You have might have read a lot of headlines that sound similar to this one above, or make promises like this one seems to. You have might have read some of those articles all the way to the end, even clicked on some of the links in the article and read all the information on those links. When you finished, you may have thought you wasted your time… no way can I make money doing that; I can’t promote that, I can’t put that on my website… or whatever that! IT WILL DESTROY MY REPUTATION!

That isn’t necessarily so. I’m going to give you some tips that will give you an opportunity to monetize your website or blog, while preserving your brand. One of the best and easiest ways to monetize your online properties is to join some affiliate programs and advertise them on your site.

Affiliate programs are the answer

Why affiliate programs? Simple. When you become an affiliate marketing associate, you market and promote products without having to develop them yourself. All the work of writing an eBook, or recording an audio track, or programming a software product is taken care of by someone else. But that’s not all the benefits. You also don’t have to create any marketing graphics- those are all created for you by the person who builds the product and is running the affiliate program.

Another big benefit is that you really don’t have to keep track of money or finances. Most of the better affiliate programs will provide the members affiliate management tools that are based on one of the leading affiliate software programs. The software will give you all kinds of measurements on how your ads are performing.

Five tips for choosing affiliate offers to promote

1. Look good earnings potential - You want to make sure that if one of the people you refer to an affiliate offer buys, that you will make some decent money. Some people think affiliate programs offering high percentage payouts are best. I would prefer to find affiliate program that sell high ticket items and pay large commissions. This affiliate program for promoting sales interview tools gives you the opportunity to earn almost $50 per sale.
2. Choose programs your readers will like - It is critical that you choose affiliate programs and offers that your audience will appreciate and be interested in. It wouldn’t be too bright to choose to promote affiliate programs and products for adult content movies on a site that is dedicated to toys for toddlers. However, if you have a website that helps people find careers is sales, it would be great to promote something like How to Get Into Medical Sales.

3. Look for affiliate programs powered by software - When you sign up for an affiliate program it will quickly become obvious if the owner of the program is serious about helping affiliate members be successful. If you are redirected to a page powered by a top-tier affiliate marketing software program, you can infer that this is a serious affiliate program. If you get an email that says ‘here is you affiliate link’ and ‘we’ll let you know if you earn anything’ you should think carefully about investing any time. Their are several top name brands like iDev Affiliate, LinkShare, and JROX JAM. My favorite is JROX JAM, which you can get for free here: http://websitesthatdrivesales.com/recommends/free-affiliate-management-software.htm

4. Make sure the website is NOT anonymous - What I mean is, make sure that there are real people standing behind the website, people with good reputations, who take customer service seriously. People who tell you who they are, give you contact information with phone numbers aren’t very likely to be fly-by-night. They aren’t likely to ‘forget’ to pay you the commissions that you have generated. If you can find a picture, bio, and phone number of the website owner, chances are they are trustworthy. You will also be able to ‘Google’ them to find any issues about their program. Peggy McKee, the Medical Sales Recruiter, is one of the country’s leading sales recruiters - she proudly announces her site ownership on the about pages like this one: http://30-60-90-day-sales-plan.com/about/

5. Choose affiliate programs that have support programs - If you are choosing a piece of software to buy, you probably wouldn’t purchase it if there was not support mechanism in place. You should use the similar criteria when evaluating affiliate websites. If the affiliate program owner doesn’t have a support system in place - something like a ticket system or help desk software - then they probably won’t care about any problems that you might have. If they do, then you can be fairly sure that they are trying to keep customers happy. If they AREN’T working to keep customers happy, their poor service will reflect poorly on you, and tarnish your reputation.

Here are a couple of affiliate programs that hit on all cylinders, that I recommend if your site’s visitors would be interested in these subjects. One is an affiliate program for a sales interview tool that targets sales professionals - you can check it out here: http://30-60-90-day-sales-plan.com/affiliate-program-details/. The other is a program that has a broader appeal - it targets people who own businesses that either have no web presence or under performing websites; you can get all the information for it here: http://websitesthatdrivesales.com/blog/home/affiliate-program/