Affiliate Marketing - is it still profitable?

Posted by Leo on June 29th, 2007 at 10:18am

The answer is “Yes”. But it is not as easy as you thought.

There are heaps of ebooks and affiliate programs promising you a huge amount of money return. Is it achievable - you may ask.

Well, let’s break this down into finer details:

1. You can join existing affiliate programs. There are plenty of such programs around. Most of them would require you to pay a small fee to get started. What they do is after receiving your fee, they would keep on introducing other affiliate partners to you. And you get paid when you brought them sales / traffic, depending on the sponsor.

2. You can run your own affiliate programs. There are codes around that you can install in your website and use it to sell your product / service. You can (and you should - or else who will sell for you?) offer a certain incentive for every sales made. Most people offer 10% for the 1st level, and 5% for the subsequence level. That means if a lower level affiliate got a sale, the 1st level affiliate would gain 5% of the sales figure. And the 2nd level affiliate would gain 10%.

There are lots of affiliates around. Most of them just put your banner on their website and forget about you. There are some aggressive ones though. They would advertise your website on Google Adwords to help you attract more traffic.

Note the policy of Adwords is that for each search query, it is only allowed to show 1 ad per parent company. If the ad of your affiliate shows, you own ones won’t show.

One thing is for affiliate marketing to work for you (ie. earning money from it) you really need to work hard and invest a bit. It doesn’t work if you just place the banner on your website. You also have to drive traffic to your website. Given banners are having lower conversion rate (people tend to ignore them) you should try to blend the link into your articles, and write articles about it.

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