Most readers come to my site for one thing, to learn how to make money. Sure, this blog started off as a way to document my journey through debt but it has since transcended into something altogether different. So today, I’m going to talk about affiliate marketing as I know that is a topic a lot of my readers find interesting.
Now I know a lot of you are new readers and are just getting started in the world of making money online. But like with most things in life, the best thing to do is just dive in and give it a go and when it comes to making money online, affiliate marketing is a great place to start.
About CPA/Affiliate Marketing
Typically, there are three fundamental ways to make money from your blog. The first is selling private ad or post space. The second is by placing banners/links where you’re paid for each click generated and the third is via CPA (cost per action) where you’re paid when one of your users clicks through to an affiliate and makes a purchase of the product or service on offer. When this occurs, you’re typically paid either a fixed rate commission per sale or a percentage of the sale price.
Obviously, the above is highly scalable and literally hundreds of thousands of companies offer affiliate arrangements in order to push sales of their products and services. But in most cases, you can’t deal with such companies directly, you need an affiliate network acting as a mediator to collate and organise the offers, provide the advertising media for your blog and ultimately manage the payments to you.
Such networks also allow you to manage multiple arrangements from one central location. It’s rare that your blog would only ever want to advertise one product or service. Most offer multiple and rather than maintaining and dealing with lots of different relationships. Using an affiliate network such as the one outlined below is the way forward.
Network of Choice
Whilst there are lot of networks out there, when you’re just starting out you’re going to want one that’s easy to use, has lots of offers, lots of creatives to use on your blog and most importantly, one is who is a reliable payer! The network that ticks all those boxes is undoubtedly Admitad.
admitad is a well-established player in the game with over 540,000 active publishers at the time of writing and over 1350 active advertisers. That’s a LOT of money making opportunities right there. They even boast of someone earning $60,397 yesterday – think about that for a second – what would you do with that level of earnings!
Getting Started With admitad
Getting started with admitad could not be easier; all you have to do is head on over to admitad.com and hit the “I’m a Publisher” button. You will then be presented with a couple of forms where you’ll fill in information about yourself and your desired login credentials.
On the second form, you’ll be asked information about the website you want to advertise on. This is obviously quite straightforward but you’ll also need to select a category for your website and outline how you intend to promote the affiliate offers. Most people in this case would literally say that they intend to place adverts on their blog and outline their traffic sources such as Google/Search Engines and so on.
Once your account has been approved, you will then get access to all of admitad’s extensive reporting system and advertiser management features. You can then literally select the advertisers you wish to partner with and if approved you’ll be presented with creative media to add to your website. It couldn’t be easier.
Once all that is done it’s down to you to drive traffic to the offers and ultimately make yourself some money!
admitad Features
admitad boasts an extremely feature rich panel. In terms of advertisers you can quickly and easily search by category and you will see a list of actual advertisers you can partner with. Each advertiser listed also has certain metrics attached to it. For example, upon viewing an individual advertiser you can see how they rate in general, the eCPC (estimated cost per click) and a conversion rate. You can also see the advertisers approval rate. All of the above should help you quickly and easily identify advertisers in your sector and you can roughly gauge how each would perform if you were to advertise them.
In terms of reporting, the statistics available are second to none. Upon logging in you can quickly see a 30 day report that will outline your earnings, impressions, clicks and actions. All of which can help you quickly and easily identify how your sites are performing as a whole. You can then drill down further and see the above information related to specific advertisers so you’re able to see if someone is performing particularly well.
The overall key to affiliate marketing is trial and error. You’re not going to hit it off day one, in reality you’re probably going to need to trial lots of different programs before finding one that converts the best (and makes you the most money) for your specific traffic.
What to offer?
The key to finding a good program to advertise is to match what is on offer to your traffic/readership. You might spot an excellent advertiser in terms of eCPC and conversion rates via admitad’s panel but that doesn’t mean to say it’s going to perform at that level with your traffic.
As an example, if you’re running a blog about getting started in blogging or making money online. You’ll have much better success advertising things that people will need to get started in that such as domain names, web hosting, website marketing programs etc. These will convert as a result of your traffic. However, if you’re advertising new cars or holidays to this demographic, it’s likely to fail. If you had a car blog or travel blog however it’d be a different story.
So first and foremost, determine who your audience are and then choose products and services which you think your audience are likely to want/buy. Don’t just advertise partners which pay a lot of money or are highly rated. Match your traffic to the offers. This is the key to all of it.
Making Money From Affiliate Marketing
In order to make money via the likes of admitad.com, you need to have traffic. You could have a great website with fantastic content but if nobody is reading it then there is nobody at hand to click out via one of your affiliate links and ultimately purchase a product/service.
Typically, good content = traffic and traffic + well matched advertisers = revenue. This formula is one you should abide by if you genuinely want to become a success. But there are no short cuts.
However, once you have the traffic at your disposal, using systems such as admitad allows you to monetize it at its optimum. It has everything you need in terms of advertiser relationships, statistical reporting and management and creative media that allows you to truly get the most from your traffic.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully the above has given you enough of an insight into what affiliate marketing is all about and how you yourself can get started. Of course there are a lot of affiliate networks out there but the company mentioned above, admitad is as good a place as any to start out as a publisher or an advertiser. In fact, when it comes to learning how affiliate programs are presented, how integration works and ultimately how you’re paid for your sales – it’s one of the best out there.
But let’s not kid ourselves, it’s not easy. You have to put in a lot of time and effort if you want to generate a significant level of sales. That will only come with great content and a lot of leg work. But hundreds of thousands of people do it around the world and the only thing they have which you don’t is experience. So persevere with it and the rewards will come.