Making Money with Affiliate Programs

By Neil Morrical

Traditionally, an affiliate selects a product from an affiliate program (such as Clickbank.com) gets his or her affiliate link for sales of that product and then proceeds to send as much traffic to that link as possible. The link takes a regular prospect to the sales page of the product and if the prospect buys, then the origin is tracked by Clickbank.com and the affiliate gets credit for the sale.

Note: Other Affiliate Programs exist as well (thousands actually), but the top affiliate programs that come to mind are:

www.cj.com

CJ.com is an affiliate program for up-scale products and services. There you’ll find products and services like: T-Mobile, Capital One, Lending Tree, GoDaddy.com ect.
(W-2 Provided for Taxes)

www.clickbank.com

This is where you will find a lot of products created by private business... There are some very high quality products here and there’s also some crap as well, like paid survey programs. Your commissions from this program are sent to you by mail every 2 weeks. (W-2 Provided)

www.PayDotCom.com

PayDotCom.com is like a younger version of Clickbank with the exception of using PayPal.com to send out payments. With PayDotCom.com your commissions are deposited to your PayPal account approximately every 2 weeks. (No W-2 Provided)

To get started, you have to select a product from the marketplace. Let’s go through the steps of selecting a product from Clickbank…

1. Go to www.clickbank.com/marketplace.html to see all of the products currently being offered by vendors. There you can search for products in either your niche market or any market for that matter.

Here you can rank the products in the marketplace by the following criteria:

PayDotCom.com is similar to Clickbank.com in that they both have marketplaces, but with PayDotCom.com, you and your affiliates are paid instantly through PayPal. (Clickbank.com pays out twice a month by mailed check.) This can be a blessing or a headache. You can get paid instantly, but you also have to send out mass payments through paypal. Something else you may want to consider is how long you should wait to send out payments to your affiliates in case of refunds. I use both because there are advantages to both programs. Here’s a view of their marketplace:

PayDotCom.com’s Marketplace

2. Select Which Product(s) to Promote: This step is very important. You want to benefit from what other affiliates are doing right now and “look before you leap.” What I’m saying is; You need to know whether the particular product you are interested in promoting in your niche market is really profitable. There are some quick ways to determine this without wasting you money on a failed ad campaign.

If You are Using Clickbank: Look at the gravity and popularity of the product in the marketplace. This will give you an idea of whether or not the product is profitable as well as let you in on how much competition you will have for commissions. For some of the Underground Affiliate Strategies competition is good, for some it is not. (We will mainly be looking at strategies, which require high product popularity and gravity to make things simple.)

Old Rule of Thumb: Most products have very low gravity and sales because there’s no money in them.

Use Google’s Toolbar to Determine Page Rank: You need to know what kind of competition you are up against and checking the page rank of the product can inform you of how many links are pointing to it. This toolbar is available on the Google.com homepage. (PR5 and above can make it difficult for sales through Adwords)

Additionally, you may wish to see what Alexa.com has to say about the salespage as well. The point here is to make sure you are not in competition with too many other sites for the keywords of the product. (In this traditional scenario) Another way you can investigate the patterns and growth of products in the Clickbank marketplace is by checking out: http://www.cbtrends.com This will tell you, which products are selling and what “trends” they are following.

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