This is a guest post by Sté Kerwer from Dukeo.com
Affiliate marketing means you use a special link to send visitors from your blog or website to a merchant’s website. If the visitor makes a purchase on that site, you earn a commission.
For example, you might use an affiliate link on your blog and send your reader to a coffee maker at Amazon. If that reader then buys that coffee maker, you earn a percentage of the sale.
There are millions of different affiliate programs you can use to make money online which will completely eliminate the need of getting online loans or payday loans. Almost every online retailer has an affiliate link you can use to send traffic their way and earn a commission on sales you help generate.
But when you take a look at all of those programs they fall into two major business models – they either pay you earnings on the number of clicks you generate or the number of actions you generate.
Here’s a breakdown on Cost Per Click and Cost Per Action affiliate programs to help you choose the best model for you.
Cost Per Click Marketing
When you use a cost per click program you’ll be paid each time someone clicks the advertiser’s link you’ve placed on your blog. It doesn’t matter if they buy anything or submit their email address. All you need them to do is click the link and you’ll earn a commission.
Of course, it’s harder than it sounds. And you usually don’t make a lot of money per click. However, if you do it right, you can get a lot of clicks and make it up in volume.
You have to pay close attention to your keywords and content to make sure they’re relevant to the ad. For example, you may have a blog about dog training and all of your blog posts are about dogs and training tips. You’re using keywords to attract searchers who are interested in dog training, which is the right thing to do. But then you decide to place a banner in your sidebar for a free numerology reading because you think numerology is cool so you think everybody else will be interested, too. Besides that, if someone clicks on it you’ll make a whole $2.
Wrong! No one is going to click on that banner because everyone who comes to your blog is interested in dog training, not numerology. The affiliate ads you run on your blog or website need to be relevant to your readers. If they’re visiting your blog to learn about dog training tips there’s a good chance they’ll click on ads that have to do with dogs – dog food, dog collars, dog training videos, etc. But they’ll more than likely just ignore that numerology ad because that’s not why they’re visiting your blog. You already know they’re interested in dogs, so use dog-related affiliate programs.
Cost Per Action Marketing
Cost per action marketing is a little different in that your reader has to complete some sort of action before you earn your commission. They may only have to submit their email address or zip code but they might also be required to make a purchase. You still need to take the same steps to match up your content and your affiliate program but generally the commissions are much higher with CPA marketing because you have to put forth more effort to entice your reader to complete the action.
Choosing the best model depends more on the type of traffic you have. If you have a relatively new site with not much repeat traffic yet, you may have more success with CPC marketing. Your readers are visiting for the first time and they’ll be more likely to click on an AdSense advertisement to search for more information than they would a banner ad that leads to a sales page.
But if you have a more established blog with lots of repeat traffic, your readers will be closer to the buying stage and you’ll have a better chance of them clicking through to complete a sale or other action. Either way, you need to have good quality, relevant content to attract the best targeted traffic.
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular online methods for earning money. You don’t have to worry about stocking inventory or shipping and handling, you don’t have to worry about customer complaints or returns, and you don’t have to worry about taking care of the money. All you have to do is learn how to choose the right product and create great content that sends your reader to the merchant’s sales page. After that, you just sit back and collect the money.
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Affiliate marketing is definitely the way forward to earning cash online. The great thing about it is that you don’t have to deal with any customer service at all. But I got some advice for affiliate marketers. Begin with driving traffic to your own site first and work on building your list. Thereafter you can drive traffic to the merchant’s site with your affiliate link perhaps via e-mail marketing or your newsletters which you send out to your list. This is advisable because you do not want to spend all your time and efforts building the merchants list only and not yours. And of course let’s not forget that you can market and follow up with your list over a longer period of time. As the saying goes the money is in the list! List build for a long term sustainable business.
Affiliate marketing has no restrictions anyone can join a affiliate program and start promoting to make a commission but when it comes to cpa marketing there are few prerequisites that has to be satisfied to be able to promote their cpa offers.
Its true that cpa offers are more profitable but the getting approved is the difficult part and anything after that is profit.
Before applying to a cpa network make sure you satisfy their requirements and then apply to get your application approved first time itself.
I have a friend from college who started doing affiliate marketing in his free time, while in school and he made a killing, especially for someone in college. After graduation, he started doing it full time and it’s actually quite surprising how successful you can be from doing it.
I really find CPA as the best way on making money online because you don’t need other people to buy products and services, but in order to be successful in using method, readers like websites that provides quality contents and information.
The important thing in affiliate marketing is to find out the niche from which you can earn money. Then about getting traffic and repeated traffic, for this you need is quality content and some unique interesting features.
Your posts and keywords must be relevant to your affiliate links or you will not get any clicks at all. Placement of you affiliate links is also important because you want to put your links or ads in a place that a reader is likely to click like the sidebar or top or your page.
What about targeting demographics? For example if you have a site about toys for a popular iphone app like angry birds, would it make sense to put CPA ads which are targeting the demographics of your visitors? For example having an ad of a ps3 game which is not directly related to angry birds but still targeted towards the types of people visiting.
Affiliate Marketing has to start with the customer. If you first create the sites to give the customers information they want and help them find out what they need to know sales will come.
It may sound a little flaky but focusing on customers over the products really can end up netting you more sales in the long run
In my opinion CPA it’s the best method an affiliate can use to make some money thru affiliate marketing, because as others said it takes a lot of time for a buyer to take the decision to buy a product and almost never someone buy a product the first time that he/she see it. The result is that even if someone buy an affiliate product it is very possible that the affiliate will never get paid…
I think doing affiliate marketing is one of the most easy to understand ways to make money online. I learned how important having the right keywords and quality contents are. Thank you for sharing. It has motivated me to continue doing affiliate marketing.