Can it be as Easy as the Internet Marketers make it out to be to make Money with Affiliate Programs?
The kind of growth that the Internet marketing niche has experienced in just the past five years alone has been nothing short of explosive. The growth has attracted entrepreneurs in such stupendous numbers online. All of them hope to take advantage of the new growth opportunities Internet marketing provides – to make money with affiliate programs and such to be able to supplement an existing income or to build a business full-time. One of the most accessible ways in which to tap into the business potential of the Internet is through affiliate marketing. To make money with affiliate programs though is a different matter altogether. The low cost of entry that this business imposes brings in competition from every quarter.
Looking in from the outside, the concept of how to make money with affiliate programs is simple enough. You pick a product to market and sell, you market it like crazy with all kinds of website promotion strategies and you drop out. When all those marketing e-books tell you that you can set the whole thing up like a well-oiled machine and then just go on vacation, you do have to wonder how truthful people are being. The affiliate programs tell you that even the niche markets have thousands of followers, and that with a good product, hooking enough interested buyers is bound to be effortless. As you can probably guess, with thousands of Internet marketers trying to make money with affiliate programs, the benefits are spread thin for most people.
As a businessman trying to make money with affiliate programs on the Internet, the contribution they make money for is that they find ways to generate traffic – traffic consisting of people who have money to buy products with. Your reward is for generating quality traffic consisting of people who actually are likely to buy your product. Simply bringing in hundreds of people your way to take a look at your ads is never likely to generate any sales.
It can be a lot of hard work finding relevant traffic to visit your websites. You’ll have to actually go out into the real world and network every day the way a real estate agent might. You have to spend money developing quality websites working out strategies every day to bring in better content and better traffic, and you’ll have to worry constantly about SEO. The easiest way to make money off an affiliate system would be to try to establish yourself as a website in a completely different area that people are really interested in. It works quite in the way a television channel tries to rope in people to watch its advertisements with free programming. If you can do this, to make money with affiliate programs can be reasonably easy.
Earn Money Through an Ebook Affiliate Program
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the least bit creative. I’ve known this from an early age, and though I’ve tried to develop my creativity through various artistic and musical pursuits, nothing has ever panned out. I guess I’m just one of those people who can deal more easily with facts and figures than anything abstract.
You might think this lack of creativity would hamper my entrepreneurial prospects, but that hasn’t happened thus far — probably because I’m fully aware of my shortcomings and am willing to work around them. In other words, I’m not wasting my time trying to invent the next hot must-have gadget or write the Great American Novel. Instead, I’m happy enough to piggyback on the hard work of others to generate my own income, which is one of the reasons I’m looking to find a good ebook affiliate program to join.
Earning commissions through an ebook affiliate program is easy, provided you have the right product to sell. Most programs do not charge a membership fee, which is great for keeping start-up costs under control. In fact, the affiliates just have to worry about marketing the book and tracking sales — and cashing the commission checks, of course! Now marketing and selling are two things I happen to be fairly good at, so this is another reason I’m excited about joining an ebook affiliate program.
The only obstacle standing in my way at this point is finding the right ebook affiliate program to latch onto. Some are obviously better than others, with the biggest differences being in the areas of content and commission. I’d be far more comfortable (and successful) pushing a book on a subject I’m already familiar with, and I’d be able to generate far more compelling sales pages this way. So I’m going to limit myself to books that discuss ways to earn money online or that offer advice about home-based businesses.
The biggest consideration for most people looking to join an ebook affiliate program is the commission. There are two main ways to go here. First, I can focus on selling a high priced product that offers a huge commission. I’d likely only make a minimum number of sales, but the bigger payouts would still make the effort worthwhile. Or, I could peddle a more reasonably priced product that offers a far smaller commission. If I do this, I’d probably make up for the smaller payout with higher sales volume.
At any rate, I’m sure I’ll figure all this stuff out after crunching the numbers a bit. In the end, I just hope whichever ebook affiliate program I choose will be able to provide me with a steady stream of passive income for a long time. That’s the real goal here!