How I Make Money Through Affiliates - My Experiment
When I started my interest in affiliate sites I was just beginning to learn about web development and working for a company that offered affiliate programs. What are affiliate programs? Most popular merchants that sell something offer affiliate programs for other webmasters to help them increase their traffic and their revenues. Affiliate programs are for people that have a website that generates traffic and can help the merchant who is offering the affiliate program. Anyways, the goal of my experiment was to try to generate an affiliate website that will generate some income and spend the LEAST amount of money in the process.
Like most of you I am an average Joe with mouths to feed, trying to make ends meet. I decided to create my own website and added affiliate programs to boost my income. I first bought a domain name and web hosting, paying a total of about $11 a month in overhead. Now being the cheapo that I am, even this step was a heart stopper for fear that my site would not work out. I decided to make a website about coupon codes thinking I could offer this benefit to many shoppers who were interested in saving money. I designed and created my site utilizing all that I had learned about web development, and gave it a catchy name cheap-buys.com. When I finally had a decent looking website, I joined affiliate programs for many major websites through cj.com and linkshare.com. These are companies who handle a lot of affiliate business for many large-scale websites. To join is free without any obligation as long as you have a respectable website created.
Now remember, I did not want to spend any money at all so I did not advertise my website. I decided to optimize my site through "search engine optimization". This is basically a way to make your website "search-engine" friendly so it can rank higher on the search results. I researched many or many search engine optimization techniques on the web and tried to implement those on my cheap-buys.com website. One site in particular, Seochat.com has many optimization techniques, tools and forum discussions that will help to improve your rankings swiftly. Finally, I added some Google ads on my website. Google ads pay per click so whenever someone clicks on your site you can generate some revenue.
Now after 1 year since the inception of my website here are my results:
I am not a rich jerk (some guy on the web that claims he's filthy rich through affiliate programs), but I am making some reasonable money through my site. I can definitely pay my overhead of $11 every month but nowhere near enough to quit my day job. I can tell you for sure that affiliate programs do work and, if correctly implemented and successfully marketed, a website that you create can be a cash flowing machine. If you'd like to create your own affiliate experiment here are my suggestions to help you succeed:
- 1. Create a website that is specific and not so broad based in popularity. For example, if you want to create a website about recipes, it is better to create a site specifically about a type of food category like dessert recipes instead of a broad category such as recipes. The website I created about coupons and deals has too broad of an appeal. If I were to do it over again I would have made it about a more specific topic. By narrowing the category you will be able to more easily be placed on top of search engines for the specific category.
- 2. Get a good domain name reflective of what your website is about. If your website is about horses' tails then you want to call it something like "horses-tails.com" and not "animals.com".
- 3. Provide original content rich material on your website. The search engines love it and will definitely allow for more people who search the web to find your site. It also helps if the content of your website changes a lot. In this case the search engines will visit more often to get the updated material.
- 4. Try to get as many other people who have websites to link back to your site as you can. This will improve your rankings in the search engines.
- 5. Sign up with Google Adsense or any other pay-per-click programs so you can offer an alternative for people who want to exit your site to click on related links and produce yourself some extra revenue through otherwise lost customers.
Brian Kim is a webmaster of two coupon code and deal sites: cheap-buys.com has online coupon codes for many popular merchants
and webcouponcodes.com has deals and promotional codes as well. Visit his sites and youre likely to save a few bucks.
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