Affiliate selling

Affiliate sites make a lot of money. Sorry, correction, some affiliate sites make a lot of money for some people. It's a fairly simple concept. You set up a website, people come to visit it and click on links that take them to the casino/poker/betting/adult/ survey/etc site that you are an affiliate of. They sign up, you get a kick back. Easy money surely?

Yes, certainly for the people who's site you are promoting, it is easy money. For you? Well that all depends. The business model relies heavily on one thing - traffic.

You need to get lots of visitors to your site and then you need to get a reasonable % of them to visit the site you are promoting and sign up in order to generate your income.

Of course the site you're promoting will have 1000's of affiliates, so even if each one only makes 1 sale a month, they get 1000's of sales (on top of their direct leads) and are very happy. On the other hand it's not really enough to encourage the affiliate to give up their day job.

No problem you say, I will make more sales than that a month! Will you? Well first you need the visitors. How do you get them? It's generally acknowledged that there are 3 main ways to get your traffic:

1. The search engines
2. Advertising
3. Social Networking

Search Engines

Ok, great search engines, let's get a top listing in the search engines and that will bring loads of traffic and then they will click through and the site will make loads of money. Right?

Search engines aren't a big fan of affiliate sites, ie sites that exist purely to generate leads that are then passed on. Without going into massive detail about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO – have a look here SEO chat for lots on that) in order to get a good listing in Google, Yahoo, MSN, Cuil, etc you need to have a site that the SE's think is useful to their visitors.

A useful site, generally is one with lots of content, lots of incoming links from other useful sites and probably lots of outgoing links to other useful sites. Chances are, your affiliate site won't look a lot like that. Of course, if you have a useful site, then there's nothing to stop you having some affiliate links on it (we hope this site is useful and yes we do have some affiliate links but as of yet they haven't generated a single penny!). However as there are already countless affiliate sites out there, your site is going to need to offer something different in order to attract and keep the visitors.

Pay Per Click

Ok, well if it's a pure affiliate site you're going to be building, better use some advertising then. Get some pay per click (PPC) ads using Google adwords or Bidvertiser or Microsoft adcenter and bring traffic to your site that way.

Trouble is, PPC keywords are becoming expensive and you could end up spending a massive amount on advertising. Unless you are turning your traffic into sales then you end up breaking even or maybe even making a loss.

Of course PPC is not the only form of advertising available, there are lots of other ways of promoting your site but PPC will probably bring in the most relevant targeted traffic that is likely to convert into sales. How you do your marketing is entirely up to you. The more inventive and original it is, the more likely you are to attract the visitors that you need.

Have a look at this site being an adult affiliate doesn't work for more reasons why it's really hard to make money as an affiliate.

Social Networking

You didn't think that all those people on Facebook, Myspace, etc with 1000s of friends were just doing it as a popularity contest did you? By building up a network of friends or contacts, especially ones who have similar interests to you or what you are offering, you can target your marketing efforts in an effective fashion towards people who have a genuine interest in your products or services. Or you could just end up pissing off your friends.

Not put off?

All this doom and gloom has probably put you off you're ideas about setting up an affiliate site and making your fortune. That wasn't the idea. The idea was simply to help you realise that it is far from easy and it is a market that is already heavily oversubscribed. Of course that doesn't mean it's not possible to make money, it just means that you need to be willing to work hard and put in a lot of time and effort. Learn about building good websites, SEO and plan your advertising campaign carefully. There's no get rich quick scheme here. However, if you still want to give it a shot, then go right ahead. We've helpfully found some links to affiliate schemes for you to sign up with should you so desire.