money long term. If you do not already have some type of autoreponder system you need to get one. Don't be cheap here either because your entire business will hinge on this one piece of software.

You can build your list many different ways. You can buy leads from reputable list building companies and get them into your autoresponder. Most good list building companies will have an option to send an email to your autoresponder so you don't have to manually input the lead's information.

Another effective way of building your list is from the traffic that visits your website. This step, which is probably the most effective, does require you to have a website in order to implement an opt-in list form. Of course if your Affiliate program does offer a list management service then you can send traffic to the affiliate URL, but I don't recommend it as you will usually not be able to email the entire list with special offers.

To make the most of your opt-in form and get the most signups, you should place it in your sales page text. It should be strategically located in the sales text after you present a problem. The title of your autoresponder email series should address the problem by offering a solution. In the example below we will assume that I am selling a hosting package and I want opt-in subscribers to my email course for back-end sales.

Example: You can use the pre-built websites or build your own. Many people think that building a website is hard, but I can show you how easy it really is. Take my 10 day email course "Build a Website with Ease" [signup form here].

When I say traffic, I don't just mean any old traffic, I mean targeted traffic, people who are motivated and ready to buy can and will make you money. You can use programs and techniques such as Google Adwords, bloging, article writing and linking to drive targeted traffic to your website.

Google Adwords is a resource offered by Google in which you can pay for your site to be show when certain keywords are queried in their search engine. The secret to using Adwords is not to bid high on popular keywords. Instead, what you do is find similar keywords that still describe your website, but are used much less frequent. These keywords will cost much less to bid on and will allow you to spread your money out over many different keywords, getting the most bang for your buck. You can use this handy little tool to find similar keywords: inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Bloging is another great way to drive targeted traffic to your website. To get the most out of this technique the blog should be hosted on the same website as the sales page witch links to your affiliate program. Once its setup all you have to do is fill your blog with good quality content.

I recommend writing your own content which specifically relates to your affiliate program and or products. Once you have some content you will need to submit your RSS feed to the as many blog search engines as you can. This will put your blog out there for other webmasters to use as content feeds on their websites.

This win-win situation allows webmasters to have quality content on their website, which increases the value of that website while driving targeted traffic directly to you. This is done by the URL link that you conveniently placed under your name after the blog was written.

That means that your link is on a blog feed that is on thousands of websites. Not only do people click those links but Google sees these links pointing back to you and thinks that you're popular and you are rewarded with a higher page rank.

Article writing is basically the same as bloging except the information in an article will need to have more useful content and be peppered with keywords that the webmasters are looking for. After completing your article you will submit (syndicate) it to content sites as opposed to blog search engines.

Content sites are places where webmasters go to find specific content to offer their readers. If you are a good writer you may at some point build up a name for yourself and finagle a deal with a webmaster to write exclusives for his site. His readers get great exclusive content and you get highly motivated targeted traffic.

Linking is perhaps the most widely used form of increasing traffic and page rank. However, if done incorrectly you could end up hurting your Google page rank and ultimately loosing potential buyers. You will need your own website for this technique as you will need a 'links' page to place your reciprocal links on.

Many people go and submit their URL links to link farms in an attempt to trick Google into giving them a better page rank. This does NOT work; in fact Google has been known to penalize websites for engaging in these activities.

The secret to linking is to find websites in your niche market which have a Google page rank of 4 or above and enticing the webmaster to list your link on their website. You may think that you would be helping your competition, well you would be. But your competition would be helping you as well. It's better to send leaving traffic to a partner than just having them close their browser window, and remember that works both ways.