Web Design Inspiration Blog | SpicyWebDesigners.com

One very profitable revenue stream of online business is affiliate marketing.  Affiliate marketing is a great little business model that allows you to generate a passive stream of income while not needing to physically stock, ship and manage the sale of products.  As of today, this is one way I personally make money on my blog, SpicyWebDesigners.com.  When you decide to use affiliate marketing on your website or as a part of your business model there are some things that you need to evaluate for it to be a successful stream of income.

One common question is, “How many affiliates should I sign up with?” and the answer to this question is different for everyone.  I’ve personally noticed that keeping a few business relationships open with a couple affiliate programs works best for me because it allows me to maximize and disburse the most amount of hits to a couple of affiliate programs and in turn increase my success (and conversion rates) selling through a couple of highly effective affiliate marketing channels.

So let’s run through a couple of ways that you can distinguish the winning affiliate marketing programs from losing ones that are a waste of your time and don’t fit your needs.

• Trustworthy company – There is a lot to be said about working with a company that is trustworthy and in affiliate marketing means that you are putting trust in a company enough to represent their products and trust that they will pay you.  Make sure that you research the company you are selling for before you launch into promoting with their affiliate program.  If you are selling products that you are ethically opposed to then it’s probably not the company for you.  Just remember that there are plenty of affiliate programs out there and there are ones that will suit your needs.
• Relevance of products and services being offered – One thing that can have a big affect on the overall success of any affiliate marketing efforts on your website boils down to this question “Does the product/service I am promoting relate to the content and audience I am selling to?”  If you’ve signed up for an affiliate program to sell running shoes and your website content is all comic books it might be a hard sell trying to get people to buy through the affiliate marketing links you’ve placed on your website.  In testing a few affiliate programs related to the audience your website has may allow you to see higher profits and conversions but like I said you’ve got to test it out to find what works and the rest is common sense.
• Amount of Commission – When it comes to affiliate marketing a large part of it is about the commissions or the commission structure of the company you are promoting.  Commissions are what you get when you make sales in affiliate marketing and with that being said there are commissions that companies pay out that simply are not worth your time!  I personally avoid commissions that are less than 30% percent depending on the company and the product price point.  If a product selling for $150 and you get 20% of each sale you are going to make a commission of $30 per sale whereas if a product sells for $27 and you get a 10% commission on each sale you are going to make $2.70 per sale.  When you evaluate the amount of commission you are earning think about how much effort it’s going to take to make a sale and if it doesn’t add up then keep looking for a product or service to represent on your website that’s worth your time.
• Minimum Payouts – A minimum payout is the minimum amount of commissions you need to have earned with a particular affiliate program in order to release the funds from your affiliate marketing account so you can get paid.  Some affiliate marketing programs don’t have this option but most hold a certain amount of funds before paying out so looking at the minimum pay out with the affiliate marketing program you’re interested in and look at the average commissions you are going to receive to see if it’s really worth your time.  If you have to make 50 sales to reach the minimum payout rate it may not be worth your time but if it takes 2 or 3 then it may be worth the time and effort.

To some extent you need to go through trial and error and test to see which affiliate programs are going to work for your website and what works for one website doesn’t necessarily work for another.  When looking at and analyzing this information to choose an affiliate marketing campaign, it’s important to understand and know what to look for in an affiliate marketing program that is going to make it a “winner” for you.

Picking great affiliate marketing takes a bit of effort, time, some analysis and some action on your part to see what’s really going to work for you, on your website or as a part of your online business but it’s definitely worth your time to explore this as a potential income stream.

Affiliate marketing is one of those types of online business that provide excellent pay for referring people to buy goods and services. The basic understanding of affiliate marketing is that a company who creates products or services, a “merchant” of affiliate marketer sets up an agreement with the company who makes the product to refer people to their product and when someone buys the product the affiliate marketer is paid a commission for their help in the sales transaction. Sounds pretty straight forward right?

What you may or may not know is that most affiliate marketing business models fall into 1 of 4 different types and almost all affiliate marketers fall into one or more of these categories with the websites they run.

Of these 4 types of affiliate marketing business models each have their benefits and drawbacks depending on the kind of website you run and how you target your audience. The 4 main types of affiliate marketing businesses online today include…

• Content Providers
• Trusted Friends
• Store Keepers
• Arbitrageurs

Content Providers – These types of sites include everything from media sites, bloggers, articles sites, etc. Even though these websites offer good to great web based content from news, opinion, entertainment, games and more they also make money by displaying other people’s banner ads, text link ads by posting them through their websites in highly traffic areas. The best content providers test to see which affiliate marketing programs yield the highest rates of return on their websites.

The potential downside of this business model is that you need to establish a trusting relationship with people you are referring to your affiliate links and this model is largely based more on volume then relationship building which brings me to my next affiliate marketing business model called “Trusted Friends”

Trusted Friends – These types of sites can include blogs (especially better known ones), company websites establishing a brand and content based websites but the key is that their goal is to establish a relationship with you through email, social media and RSS feeds and keep your customers coming back for more by growing a list of subscribers or by creating a community.

The way that sites like this make money is largely based on influencing people to make a buying decision. Even though the customer may not purchase the first time the goal is to develop that relationship and continue to sell through proactive communication with your audience. The best of the best create their own products and market to their audience through product launches.

Store Keepers – As it sounds, these types of websites are in it to sell to you… plain and simple. They aren’t a traditional e-commerce business because they drive traffic through affiliate links but they do try to establish a trusted relationship so that you’re customers will come back for more.

Arbitrageurs & Brokers – These guys are the brokers of the affiliate marketing game because they buy traffic from search engines, popular sites to generate a higher profit using affiliate links.

For the most part they aren’t as concerned with being a trusted friend or providing top content but rather they are interested in generating the most traffic through their affiliate links to generate the most sales. The drawback on this business model of affiliate marketing is that you need to keep an eye on your return on investment because you aren’t focusing on the same aspects as an affiliate marketer acting as a trusted friend and of the traffic you buy you need to make so much return on investment for this to be and stay a profitable business model.

Affiliate marketing is a very interesting business model and it can provide your existing online business a new stream of revenue which is one thing that makes it so attractive to those interested in growing an online business.

Whether you want to build a website that uses the “trusted friend” model referring people to product you love in the hopes that they buy through you or you want to be the next mover and shaker affiliate marketing broker there is a model or a hybrid model that can fit your needs when it comes to affiliate marketing.

You may have noticed a lot of changes to the SpicyWebDesigners.com site recently.  It’s no surprise to anyone that technology advances rapidly and I felt that it was worth taking the time to simplify the website for the readers and subscribers with the newer WordPress CMS platform architecture.  I backed up the mySQL database that is becoming larger and larger with each passing month as I add new content to the website and performed an update from WordPress 2.6.X to WordPress 2.8.6 because I hadn’t updated it in a while.  There are a few reasons I decided to upgrade the website including…

1. The WordPress architecture was preventing me from using newer plug-in, themes and features
2. With almost 300 articles to date I needed to backup my database and get it to the most stable release of WordPress up and running
3. The WordPress theme I was using before was looking tired, it had started to break in the newer versions of web browsers and was taking more time to update and fix to the point where it wasn’t feasible to use it anymore.

I hope that you enjoy the changes to the website and I welcome any feedback as well.  This brings me to the topic of this article.  Recently someone asked me “I was just wondering, that amazing page corner button on your top right corner that opens to a Squeeze Theme, what is it and how can I get it?”

I’ve been focused on monetizing my site lately since about March of 2009 using affiliate marketing techniques.  I decided this was the best way to continue to run the site as it currently is because it costs money to host, renew the domain name, my time to produce articles and content and the occasional email marketing expense as well.

Affiliate marketing affords me the ability to generate some income without the headaches of selling, physically storing and then shipping products out to customers.  The “page peel” also known as a “peel” you see in the upper right hand corner of this site is one of the options or tools that I have when promoting the Squeeze Theme from Unique Blog Designs which I recently wrote a review about.  It’s a smart idea to intrigue readers on your website and get them to click on something other than a banner advertisement.

The “Pre-Peel”

With “Ad Blindness” on the rise in the world of internet marketing it takes something kind of different and unique to pique the interests of your audience.  The “Page Peel” is one of these tools than can help you raise a little interest over a product you are promoting.  Most page peels are comprised of a Javascript that performs the actual “peel” action, the images associated to the pre-peel and post-peel and lastly but most importantly the affiliate tracking link that is needed to make sure that when your page peel makes a sale you are credited for it.

The “Post Peel”

If you are involved in affiliate marketing or you use this method of marketing to market your product on the internet then developing a page peel for your latest promotion can help you increase conversions and sales of your company’s products.  Affiliate marketers out there just remember that not all affiliate marketing programs have this tool currently at their disposal and having said that you could always take the product you are promoting and create a page peel for it.  You just need to know a little coding to get it operational.  Whatever way you “peel” it, page peels can add a new take on traditional website monetization methods and can in turn drive more profits to your website.

There are many ways to make money online and affiliate marketing can definitely be a profitable way to earn a great income if you are a blogger, entrepreneur or anyone else interested in learning how to make money online. Affiliate marketing offers people who choose this option a way to sell products for other companies without having to physically house the product or the infrastructure needed to sell the product, ship it, invoice it or any of the other logistical nightmares that selling physical or digital products poses and leaves you a way just to make profits from sales. If you do any amount of affiliate marketing then you’ve probably heard the terms “Hop Ads” and “Hop Links” but what exactly do they do and what do they mean?

Hop Links – Ads can’t hop without links

Hop Links allow the affiliate marketer and the manager of the affiliate marketing program to track clicks, source URLs and most importantly sales of affiliate products when a “hop” occurs from an external site with a hop link that then redirects to the seller’s homepage. The relationship that exists is possible because the URL contains specific URL parameters that are passed during the hop and stored so that when a buyer makes a purchase from a hop link that affiliate marketer is credited for their efforts and sees those profits coming in. For those of you who are not familiar with URL parameters, they are parameters passed in the URL with specific values for specific reasons; in this case the reason is to track affiliate marketing sales. The general makeup of a Hop Link looks similar to this…

Installing a Hop Link on your website

Hop Links depending on the affiliate marketing software being used are highly effective for tracking affiliate and are super easy to install. Depending on which affiliate marketing software is generating the hop link the result may be slightly different. However with that said, once you’ve got your website’s source code in front of you to add the hop link all you need to do is enter the hop link using an A HREF html tag like this…

<a href =”YOURHOPLINK” > TEXT FOR YOUR BUYER’S TO CLICK ON</a>

After you’ve got this you can start earning commissions from affiliate marketing sales. Pretty easy right?

Gideon Shalwick from BecomeABlogger.com has a video that explains hop links very well. The only thing that I want to add is that in this video, Gideon uses ClickBank as the example but the concept of a hop link can be applied to other affiliate marketing companies like E-Junkie.com and PepperJam to name two others.

If you’ve just started promoting affiliate products, or you are managing an affiliate marketing campaign yourself to make more money having people sell your products than understanding the concept of a Hop Link, how to install it and how it works.

Luc Arnold

“Hop all the way to the bank!”