When I started out with affiliate marketing, I probably did it the way 90% of the other beginners do it... I created a clickbank account and started to promote clickbank products on traffic exchanges. The results as you can imagine were close to zero. I then started my learning curve and read somewhere that the money was in the list. So I built a list with an opt-in page and as soon as people signed up, I sent them clickbank offers. Again the results were close to zero and the people on my list didn't stay there very long. It took me several years of learning and many mistakes to finally come up with a business that makes me money.
What have I changed in my strategy?
The biggest change that I undertook is to actually have a strategy at all. What I mean by strategy is to have a plan as to how I want people to find me, how I want to interact with them and especially what I want to promote to them.
The most important component of your business strategy - how will you monetize it?
It is very important to define how you want to monetize your business. It is a good idea to think about that before you start your business. The manner you monetize your business defines the demographics of the leads you should be looking for and how you should interact with them. Surprisingly, I find a lot of people who start to build an online business without knowing how they will monetize it.
How to choose your affiliate programs
Affiliate programs are one of many ways how you can monetize your business and it is probably one of the easiest ones. However there are a lot of different type of affiliate programs. First of all you have to eliminate everything that is not serious. Never promote a program that you wouldn't invest yourself in.
For me a very important aspect of an affiliate program is whether it pays you commissions for sales or whether you are paid according to the activity of the users you refer.
Commission based affiliate programs
Let's take the example of the affiliate program of Splinterlands. You probably all know this game which is one of the great motors of the steem blockchain. Splinterlands offers an affiliate program where you earn 5% commission on all the purchases made by your affiliates. With Splinterlands I earn money when my affiliates purchase new packs.
Activity based affiliate programs
Let's look now at the affiliate program of cointiply. Cointiply is a website that pays you for many different tasks like taking surveys, watching videos or simply to claim from the faucet. With cointiply I earn 10 – 25% of the coins that my referrals earn themselves. With Cointiply I earn each time any of my affiliates fulfils a task on the website.
In my experience it is much more difficult to get affiliates and also income for commission based programs. It is much easier to get affiliates for activity based programs and it is also much easier to generate income with it. On the other hand the income potential is much bigger with commission based affiliate programs.
Choose the nature of the affiliate programs that you want to promote and only then build your strategy for your online business.
Do you want to learn more about affiliate marketing and internet business? I've just published an e-book that can be purchased on steem with steem or Leo How to start a Cost-Free Internet Business.
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