Learn what’s important in selecting the affiliate program that’s right for your web site. You can’t maximize conversions (and your income!) unless you choose products that your visitors will be interested in. This video offers some excellent advice for choosing a money-making affiliate program.
Proving Santa exists is getting to be a big business, with dozens of commercial concepts out there on the internet, designed to help you prove to your kids that Santa is real. One of the most popular is letters from Santa — personalized letters sent to a child that mention specific events in his or her life and let them know that Santa cares about them. So it’s no surprise that affiliate marketers can also “sell” the magical belief in Santa Claus to earn a little extra cash at Christmastime. Our friends from the Santa Proof blog are featuring a web site this week that offers printable letters from Santa, and a super easy affiliate program that keeps paying out as long as your referrals remain subscribers.
If you’re working on building your affiliate marketing web site, or making it better, in preparation for the holiday season, now is the time to look for tips and advice from affiliate marketing experts on making your site the best it can possibly be. The better your site, the more money you’ll make. These 10 Commandments of Affiliate Marketing from About.com’s Business channel all have great advice for designing a site that will result in maximum conversions.
If you’d like to get started in Affiliate Marketing but aren’t sure where to begin, Shawn Collins from the Affiliate Tip blog has created an excellent video to help you out. This 15-minute video shares 7 strategies to use when creating a new affiliate site. He cautions that you won’t make money quickly (within a week or two) with these strategies, but you will eventually start to make money.
During the holiday season, many retailers are trying to get out of the red and back into the black as consumers shop for Christmas gifts. Online retailers, and affiliates in turn, are no exception. If you market well, you can really pocket a lot of extra money in November and December from your affiliate relationships. Storm the Castle offers some great tips for increasing your holiday affiliate revenue by helping you market effectively to customers during this busy buying season.
Selling Christmas trees is a good way to make large commissions, since the price point on premium artificial Christmas trees is so high. Christmas Trees Galore, an artificial Christmas tree specialty site, offers its affiliate marketers up to 8% commission on sales made through their site.
They do have some requirements though, and not every applicant to their affiliate program will be approved. They are looking for web sites with “medium to high traffic,” so if you are just getting started in the affiliate marketing world, you might not have much luck. If you already have an established web site though, it’s worth a try-an 8% commission on a $400 tree is $32, so you could have a nice, steady income off of selling just a few trees every day. If you’re interested in joining Christmas Trees Galore’s affiliate program, click here for more information.
Here’s an easy holiday affiliate program-the Kids Christmas Activities program They only sell one product: an eBook package containing Christmas word puzzles, sudokus, math worksheets, writing activities, mazes, coloring pages, cards, bookmarks, and several printable games for kids to enjoy. They are downloaded to the customer’s computer immediately after purchase for instant gratification (and amusement for the kiddies). They also pay a hefty 50% commission for each sale you refer. That’s $7.80 per sale at the current price of $17.97. This affiliate program could also be a successful fundraiser for schools and other non-profit organizations-just include the affiliate URL in the organization’s newsletter or on the web site. To join the Kids Christmas Activities affiliate program, visit their affiliate page.
Another Christmas decoration retailer that features an affiliate program is HolidayLEDs.com. They specialize in selling energy efficient LED Christmas lights, and offer a wide selection of sizes, shapes, and colors for both indoor and outdoor use.
They use ShareASale to run their affiliate program, and once you’ve applied and been accepted, you can use banners and text links to advertise Holiday LEDs on your web sites. Through ShareASale, you can monitor how your sales are going and how much you’re making. You don’t have to pay anything to participate, and you’ll make a 12% commission on each sale. For more information, visit the Holiday LEDs Affiliate Program.
If you want to cash in on people looking for basic Christmas decorations, you may want to join the affiliate program at ChristmasDepot.com. You’ll earn 10% commission on every sale that comes from your web site. Their affiliate program also offers you the ability to subscribe to data feeds to add their products to your own e-commerce site, including popular categories like energy efficient Christmas lights and American-made artificial Christmas trees. Christmas Depot pays once a month and has a $40 minimum payout.
Every day, a multitude of new ways to make money via the internet start showing up on the search engines. As with all money-making schemes, some are legitimate, and some are not. Affiliate programs are one of the legitimate ways to make money, although there’s definitely no guarantee that you’ll get rich quick, or at all.
If you already have a web site that gets a good amount of traffic, you can harness that traffic to make money if you join the right affiliate program. (You can also build a web site specifically for your affiliate program and drive traffic to it through search engine optimization and pay-per-click campaigns, but that’s a bit more complicated and costly.)
Next, you’ll want to choose an affiliate program. A good place to start is checking a web site that sells a product that is relevant to your site. See if they have an affiliate program that will enable you to make a commission based on sales that come from your web site. Making sure the product is related to your site (or that you can make it related) is important, because people wouldn’t come to a site about flowers to buy a light bulb, or vice-versa. That’s an extreme example, but it illustrates a very important point. You’ll make more sales if your audience comes to your site looking for information about the product you are selling.
You can also join an affiliate network like ClickBank to sell products through multiple affiliate programs and manage it all in one place.
Once you’ve signed up for an affiliate program, you’ll start linking to products from the web site you’ve signed up with. Be sure to follow their instructions so you get credit for the sales. You’ll be paid a commission (usually a set percentage or dollar amount) based on the sales that come from the links posted on your web site.
On this blog, we’ll be discussing how you can boost your holiday income with Christmas-related affiliate programs, and find your share of the Christmas-spending pie.