I’ve been sitting at home for a week straight now getting paid for doing it. How is this possible? Well, I have a deal with several online merchants that pay me every time someone uses my webpage to find their products. You may have heard of this before; it’s called affiliate marketing.
With the cost of prime time television time sky high, smart businesses are turning to the internet for a more constant audience. Amazon set the standard when they kicked off their affiliate program in 1997, and it’s caught on big time – now, ordinary people like me can help out on the side and bring in some extra cash.
First I had to make my own website. It’s pretty easy to do, although I was a little intimidated before I started. Once I started checking around, I found that there are a lot of sites dedicated to helping businesses and affiliates connect. Affiliate management programs take you through every step, and have comprehensive lists of merchants that want your help. They also walk you through building a website from scratch, and host it for you when you’re done.
If you want to figure it out for yourself, you can get a free site builder program like HTML Writer or Spider Writer. It takes a little time if you’re not familiar with the script, but once you’ve got it down, it’s easy.
After you create your webpage, it only gets easier. You just need to get it some attention by finding out what people are searching for. There a free keyword suggestion tool from Google that is perfect for this – it tells you how many people on average are searching for a particular phrase, and how many websites exist that use the phrase near the top of their page. The lower the competition, the better chance your page hits near the top of the stack.
Once you’ve got attention, you’ve got to deliver by showing your traffic where to go next. When they click on a link to a merchant, you get paid! Many businesses pay affiliates only when the customer buys something, but you can find pay-per-click deals as well. The more pages you have, the more people will pass through your site – it’s only a matter of time before people will be buying.
If you want to get in on the newest marketing technique today, click on the affiliate links you see all over the web. Once you’re set up you can sit back and let other people make your money!
