Earn a Doctor’s Income with Affiliate Programs
Just two things are needed to earn significant income as an online affiliate. The first is traffic, visitors to your website, ideally visitors with something defining in common (mothers, Catholics, stay at home dads, etc.). The second is at least one product or service in which they are likely to have a strong interest.
The first question you have to address is demographics, especially if you have a website that does not attract an easy to define visitors base. But, even if your visitors can be pretty well defined, there are important demographic questions to be asked and answered. Are your visitors men or women? How old are most of them? Do they have significant disposable income? Do they often make purchases online? What are their interests? What are their needs? Their buying habits?
Most important of all, why do they come to your website? What do they hope to do there? Are they looking for advice, entertainment, the solution to a medical problem, or something else?
If you do a lot of well organized thinking about who your visitors are, you’ll discover what their interests are, what they need, what they think they need (which may be very different), and what they might be willing to buy online. The products or services you choose must be a good match for your audience or it doesn’t matter how many folks visit your website. But, don’t worry, if the products or services you choose first don’t sell well, try others. It’s better to be right the first time, but it’s not a requirement.
Be sure to consider lead generation programs as well as programs which pay you on a per sale basis. Depending on the content of your site and the demographics of your visitors, they may be more interested in receiving car insurance quotes, for instance, than in buying auto accessories. Some programs pay you very well just to help them identify prospects for whatever it is they sell.
Because all sorts of companies want to build their mailing lists, you can even earn a commission when someone signs up for a coupon, a free restaurant meal, a few trial issues of a magazine, or countless other freebies.
Obviously, you want to consider programs which pay high commissions, but your own sales and/or sales leads do not have to be your only source of revenue. Try to find programs which will pay you for attracting other affiliates, particularly two and three tier programs. One program to which I belong pays me 10% of the earnings of everyone I sign up.
Be cautious and selective when choosing an affiliate program. Choose those which:
1. provide you with accurate tracking information. You need to know about what is working well for you, and what is not.
2. offer you proven advertising to add to your website.
3. offer you a quick and complete response when you have a question or a problem.
4. meet your website visitors’ needs with a high quality product or service at a fair and competitive price.
Be sure you offer your visitors a newletter, a small gift, or some other incentive to obtain their email addresses. That way, you can invite them back to your site when it changes or offer them opportunities to purchase products you believe may be of interest to them. But, do not send emails without permission, and do not send them excessively…the goal is to create trust and longterm customers.
My final suggestion to you is a bit of advice I was given by one of the most successful marketers I’ve ever met. Continue to track and analyze the results of everything you do.
