2:53 AM

How Do Affiliate Sites Make Money?

There are essential 4 ways to make money on with an affiliate site. As an affiliate marketer you can choose to use one method or all four, certainly most people will use more than one strategy to make money with affiliate marketing.

Must Watch: How A 28-yr- Old Got Fired &Then Built A $500k-A-Month Business ⇒

1. Selling Affiliate Products / Product Reviews

As you build content on your site or blog if you have followed my suggestions on how to find a profitable niche, then you should also have had a look to see if there are products to sell for your niche. For example:

This site is a prime example of affiliate marketing of products. They review products – so if you click a picture you will be sent to the product review page that will have a link at the bottom that sends you directly to the amazon sales page (in this case).

So the site is content rich as it gives a lot of reviews on products with in-depth information for the purchaser – the purchaser can choose to go on to the Amazon site or not – but if they do and they purchase, the owner of the website gets the commission.

The reviews tend to be positive as the owner of this particular site wants people to buy any of the reviewed products, but if you are doing (for example) a diet website – try to give positive and negative reviews to balance it out for your readers. Always keep in mind the reason for your website is to provide a quality place for your audience to come back to!

This particular affiliate marketer (above) sends practically all his readers to Amazon. I’m not a massive fan of putting all your eggs in one basket and I prefer to have a number of affiliate networks. Amazon in particular changes is parameters on who can sell quite often so going to other affiliate networks products would be a good idea. Check out my article on Finding Affiliate Programs to help with this.

You get told the commission structure upfront when you sign up for an affiliate account so you can work out how many sales you would need to make to get you to the income you desire.

2. Adsense:

Another way affiliate sites make money is by allowing adsense advertising – I guarantee you would have seen these on pretty much every site you have been too they look and sound like ads.

One of the most popular ways to leverage free traffic coming to your site is through Google Adsense. This is a publisher network that allows people like you and I to put ads on our site in exchange for a percentage of the ad revenue that is earned if one of the ads gets clicked.

So basically you are getting paid to allow advertisers to put their ads on your website. The cost per click is very minimal and I would argue you would get paid more if from an ad you place for an affiliate link, but a lot of people just want to start getting ‘some’ payment for their websites/ blogs immediately and I understand that. To find out how to set up adsense on your website just click here.

3. Newsletter Subscriptions:

A great way to earn money through affiliate links is to place a sign up form on your account for a daily, weekly or monthly newsletter.

The concept is simple and you may already be on someone’s subscription list and receiving emails yourself!

When someone agrees to receive your newsletter updates, you simply send through an information email/ newsletter to your subscribers informing them of a new product or product update with your affiliate link attached. So should a subscriber to your newsletter purchase – voila you receive a commission.

There are many ways to keep your subscribers happy – I would suggest putting together a small free course to gain your subscribers trust and of course as your focus is to help and teach your audience, this should not be a problem. As you build your list then you can expose them to your affiliate offers.

Please note you SHOULD NOT use your email list of subscribers simply as a means to promote products – you will burn them and have no business left. Please use your email list as a means to build a business and build a strong customer base!

This is by far the best way to build your business and I’m sure a lot of you have heard the phrase “the money is in the list”.

4. Affiliate Links Within Content

I have covered this off a few times – placing links back to a page within your website is a great way to provide not only great information to your audience, but to steer them back to your main offer. For example when I tell you that the way I actually learned all this information is from my top recommended course – you’ll see this phrase links you to my Top Recommendation page – there you will find all the information about Wealthy Affiliate – and when you read this page and agree the zero cost, 2 free website offer is too good to pass up – you will sign up and become one of my referrals. By the way, then I can help you personally within the WA community!