Affiliate Marketing

Recently I received an email from one of my affiliate managers telling me I had made a sale on one of my affiliate accounts. I always love getting these emails, so naturally I logged into my affiliate account to see what my new earnings were. What I was greeted with was a sale notice for $575.80.

As you can imagine, that was definitely a pleasant thing to see and since I’m all in favor of encouraging positive behavior, I started thinking back on the different ways that the sale could have taken place. Did I write an article? Was it an affiliate banner placement? Did I send an email out that included a link? How did this sale happen and how could I make it happen again.

For most people ten of these sales a month would more than pay their bills. If this is you, listen closely because this could be the thing that puts you on the road to making good money online. To be clear, I’m not saying this is the only thing you should do to make money online, but it would be a great addition to your other efforts.

What I realized was that I had written an article six days earlier that had included an affiliate link to ShareASale.com, the affiliate network my sale was made with. In the article I had written the reasons why you should start an affiliate program.

The article included information about different affiliate solutions. One of the named solutions was ShareASale because they offer affiliate program management services and I’ve had a very good experience with them as an affiliate.

I made sure not to sell anything in the article because I didn’t want to jeopardize losing reader trust. I also made sure to offer solid information about which software packages had what features and to highlight their pros and cons. It wasn’t for me to decide which solution would be best for the reader, but I did try to bring all the facts to light so the reader could make their own decision for their situation.

The overall goal of your article should be to provide your reader with as much value as possible by bringing well balanced, relevant, information to their attention. That means you should know what points matter most to your reader so you can correctly highlight the most important aspects of the topic.

The potential for this type of affiliate marketing is endless. Good quality articles can be written for just about anything and these days a lot of products and services offer affiliate programs that will pay you a handsome commission if you can send them qualified customers who need their products and services.

It certain worked out in my case and you can be that I’m already thinking of new articles to write to attract more interested readers so I can get a lot more $500 dollar emails from my affiliate manager.

Sharpening my pencil,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com