online income

How To Make Money Online With Your Affiliate Programs

When I Started Out

How to Make Money Online With Your Affiliate Programs
When I started out, my first year and a half, I didn’t have my own affiliate program. As a matter of fact, my first year and a half I didn’t even have my own products...but once I did, I found it was really cost effective to set up affiliate programs. I knew how to make money online by sending targeted traffic to other people’s sites and I wanted to help other people make money with my own products and programs!
Affiliate Programs are Low Cost to Start
You can set up affiliate programs in a lot of ways...but affiliate programs really take little or no money in order to get rolling, right? I mean, it could be a $30 a month 1ShoppingCart program that already has an affiliate module built in, or it could be a you spend $200 one time to install your affiliate script, or some people choose to spend a lot more for fancier websites...that’s really up to you, the point is you can start really inexpensively if you want. It works-and you can always tweak and grow your affiliate program down the road!
Affiliate Tools
I do think it is a good idea to have some tools ready to give to your affiliates...so they can help promote your site and products. Some of these can be free...most won’t cost you a lot and will pay off.
You can write some sample emails, social networking posts and those are really cool. Maybe add the cost of getting some banners made or something like that. Truth is, most people don’t even do a lot with those, but for those who do it can be really helpful. And if you plan for the banner graphics when you are having your product graphics made the cost will be pretty low.
Who Should have Their own Affiliate Program
So what type of personality does it take to do well with their own affiliate program? Pretty much anyone can...people with information products do really well with affiliate programs because their costs are so low...it really gives you a lot of money to be able to give your affiliates, which of course makes it extremely attractive for them to promote you.
Offline companies and people with physical products can also do really well with affiliate programs. The only businesses that don’t benefit from affiliate programs are companies who just don’t know their numbers...if you don’t know what your margins are, what a new customer means to you in revenue, what adding a person to your list means to you in dollars down the road, then you might struggle to build an affiliate program.