So, You Want To Make Money From
Your Site!

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by Jenny Wanderscheid

Okay, you've been reading Internet Day for awhile. You've tuned up your website. It looks marvelous. You've made great meta tags. You've submitted to all the search engines. You've built up nice content and update it regularly. You've got some nice traffic coming in. How the heck do you make money from this? I was recently a speaker at the Affiliate Solutions '99 conference in San Francisco, and trust me, affiliate marketing is going to be bigger than you know! It IS the future of making money on the Internet.

Not everyone has a big enough site to get advertisers, and not everyone has something to sell on his website. How the heck are you supposed to get by? The answer, my dear friends, is Affiliate Marketing. It is the single most wonderful revenue generator for content based web sites. Even if you already have a product to sell, chances are that you can complement it with an affiliate program and increase your revenues.

So, what is affiliate marketing? To make a long story short, you advertise for other people and earn a commission when they buy something. Aha. So, you can have advertisers even if you are a small site. There is such a variety of companies and products out there, I challenge you to say that there isn't one that will work for you. From toys to credit card applications, clothes to gifts, food to magazines, you name it, someone has a program for it.

You can start small with one or two affiliates, or you can build up an entire mall full of products. The more you do, the more you will earn. If you have a good relationship with your visitors, they will trust you and want to buy from you. It never hurts to say something like "purchases made through our mall help to support this site and keep it a free resource for you to enjoy."

You can use these products, affiliates and or malls in several ways. Most have several linking methods. Imagine your newsletter with a line at the top "Please visit our sponsors." It makes you look more professional to have sponsors, even if you really don't. Most affiliate programs have standard buttons and banners you can put at the top of your pages--much better than free those banner exchanges that you never really earn money from. These give you the chance to earn actual commissions. Last quarter, my website made over $3000 dollars from using affiliate marketing. Not bad for a mom who stays home with her kids and plays on her computer all day.

You can also add some buttons and text links into your pages to help generate additional revenue. Some affiliate programs also allow you to link to specific products to feature on your site. Some programs even have prebuilt storefronts for you; all you have to do is add the code to your page! See our new Health Shop for an example of a prebuilt storefront from PlanetRx Pharmacy. Say you have an article on your site about traveling, how about a picture of some new luggage? Or perhaps an article on business magazines? Offer a magazine trial. Using the Goto.com affiliate program, you can set up their search box on your site and earn a commission from that. The possibilities to affiliate marketing really are endless.

My favorite program is Nexchange as they offer co branding (your headers and footers, and a return back to your site after purchase). They also offer a wide variety of products and their system is very easy to implement and integrate with your site. Other affiliate programs that include many products and services include BeFree, and Linkshare, as well as many other independent programs. Try doing a search at Yahoo for affiliate programs and you will have more than enough to keep you busy. Feel free to check out our site, ChildFun, to see how we have integrated our affiliates into our content.