Adding an affiliate program to your website

If you have an established website with a healthy amount of traffic viewing it then you are in a fantastic position to take advantage of the joys of affiliate marketing. Most of the hard work has been done already and the next section tells you exactly what you need to do to start making an extra (or multiple) streams of income through your website.

If you already have a website established but don't think have a good amount of traffic running through it, don't worry, you will find a range of information on getting more traffic through your site, both by using free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, paid advertising and Pay Per Click (PPC) techniques.

People run websites for a variety of reasons:

An extension of their offline businesses (selling products online)
A website as advertising for their offline business
A completely online businesses
To distribute information (not for profit)

There are of course many other reasons, but all websites can make extra money for their owners if they have enough traffic. Not all websites have the potential to make massive amounts of money, but most well optimized sites with a moderate flow of traffic can make several thousand dollars a year via affiliate programs. Many websites make far more.

Automated money making

The beauty for me is that as soon as the affiliate program aspect of your website is completed, the whole operation can be left running with little or no work on your part. You just sit back and watch the money come in on your bank statement. Affiliate programs are free and cost you no money to set up, all the expertise you require can be found on this site and if you get really stuck then you can just ask on a forum.

Affiliate programs enhance websites

If you site is your online business then you may be concerned that affiliate programs may detract from the main business of your site. This may be true, but if you have sell affiliate products related to your site, well placed within your site structure, that are not competing with your own products, it is highly unlikely to have a detrimental effect on your site. I am often told by people that their users find it enhances the experience of the site.

As I will discuss in detail later, affiliate product work particularly well when written into blocks of relevant information. Having such information on your site, can be very appealing to your customers, who will come back to your site time and time again, to view information of interest to them. It can be a great way to get users to sign up to your newsletter, allowing you to email them with your own product information as well as more affilliate products.

Making more money from advertising

Its pretty easy to sell advertising space on your website with pay per click (PPC) advertising. This works really well on sites that have a high amount of traffic as well as afflilate programs.