I’ll bet you have read a lot of headlines that sound similar to this one above, or make claims like this one. You might have spent quite a bit of time reading articles with title like this one. However, when you were done with the article, you might have thought YOU couldn’t do it… no way can I make money doing that; I can’t promote that, I can’t put that on my website… or whatever that! IT WILL DESTROY MY REPUTATION!

That isn’t necessarily so. I’m going to give you some tips that will give you an opportunity to monetize your website or blog, while preserving your brand. One of the best and easiest ways to monetize your online properties is to join some affiliate programs and advertise them on your site.

Affiliate programs are the answer

Why affiliate programs? Simple. Affiliate programs allow you to sell products and services without having to build or create them yourself. All the work of writing an eBook, or recording an audio track, or programming a software product is taken care of by someone else. But the advantages don’t end there. You also don’t have to create graphical marketing materials – those are all created for you by the affiliate program owner.

Another big benefit is that you really don’t have to manually keep track of finances or money. Really good affiliate programs will provide you with affiliate management tools that are based on one of the top affiliate software programs. These programs make it easy for you to follow how the ads you place on your site are doing, and how much commission you are earning.

Five tips for choosing affiliate offers to promote

1. Look good earnings potential – You want to make sure that if one of the people you refer to an affiliate offer buys, that you will make some decent money. Some people think affiliate programs offering high percentage payouts are best. My preference is to look for affiliate program where you make a large commission from a referral. This affiliate program for promoting SEO services gives you the opportunity to earn monthly recurring income up to $350.
2. Choose programs your readers will like – It is critical that you choose affiliate programs and offers that your audience will appreciate and be interested in. It wouldn’t be very effective to choose to promote affiliate programs and products for chocolate desserts on a site that is dedicated to losing weight. However, if you have a website that helps people find careers is sales, it would be great to promote something like How to Get Into Medical Sales.

3. Look for affiliate programs powered by software – When you sign up for an affiliate program it will quickly become obvious if the owner of the program is serious about helping affiliate members be successful. After signing up, if you are automatically redirected to a page powered by a fully-featured affiliate marketing software program, they are probably serious about their affiliate program. If they don’t have a ‘welcome’ screen that lets you know they are using a software program to manage the program, you might want to re-think your membership. Their are several top name brands like iDev Affiliate, LinkShare, and JROX JAM. My favorite is JROX JAM, which you can get for free here: http://websitesthatdrivesales.com/recommends/free-affiliate-management-software.htm

4. Make sure the website is NOT anonymous – What I mean is, make sure that there are real people standing behind the website, people with good reputations, who take customer service seriously. People who let you know who they are, give you contact information aren’t very likely to be fly-by-night. They are more likely to pay you on time and deal with you fairly. If you can find a picture, bio, and phone number of the affiliate site owner, chances are they can be trusted. You will also be able to ‘Google’ them to find any negative information about their program. Peggy McKee, the Medical Sales Recruiter, is one of the country’s leading sales recruiters – she proudly announces her site ownership on the about pages like this one: http://30-60-90-day-sales-plan.com/about/

5. Choose affiliate programs that have support programs – If you are choosing a piece of software to buy, you probably wouldn’t purchase it if there was not support mechanism in place. You should use the same criteria when evaluating affiliate website offerings. Affiliate website program owners that don’t put support systems in place – something like a ticket system or help desk software – probably won’t care about any their products or customers, and eventually they won’t are about you. When they do, you can be fairly confident that they are trying to keep customers satisfied. If they AREN’T trying to keep customers happy, their poor service will reflect poorly on you, and tarnish your online brand.

Here are a couple of affiliate programs that meet all these criteria, that I recommend if your site’s visitors would be interested in these subjects. One is an affiliate program for a sales interview tool that targets sales professionals – you can check it out here: http://30-60-90-day-sales-plan.com/affiliate-program-details/. The other is a program that has a broader appeal – it targets people who own businesses that either have no web presence or under performing websites; you can get all the information for it here: http://websitesthatdrivesales.com/blog/home/affiliate-program/

Tags: affiliate marketers, affiliate marketing, affiliate programs, affiliate software, internet business, internet marketing, make money from home, make money without working, making money online, monetize, online business, websites