A step by step guide to making your website pay for itself. Running your website for free.

Affiliate Marketing.

I have always been wary of affiliate programs but as I have already said, It is not my intention to spend any money so I will need to start looking for free affiliate programs to join.

There are thousands of affiliate programs out there offering infinite products to sell on your site, but I am only going to join a few to test the water and see if I can actually make money online buy advertising their merchants products within the content of my pages.

I will mainly be looking for affiliate programs that offer PPC, but will also join a few that offer other options as well. These being Product Links, Live Store-Windows, Virtual Stores, Banners, Search boxes and Text Links. That will provide Pay Per lead or Pay per sale options also.

Take my word for it though. Joining affiliate programs is not a guaranteed way to make money. It sounds great and you think that as long as you are getting a steady flow of traffic to your site, and are getting hits on your links, you are likely to make sales, trust me that is not the case. Getting hits is one thing, making a sale is something completely different. There is also the risk that the affiliate program you have signed up to is not all it seems and although you may make the odd sale you might not actually receive the commission you are due. Plus you have the fact that most, if not all affiliate companies will only pay out once you have earned a set amount of money Which can vary from anything between $5-00 to $50-00 plus and believe me it is harder to hit the targets than you think. I have found that despite getting hits on my affiliate links I do not always get a sale and no sale means no commission. I have had hundreds of hits a week on some of my affiliate links but seldom do they convert to a sale.

I will be experimenting with different affiliate programs, providing of course I meet my chosen merchants criteria to be able to sign up. This is also another factor that needs to be considered. A lot of merchants will not accept you as an affiliate, if for example your site does not meet their regional requirements. For example this site is a .com site but is UK based. We advertise globally and most, at least 80% of the sites customers and traffic come from the USA and other foreign countries yet a lot of merchants will not accept us as a member of their program due to not meeting their regional requirements. Your site content is another factor that you need to consider. There are millions of sites on the web, all with the same type of content  as you so unless you have a niche market you will be competing with all of them and a large majority of them will all be promoting the same affiliate links and products as you.

Pay per lead (PPL) involves your visitor having to fill out a form or register for a product for which you will receive an agreed payment. If the visitor does not sign up then you will not be paid, Pay per sale (PPS) means that you will get commission based upon an agreed percentage cut of the sale price of the product purchased by the customer you point to the merchants products.

My main target will be the merchants that offer Pay per click (ppc) advertising as again I will be looking for a way to provide a trickle income to help support my site by directing traffic to the advertisers products and getting paid for doing so.

Pay Per Click PPC Affiliate Programs.

ClixGalore affiliate marketing programs.

The first program that I will join is ClixGalore. I have joined this program mainly because they offer a good selection of PPC as well as other options to generate an income from sales. I will mainly focus on the PPC sites so that I can begin to generate an instant revenue stream for every click that I receive on a specific PPC advert that is placed within the site. ClixGalore offer both text and banner links so you can strategically place them to insure they will get hits. If you have a high traffic site then this type of advertising may work well for you depending on the type of programs that you join and how you place your adverts within your page content. At present I am experimenting with two types of PPC programs. For one program I am using only text links, and for the other I am using text and banner links. At present both are proving to be generating a modest amount of hits per day which converts to instant money in my affiliate account. You need to remember though that you will not be paid until you reach the required minimal payout total. At present the text links are slightly out doing the banners but we are talking minimal amounts of hits, the difference being only one or two hits per day. ClixGalore have an extensive range of merchants to choose from with numerous choices of currency payments. You can join ClixGalore affiliate marketing program today and start earning a PPC income by clicking HERE!.

SpeedyAds  Entireweb.com offer a similar PPC advertising system which they have named Speedy Ads. Once you have created your free  Speedy Ads account you will be able to create customised PPC adverts similar those available with Google's adsense and Yahoo, which you can place within the content of you web pages. They have a minimal payout threshold of $25-00. In order to receive payments you will need to set up a PayPal account which you can do by  Clicking Here, or on the banner at the foot of this page.
Once I have set up my PayPal account I can then go back to my Speedy Ads account where I will be able to create text and image adverts which I can then copy and paste the supplied codes into my pages and begin to receive payments for hits that I get on them.  Entireweb have an easy to use get ad code system with pre formatted adverts that  you can customise and edit to suit the layout of your pages. You will need to be aware that other PPC companies may not like you placing competing adverts on the same pages as theirs. Always check their policies first or you could be banned and lose any revenue that you may have earned. The adverts on this page are all SpeedyAds adverts that were created within the get ad code section of my account.
 

Non PPC programs

AffiliateWindow.
The next program I am going to set up is an AffiliateWindow account. Affiliate Window offers you the tools to make money from traffic on your website, blog or email database. You simply pick up text links, banners, product feed data or widgets from online retailers via the Affiliate Window network and include them on your website. Depending on your content and audience profile, you can work with their biggest merchant sites or select more niche operators. Whatever you decide, there are over 700 retailers to choose between. The beauty of Affiliate Window's technology is that it requires very little technical expertise. By joining the network you can offer price or product comparison, carry banners, text links, white label offerings or design and use Content Window widgets. All this plus market leading reporting tools and analytics are just a few clicks away. You can open an AffiliateWindow account here.

Link Share.
Next I will set up a Linkshare account. Linkshare offers you ways to make money online from your Web site traffic. It enables you to earn commissions from some of the world’s best known and fastest growing brands. You’ll be joining a trusted industry leader that has helped thousands of publishers earn millions of dollars. You earn commissions by simply linking to products and services that your target audience is likely to purchase. Join LinkShare Today!

I will also join a few independent affiliate link programs with products related to my sites content.

It is also important to continue to build your links and add new original content to your pages on a regular basis to ensure that the search engines take notice and index your pages for your customers to find so as to ensure a steady flow of hits on your adverts.

Sign up to PayPal and open your PayPal account here.

 

                                                                                                                                                                     

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