Remember the day when you made the ultimate decision to change your life? Yes, it was the day when you decided to start your own home business. Gosh, I remember the anxiety when I uploaded my very first web site, waiting for something to happen. It’s like going onto a stage and performing in front of a large crowd.

Ok, what has this to do with affiliate programs and how to make money with them? Not much other than this is the primary reason why people spending money online. Emotions are the number one selling factor, period. And newbie web masters are loaded with emotions.

When you started your home business, did you have a product to sell? Neither did I. That’s why affiliate programs are perfect for startup home businesses. In a nutshell, an affiliate sells products from somebody else and keeps a commission from each sale. An affiliate id responsible for all the advertising and only gets paid whenever there’s a sale.

Take a break and think about this for a minute. Every day there are thousands of people online, searching for products and ideas to make money with. They know that there’s big money to make and they are eager to get started. When you started your home business it probably never crossed your mind to sell your own products and to run your own affiliate program.

If you’re in the online business for a while with mediocre results it is time to switch sides. Why should you carry most of the risk with your advertisement spending with less than satisfactory sales results? Not to mention that you’re at the mercy of somebody else’s reliability to send you your hard earned money.

If you don’t have a product to sell, go out there and search for products with master resale rights. This will grant you the exclusive rights to sell the product and keep 100% of the profits. Selling the product through affiliates doesn’t violate this, because you’re paying your affiliates for the advertising efforts, the final sale is still made by you.

Of course there are a million products with master resale rights available. Choose your product wisely. You don’t want to start an affiliate program with products that are already over marketed and maybe available for free or as part of a bonus package. This takes some time and research, but it is well worth the effort.

One source is to research the public domain sector and compile your own information product. There are numerous publications available on this topic. Another source is to join a membership program that sells master resale rights products. Make sure that they offer unique products and check their rules. Many offer a trial membership, take advantage of this.

Once you have your product start your affiliate program. Don’t join one of the many services that offer affiliate program services for a monthly fee. Here’s why. Having thousands of affiliates advertising your product is a great thing. Having thousands of free links to your web site is priceless.

Create as many advertising samples for your affiliates as possible. Have these samples point to different entry points to your web site. Banners are the worst advertising tools, but newbie web masters love them. They are easy to implement. What do you care, you got your free link to your website. Make sure that you use search engine friendly affiliate links. Affiliate links with a “?” are recognized as such. Better are the affiliate links that look like a directory structure. The easy way to implement this is to use PHP as your language of choice.

Guess what will happen after a few months running your own affiliate program from your website? Your own web site will skyrocket in rankings on any search engine, because you got so many links to your web site without having a link farm on your own. This is every web masters dream. Now you have a choice. You either aggressively promote your affiliate program or you promote your products. Either way you win.

If you’re still skeptical, go to Google or Yahoo and search for links pointing to your favorite affiliate program. Simply type ‘links:’ and your affiliate program’s domain name into the search field. Make sure you don’t have any blanks. This will return all the websites that are linking back to this affiliate program. Check out the number on the right upper corner where it says ‘Results 1 – 10 of about x’. x stands for the total number of links. Now do the same for your website. Hmm, you got nothing? Well, that’s the difference. I hope you see the power of this by now.

Before you go out there and slab together your own affiliate program. Do your homework and research as much as possible. You want to get it right the first time.

Good luck to you all,

Peter Dobler
© 2005