Lessons Learned From Affiliate Programs

Don't create a site just to sell products or services through one or multiple affiliate programs because you will mostly likely end up spending more in advertising than what you will make on commissions. I can almost guarantee that you will lose money, and keep on losing money, and end up just like me. I learned it the hard way. I hope you don't make the same mistake I have. I was very clumsy in making that decision, and I regret taking such careless actions.

If you want to have some chance of making money from affiliate programs, you will have to have an established website first with continuous slow of traffic, which spending so much in advertising. Repeat visitors are the best since they don't cost you anything, and will most likely make you money. In order to have repeat visitors, you have to have something different. Affiliated websites all have the same products, and those visitors will most likely end up going straight to the affiliate program providers to take care of their business.

If you already own an online store, and have repeat customers, try to use affiliate programs like what Amazon.com offers, to give your customers a bit more variety. Products that are relevant to your store and something that you don't carry. What I like about Amazon's affiliate program is that you can pick and choose what products you want to advertise on your website. You can be as specific as "silver mini iPod 6GB", and Amazon will give you a small HTML code that will give you the image of that iPod, the price, and the link with your affiliate ID in it to track your sales. Other affiliate programs provided by companies like Overstock.com and Buy.com only provide banners in all different sizes, and search boxes where people can use it as product search engines, which will search through the search box owner's product database.

Majority of big online companies and stores that offer affiliate programs, all tracking and commission payouts are done through LinkShare and Commission Junction. Even banners, search boxes, and links are taken from these sites, not directly from the affiliate program offering companies. From credit-card signups (all bank websites) to membership signups (like eBay.com) to product sales (like Amazon.com); companies offer so many ways for affiliates to make money. Some actually do become wealthy from these affiliate programs, but like I said before, they use these affiliate programs on their already established websites. Make sure you put up relevant ads and products on your site. If you put electronics on your site when your site is known for selling chocolates and cookies, the audience you've been targeting to establish your site is not there looking for DVD players.

Just because I wasn't successful with Amazon.com's affiliate program doesn't mean that all affiliate programs should be avoided. I didn't know much about anything, how these programs worked etc., before I started the whole website and advertising thing. However, I manage to learn from my mistakes...just that the mistakes I make are costly. I hope what my mistakes have taught me would help you save some money and time.

If you had similar experience as me and would like to share your story with the audience, please feel free to email me with your writing piece at writings@imbae.net

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Written by: Anthony Bae