Want to earn money online – quickly and easily? Then make money with affiliate programs! In most cases, the product owner will handle the product creation, customer support and promotional follow-ups. They may even provide you with a variety of ready-to-use affiliate tools to easily convert visitors into buyers. All you have to do is drive traffic to their site, and the merchant takes care of the rest.

Affiliate Marketing Vs. Other Models

Although it’s easy to make money with affiliate programs, there are other ways to earn online.

Let’s look at the other models, and check out some of the advantages (and disadvantages) of affiliate marketing compared to them.

Google Adsense can make you money every time someone clicks on your ads, even if they don’t buy anything; but you can only earn a few cents per click (in most cases) -unlike in affiliate programs where you could earn several dollars per sale. You’ll have to get a lot more adsense clicks to earn the same amount as one affiliate sale.

If you choose to sell your own products, it might require a lot of time (or money if you outsource) before you can ever see any return on your investment. Although you can keep 100% of the profits, you have to manage everything – research, product creation, payment processing, and customer support, among others.

But when you decide to make money with affiliate programs, you only need to focus on driving traffic to the merchant’s site, and perhaps building a list if you want to continuously market to that audience for the long-term.

Where To Find Affiliate Products To Promote

There are a number of affiliate program networks where you could search for ideal affiliate products to promote. The most popular ones include:

• Clickbank

• Commission Junction

• LinkShare

• ShareaSale

If you’re just getting your feet wet, I recommend starting with Clickbank. It’s currently the largest and fastest growing online retailer for digital products.

If you want to successfully make money with affiliate programs at ClickBank, one good tip is to select a product that has a gravity of 40 to 150. That doesn’t mean any product with a gravity below 40 won’t produce profitable results; but at least you can be reasonably assured that affiliates are making lots of commissions if a product has a gravity within the 40 to 150 range.

Now why not promote affiliate products with a gravity above 150? Because they have plenty of competition. If you want to earn a sizeable income while not having too much competition, choose a product with a gravity of 40 to 150.

Sites That Help Sell Affiliate Products

You can directly promote your affiliate links to make money with affiliate programs, but you can achieve higher conversions by creating your own sites that review or pre-sell the affiliate products.

Some of them include:

1. Review Sites.

You can do a review site that gives a detailed review of the affiliate product you’re promoting. Review sites are perceived to be authorities on the products they’re reviewing, so they could build up your credibility in that market.

One good tip when reviewing is to appear unbiased. You should not only mention the benefits, but you should also point out any minor flaws as well. Once you do that, the buyers’ defenses will go down and they can focus on the positive aspects of the product.

But remember that the benefits should greatly overcome the minor flaws, or the affiliate program would not be worth promoting.

If you don’t have a host and domain (and you don’t like to shed money before seeing any returns), you may post your review using a blog or content-sharing sites such as squidoo and hubpages.

Search engines give more weight to these content-sharing sites, so you have better chances of ranking higher for keywords you optimized your reviews for. Just remember to give valuable content as well, and you’ll be regarded as a trusted source of information on that niche.

2. Squeeze Pages.

Listbuilding is crucial if you’re planning to establish a relationship with people in your target market and you want to promote long-term to them.

When you collect subscribers through a squeeze page, you can follow up as many times as you want. That’s the beauty of it.

To capture subscribers, what you can do is create an e-course or short report related to the affiliate product, and use that as a "bribe" to get their email.

If you don’t have the time to create the "bribe" or the budget to outsource the task, you may ask the merchant if he has a rebrandable report you can give away. Or you may ask him permission to use his articles in your promotion. You may compile the articles into an e-course or report, and use that as the incentive to get targeted people to subscribe.

Traffic Strategies To Make Money With Affiliate Programs

1. Adwords.

This is probably the fastest way to test a product’s profitability. However, you should track your spending, as Google Adwords can drain your bank account quickly, especially if your selection of keywords is very general such as "weight loss or internet marketing." Use keywords that are more targeted; they cost less but can get you better response.

Set a limit on the daily budget for your campaigns if you’re not very familiar with adwords yet.

Check out ads for similar keywords. If you notice the same ads appearing repeatedly for a long time, then that’s an indication it’s making money.

2. Article Marketing.

If you don’t have a budget to start with, you can still make money with affiliate programs - for free. Simply write articles and submit them to article directories, or post them at content sharing sites like squidoo and hubpages. Make sure you optimize your article for your keywords.

3. Forum Marketing.

Another free way to advertise is to post at forums. You could put an invitation to visit your site for more information, or download your free report, in your signature (sig) file.

Make sure you read the rules and observe if other posters are including their sig files. If you found that they don’t allow sig files, find other forums that do. Don’t waste your time on forums that don’t provide any reciprocal benefits for your efforts.

Once you found some good forums to post to, contribute first. Give advice, establish yourself as a go-to person, and make several helpful posts before you include your sig file.

To make money with affiliate programs, all you need to have is a basic understanding of the fundamental principles of online marketing and take consistent action on what works. Once you grasp the basics and apply them, making a living from it consistently can be as easy as pie!