Lesson 8: Business from your Website
Lesson 8:
Affiliate Marketing
You need not promote someones product and you need not sell anything. You
just have to send people to the website you are affiliated with. Once you become
an affiliate for a company, you will be provided with a special (unique) URL. You
can promote them from your website by displaying their banner or text link from
the content pages or through your emails or newsletters. You need to make
people click on the link provided by Affiliate Company. And your job is over.
The company takes care of selling their products. Even if some visitors do not
buy during their first visit, the company keeps track of them and you get credited
when they buy the product. Usually they track the visitors by placing a small file
called cookie in the visitors computers and reading them when they visit again.
You will get paid for your visitors purchases - as long as the cookie remains in
their computers at the time of purchasing the products.
Though in general, the companies pay per-sale, some companies even pay
per-lead or pay per-click. In pay-per-leadyou are paid for giving a lead to the
company, i.e. when a visitor from your website visits their website and asks for a
quotation or downloads a free demo or registers for a free program, etc. In pay-
per-click you are paid whenever a visitor from your website reaches their website.
Joining an affiliate program (also known as reseller program) is very easy. You
need not pay any money for joining the program (in most cases). Based on your
product or the theme you have chosen, signup as affiliate for one or more
products. While signing-up, read the terms and conditions carefully to checkout the
percentage you get, the minimum money to be accumulated to request the
payment, frequency of payments, etc.
There are many people who earn good amount of money just using this
method alone. But you should know a fact before you lay your hands on this
method of making money. To start earning right away (a handsome income), you
need to have hundreds (or thousands) of visitors coming to your website everyday.
Or if you intend to use email marketing, you need to have thousands of emails in
your list. So this method is the best method of earning money, if you already have
a busy website or a large email list.
If you are just starting your business, you need to promote your website and
build the traffic, whether it is your own product or affiliate product. But your earning
will be more if the product is your own. So the bottom line is, if you are just
starting your business, consider creating and promoting your own product first
and simultaneously promote affiliate products as secondary products.
Google Adsense
Today Google Adsense is one of the hottest subjects that are being
discussed around the world. What is Adsense?
If you had visited Google website and searched for some information you might
have noticed some links on the right-hand side and on top of the page. Those are
called Text Links that are relevant to the information you are searching for. Those
links are the advertisements, a program called Google Adwords. Google charges
the advertisers for those advertisements on per-click basis.
If you are registered with Google for AdSense, they will provide you with some
HTML codes that you will copy and paste it on your website. When someone
opens your website, Google ads appear on your website that is relevant to the
content of your website. And when one of your visitors clicks on any of the
advertisement links, the advertiser pays to Google and Google shares part of that
revenue with you.
At this point you must understand an important factor. All clicks do not fetch
the same money. Some keywords are sold for high price due to competition and
due to the frequency of its searches per day. And some keywords are sold for very
low price, since there is no competition. It is quiet natural that Google will pay you
based on the income they generate.
So it is important to closely watch and study the current trend. If you know the
profitable keywords, you can optimize your website accordingly and generate a
decent income from Adsense.
To register with Google for Adsense you need to have a website that provides
information (onany subject). The website must be completely ready without any
broken links (i.e. the links that take you nowhere). Once your website is completely
ready, only then should you apply to Google. One of their representatives will
personally check your website and then it will be approved or rejected. The whole
process of registration may take a week or two.
In a way Google Adsense is like an affiliate program. You will generate
handsome income, if you have good traffic to your website.
In the past one year alone hundreds (if not thousands) of websites have
mushroomed and variety of products like Secrets of Google Adsense uncovered
are being sold. And people charge for such products anywhere between US $10
and $197. It has become a fashion to create a product and incorporate the
word Google while naming the product.
But the fact is there is no such secret exists that needs to be uncovered.
If you want to make good amount of money with Google Adsense, you need to get
thousands of visitors per day to your web site. If you do not have sufficient visitors
to click on the ads on your webpage, it is obvious that you are not going to
generate any income through Adsense.
Earlier in this course we had discussed in detail about finding a niche product.
The same concept is applicable for finding the profit making keywords. Please
check your CD for some very useful keyword tools.
Visit http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/ to find out the keywords that
were used the most during the last month. To find out how much people are
bidding for a particular keyword use this Keyword Bid Tool:
http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/
This will give you an idea of the costly and cheaper keywords. There is twist
here, please read carefully. It is obvious that the costly keywords will get you more
money per-click. But costly keywords need not necessarily be your profitable
keyword!!!
At this point you must remember that these keywords are costly, because there
is competition. It means that there are already many websites with content related
to these (costly) keywords. If you are going to build a website with such content,
you will find it difficult to get your website listed on top of search engine results.
This is the place where you need to work really smart.
Lets say the cost of keyword1is 50 cents (half a dollar) and the cost of
keyword2 is 2 dollars ( http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/). If
you analyze and conclude that (because competition is less) you can get more
visitors to your website with keyword1 (and hence more clicks) as compared to
keyword2, you should consider building your website with the cheaper keyword.
If you can get can 400 clicks on keyword1 and just 50 clicks on keyword2,
you will make more money with keyword1. In the above case, your profitable
keyword is keyword1, though it cost less and you will earn less money per-click.
So you have to understand your profitable keywords and build your website with
these keywords to display the ads on your webpage to earn good income.
The first criterion is to understand the profit making keywords. Second is to
generate good traffic to your website. These are the real secrets involved in
making money with Adsense and nothing more. Soon you will learn various
methods to generate traffic to your website.
