Affiliate Marketing Opportunities as a Product Owner and Promoter

Another method to earn money on the ‘net is to use affiliate marketing both as a product promoter and as an affiliate for other people’s products. It’s a win-win situation to have other people driving targeted traffic to your domain so that you can split the sale.

The most profitable way to leverage this concept is to play both sides of the coin – to launch an affiliate program allowing others to sell your wares as well as becoming an affiliate to make a commission whenever you recommend someone else’s product to your visitors and subscribers.

Affiliate Marketing for Other Product Owners

You can start making money on the ‘net without ever having your own product or website if you want to. The first step is to go to sites like ClickBank, PayDotCom, LinkShare, or Commission Junction and get your affiliate ID code that lets you get credit for the sales you make.

There are many ways you can promote to the buying public, including:

Website Pre-Sell

A website pre-sell can be done by hosting a content-laden website where you write your own articles and include text links back to the product owner’s site using your affiliate ID code.

Some people also create specific review websites where you compare and contrast similar products and write about the pros and cons of each one. Regardless of which product the consumer decides to buy, you make a commission, because each one carries your affiliate link.

With a review site, you don’t want to boast about every single product as if it has no faults. One good maneuver is to find the missing link in the product and then fill the void.

For instance, if you were promoting a potty training guide to the parenting niche, you might discover they left out a section on traveling with a potty training child, or how to potty train a child attending daycare.

You would create a short report providing the solution to whatever was missing, and then offer it as a freebie if the person decides to buy through your link. All you have to do is get targeted traffic there, and let them decide.

Your traffic can come from major search engines as you optimize your site for search engine positioning, or you can pay for traffic using click sites and pay per click search engines.

Pay Per Click Traffic

As an affiliate, you may also want to employ the use of PPC search engines like Google AdWords. Make sure you never set limits you can’t afford with paid traffic options. The clicks can add up faster than you thought possible.

Pay per click traffic isn’t just an option for AdWords ads, which are the ads seen on the right side of a search engine results page. You can also use banner ads placed strategically on websites whose traffic mimics the audience you need.

CPA (Cost Per Action) is another method you can use, where you pay for an action, not just a click. You might pay each time someone opts into your subscriber list, or fills out a form for you.

Email leads that you purchase can be another paid form of traffic for the affiliate marketer. You can buy someone else’s list or purchase a solo ad to be blasted out to their subscribers. Just make sure the list isn’t something that’s outdated or has been exhausted with other ads relentlessly.

Launching Your Own Affiliate Program

As a product owner, it pays to launch your own affiliate program. There are networks you can use that help with the process, such as ClickBank, LinkShare, Commission Junction, and PayDotCom.

Each one has a different set-up. For instance, with ClickBank, they handle all of the affiliate’s income, paying them via check sent to the affiliate through snail mail. On PayDotCom, however – you pay your affiliates, and you can either do it instantly with a PayPal transaction, or by cutting a check to mail to them.

On ClickBank, anyone can sign up to promote your products. But on LinkShare and Commission Junction, you can wield the power of approval, ensuring only the people you want promoting your products are able to.

Launching your own affiliate program allows you to expand your sales. Instead of you doing all of the work to bring targeted visitors to your site, you’re employing an army of affiliates to send traffic your way, for no advanced payment, but a cut of the profits instead.

You don’t pay for traffic that doesn’t convert into a sale, like you would with a pay per click search engine or other paid advertising technique. A site can’t be profitable until it gets traffic to it – and that’s true for any niche using any marketing approach.

Regardless of what affiliate management tools you use to run your program, you’ll want to ensure you give your affiliates as many tools of their own to use in promoting your links on the ‘net.

The easier you make it for them, the more traffic they’ll bring in. Every affiliate toolbox should include autoresponders they can use for their list, banner ads, ecover graphics, forum sig files, and solo ads they can blast to their list.

Set your commission payout so that it’s big enough to entice top affiliates. That means at least 50% for a moderately priced product. You can get away paying less if you offer a high-dollar product on the ‘net because the affiliate still makes a good deal of money in sales.

If you choose one of the options that lets you pay affiliates directly, make sure you always pay on time. You don’t want disgruntled affiliates moving on and promoting your competitors because you mishandled your management of the program.

If you’re a webmaster, you can even use Google’s program called AdSense and leverage it as a sort of affiliate program where you earn cash every time someone lands on your site and clicks through on one of your links. The money the advertiser pays in is shared between you and Google.

Affiliate marketing is like having a football team. Without the rest of the team, the quarterback may still be a good player, but he can’t score a touchdown on his own. With affiliates, your sales will skyrocket so that you meet your financial goals each and every month of the year.