Want to know how to make money with affiliate programs? Here’s where to start, with a beginner’s guide to what you need to do to start earning money.

Affiliate basics

You’re the affiliate – you’re the person who will represent a company, promoting its products on your website.

You’ll also be known as a publisher or partner – as you are publishing pages online with your website.

The affiliate program is a program run by an advertiser, also called merchant, for its affiliates.

The advertiser will provide you with affiliate links or banners to put on your website. These are specially coded links with your identity built in, so that when somebody clicks on your link and buys a product, you get the commission.

When your visitors click on a link, a cookie is placed on their computer; even if the visitor returns to the sales site a few days or weeks later, you might still get a commission. It depends how long the cookie is valid. Some affiliate programs’ cookies last for only a few days, or a few weeks, or maybe 120 days. Other cookies are “lifetime cookies.”

But watch out – because other programs ask that a visitor buys something on their first visit to the sales site – the Amazon affiliate program works like this. If the customer returns to Amazon later in the day, you won’t earn any commission.

You can also earn money by providing leads – encouraging your visitors to sign up for something or take a particular action – and you get paid a certain amount per lead.

Affiliate networks are big sites such as Commission Junction, Shareasale or Linkshare.

Hundreds of advertisers run their affiliate programs through these networks. This is good news for you, because you can join up with one affiliate network and browse lots of companies all in one place, comparing commission rates, cookie duration, and types of links.

Of course, you can still make money with affiliate programs that are run “in-house” by merchants who choose not to use an affiliate network.

Choosing the best affiliate programs for your site

What do your visitors want?
The products you promote should be very relevant to your website visitors. If your site is about home improvement, ads about free ringtones, debt reduction or wonder diets won’t attract many clicks or sales, as your visitors aren’t seriously looking for those things. They’ve come to your site for something else.

And they won’t appreciate having to make the effort to ignore irrelevant ads. They’ll probably go back to Google and find another site where it’s easier to find what they originally went to your site for! You’ll lose your visitors.

Finding out more about affiliate programs
If you’re a beginner and want to make money with affiliate programs, you might be wondering what’s on offer before you start building your site.

The problem is, you’ll need a website to join up – because the networks want to see that you have a site that is appropriate for their merchants!

No need to panic – because Shareasale, who I have found to be the most user-friendly of my affiliate networks, provide good info about their program and advertisers without you needing to join up first. So I recommend you take a look at the following:

A preview of advertisers on Shareasale
Here you’ll find affiliate program previews, and advertisers listed by their category, such as Gifts, Recreation, Clothing, Computing and so on. It’s interesting to see the range of programs, their commissions – and if you click the “join program” link, you’ll get further detail about each advertiser, which can give you lots more ideas, even if you’re not wanting to join that merchant right now.

Shareasale Affiliate FAQ
More covering of the basics here, from Shareasale’s perspective, with lots of info on how the whole thing works.

Can you really make money with affiliate programs?

You can only make money with affiliate programs (and I’m talking a hundred dollars per month plus here) if your site gets lots of visitors.

Here’s why.

Let’s imagine you get 100 visitors to a page about baby bedding. You have a couple of links on that page that will take your visitors to product pages on the merchant’s site.

How many of your visitors are going to click on those links?

It could be just one – or 1%. That’s a reasonable clickthrough rate for many webmasters.

But nobody’s actually bought anything yet. So now you have to imagine how many visitors who click on the links will end up purchasing something.

Let’s say that only 1% of those that click through buy something. This means that to get one sale, you have to send 100 visitors to the merchant; and in order to send 100 visitors to the merchant, your page will need 10,000 visitors. Help!

Don’t panic yet!

If you think it’s impossible to make money with affiliate programs – it’s not. You just have to be determined!

Improve your click through rate
Here are some tips on improving your click through rates to merchants:

• You can test different kinds of content on the page
• You can test simple affiliate text links, or a banner, or a widget, or whatever other links your merchant offers
• You could try comparing two “best of the best” products in detail – you’re much more likely to get a clickthrough with valuable information like that.

Higher clickthroughs often mean that what you are offering is definitely of interest to your visitors – and you are likely to have a higher sales conversion rate as a result, too – meaning that you are squeezing the most “affiliate dollars” from your visitors!

Remember the golden rule: you’re much more likely to make money from affiliate programs if the products or services you’re promoting are highly relevant to what your visitor is looking for.

So…

Write specific pages
Of course, a general page about everything and anything, talking about nothing very much, isn’t going to get a very good clickthrough rate at all!

Why should anyone bother?

That’s why it’s so important to have specific pages, talking about specific topics, with good info – so that your visitor will naturally click through almost as a matter of course, rather than feeling annoyed or put under pressure to do something.

And a well written, tightly themed site will find much better clickthrough rates than weaker, more general sites – as well as attracting more traffic from the search engines such as Google or Yahoo!