Affiliate Marketing | Programs

Web hosting is a very competitive market and affiliate programs are often created by web hosting companies in a bid to obtain more customers. According to each web hosting affiliate program, you’ll earn a commission when you refer a customer who purchases a hosting plan.

For web hosts, there’s nothing easier than getting other people to promote their web hosting services for them. The returns in investment for each new customer is usually high as well, because each signup gives the web host recurring income over the long run.

Making money from a website often entails the use of proverbial income generators like product sales, affiliate programs and on-site advertising.

All of these monetization methods rely on inducing the visitor to perform a specific action such as clicking on an ad or an affiliate link, purchasing a product or subscribing to a newsletter.

Your success in getting the visitor to act the way you want often depends on the visual structure (design/ad placement) of your website and the type of content preceding or surrounding the product or promotion.

Template Monster is a popular online store which offers readymade website templates for webmasters and businesses. Other products from their large inventory includes pre-made Flash templates, Wordpress and other CMS themes, logos as well as osCommerce templates for online stores.

Affiliates earn 20% commissions on all purchases made via their affiliate link or template shop. Templates generally range from $5 to $3500, which means that you do have a chance to make some substantial earnings.

The key to making money through affiliate programs or other forms of advertising is traffic, which is simply the sheer number of visitors who arrive at your blog daily.

In terms of affiliate marketing, the more visitors you have, the more opportunities or capacity you will have to recommend or successively promote any products, services or websites.

There are many different ways to market your blog and gain more visitors which will eventually allow you to make money through blog-based affiliate marketing.The use of blog traffic exchanges is one method you should consider.

Imagine this scenario. You’ve just came across an amazing website which offers a lucrative affiliate program. You signed up instantly as an affiliate and are itching to promote your referral link to as many people you know.

You hook up a new thread in a forum and insert your referral link after a short pitch, perhaps you’ll also leave a few comments on a few blogs with the referral link as the URL or signature.

You might even publish a short blog post which consists of nothing but a short opener, an excerpt from the website in question and your big fat affiliate referral link.

I recently signed up as an affiliate for Aaron Wall’s SEO Book (aff) and took a good look at the salesletter, which was apparently rewrote by Brian Clark late last year. The copy for the new sales letter was well done and I think the main improvement was the reduction in its length as well as the strategic insertions of recommendations from notable personalities like Seth Godin and Wharton Professor J Michael Steel.

A more subtle but equally powerful change was moving the specific call to query or feedback all the way down to the bottom of the page. Here’s a side by side comparison of the old (left) and new (right) sales letter.

Everyone loves cool T Shirts with great designs or slogans. And why not? They aren’t expensive and are generally affordable to a large market of consumers, from your average college student or high school kid to your corporate executive or housewife.

Because of its implicit connection with internet, sports and pop culture, T-Shirts with snarky or humorous designs are appealing and can easily sell themselves effortlessly. Here’s where this applies to you.

I was checking my Gmail account when I noticed an interesting ad near the top of the screen. It was from a recruitment team that was seeking to hire professionals with an interest in marketing guru, Seth Godin’s work.

The copy for the ad read:


If you Read Seth I Want U: If you are reading Seth Godin’s blog I want to hire you!

The main reason why I clicked on the ad was because I am a regular reader of Seth Godin’s blog. After clicking on the ad, I was taken to a webpage which immediately requested for my resume and credentials. Talk about super targeted Adwords traffic!

I’ve been researching on how blogs can be used as a means to promote affiliate programs because I’m pretty interested in how blogs seem to have some natural potential for building stable and long-term relationships between the affiliate and the customer.

Blogs grow over time and their accumulated content is a gold-mine for search engines and the targeted traffic they bring. While contextual Ad networks like Adsense are effective, passive ways of earning money from a blog, I think affiliate programs are superior in many aspects, particularly in terms of long-term profit.