Starting with Affiliate Programs – 5 Top Tips for Beginners

Affiliate programs could be a steady revenue earner from your blogs & websites. With more & more advertisers looking to pay for internet advertising, a good blog or a website could earn you several hundreds of dollars a month.

However, you have to know what works & what doesn’t in the affiliate business. You also have to understand the success criteria & the work that goes behind a successful affiliate earning.

An affiliate is very similar to a reseller. Sellers look for popular & trust worthy blogs, websites & web masters or publishers to promote their products or services. And for every customer that you bring to them, they pay you a commission.

In most of the cases of affiliate marketing you do not have to physically stock, ship or hard sell anything. The parent company does it all for you. However, you do have to spent time & effort in bringing in new customers.

Most of the affiliate programs pay only one time for a new customer, or for a period like a month or 6 months. Some of the better known affiliates also pay for a year or more on any sale done for the customer you introduce to them.

Before you jump in & sign up for any affiliate program, you have to do your home work. Signing up is the easy part, getting customers & hence making money, is very hard. It requires you to consistently promote the product or a service & diligently answer questions of your potential buyers.

Here are the Top 5 things you need to know & do before you get on with any affiliate program. I have tried & tested out all of them successfully.

Successful Affiliate Tip 1: Start Small – look for affiliates that do not expect you to sell in large units to keep up with their affiliate program. A good place to start is with the makers or service providers of tools & systems that you use.

I started with affiliate programs of advertisers that I used - Adbrite pays good money to cover your initial expenses.

Bid Vertiser is another great ad company to pay high dollars to their affiliates.

Chitika is a great tool for both beginners & experienced webmasters to earn some serious money from referrals. Since Chitika has both contextual impressions & click ads, your referred web site owners will likely to have a very steady earning from their ads as well.

Successful Affiliate Tip 2: Align your affiliate programs to your blog or website subject. This has 2 advantages (1) readers could relate directly to what you are advertising from what you are writing (2) you can leverage the co-branding with the manufacturer.

For example, if you are writing about photography you will more likely be able to sell Nikon cameras from your website.

Successful Affiliate Tip 3: Expand your network slowly. Some entrepreneurial networks pay commissions to affiliates to bring in more people to do their business. Webmaster earn credit for Websites when they bring in their friends & business associates.

Join business networks & start building your community online. These networks are different from other social networks like Facebook etc where not much business happens.

Another great network is the Freelancer’s Network where you can also find thousands of freelance writing and editing jobs daily. You have to enroll for $2.95 to set up your account with them. This is a great community of freelancing people who could lead you to more business online.

Successful Affiliate Tip 4: Offer freebies. There is nothing like offering things free to your readers. The Never Blue network affiliates give away free coupons, free electronic gadgets like Computers, iPods etc from sponsors to their readers. This is a great way to be noticed in the internet marketplace.

Join the Never Blue network of associates & start promoting sponsored free gadgets to your readers & web log visitors. They take care of all the accounting & maintenance of records so you could do what you do best – write blogs.
Successful Affiliate Tip 5: Always give due credit to other affiliates. Success on the internet depends on how much you can help others. One way is to respects other affiliates’ earnings. If some entrepreneur is bringing you a nice money making opportunity, do what is necessary so that he / she gets their share of the earning.

When associates & affiliates help each other to succeed, the entire community of web entrepreneurs succeed.
Other Guides to Profitable Affiliate Marketing & Money Making Affiliate Programs:

• Complete List of Advertisers for Affiliate Marketing
• Very High Payout Affiliate Programs from Web Hosting Services
• Affiliate Programs & Business on the Go Opportunities
• Affiliate Commissions from Never Blue Ads
• Affiliate Earning from writing Reviews
• Find thousands of freelance writing and editing jobs daily. Kickstart your writing career for just $2.95. Join the freelancing network
• Excellent Opportunity for Affiliate Earning & Earn Credit for your Website for new Web masters
• Earn Affiliate Money with WidgetBucks
• Join the Chitika Premium Affiliate Network

There are lot more affiliates, but I suggest that you look into these first while you are starting your affiliate marketing. As you become more experienced, you could move into more high paying affiliate programs offered by companies like Google etc.