Affiliate Marketing Referrals: How to Earn Referral Income on the Web

Are you thinking of incorporating links for affiliate marketing referrals into into your content pages and launching a sales strategy? Excellent plan, but do you know how to go about “pre-selling” and “monetizing” your information so that you can capitalize on all your hard work?

The core of any money-making website is its content and that content must be unique and compelling to generate any referrals. And by unique I’m not saying affiliate marketers need to re-invent the wheel. On the web, unique content simply means original. It can be much the same information found at many other sites but it has been written from scratch and has not been copied or duplicated in any way.

Launch a "Theme-Based" Website

In order to begin earning affiliate marketing referrals you’ll have a better chance at survival in this business if you follow a basic plan.

Your first task in the plan is to develop a niche or "theme-based" content site that provides product reviews or tips to online consumers searching for information. Niche sites are the life blood of affiliate marketers and can cover absolutely any topic. Whether your passion is cats, traveling, auto racing, cooking, politics, shoes, or video games -- you can be sure there’s a need for your knowledge on the web.

Preparing to Land Those Referral Fees

Your business plan will take you through the steps of building and developing a niche site but it must go further than that.

If you’ve never launched a site before (other than a personal blog) you might want to take a look at the C-T-P-M process offered by SiteBuildIt. Their Affiliate Marketing Masters Course takes you through the four critical phases of 1) offering unique and "in demand" content, 2) attracting targeted traffic, 3) PRE-selling the product, and 4) monetizing the PRE-sell to the customer.

Should you be successful in pre-selling the product to the consumer, they would then click on a link at your site to go to the merchant’s site to make a purchase. These affiliate marketing referrals earn commissions through either the sale or lead or both.

It’s just too bad that’s not as easy as it sounds.

The interesting fact about many partner websites is that while they are often successful in steps 1 and 2 (writing fresh content and bringing in traffic), it ISN’T ENOUGH to be profitable! To land a solid conversion rate of 2% to 3% of visitors and earn affiliate marketing referrals, you must learn steps 3 and 4 in order to gain any financial benefit from all your hard work.

Open Up Multiple Income Streams

In their plan, SBI uses what they call Small Business Monetization Models. Most affiliates start out using a "no-product/low-maintenance" type of website and add a few pages of content every week to slowly grow the site.

But as you develop your affiliate marketing site, SiteBuildIt shows you how to expand the monetization model to include multiple income streams including: referrals, finder’s fees, Adsense or other contextual ad programs, or even sell ad space on your pages directly to advertisers. Eventually, you may even want to create your own digital ebooks, or drop ship your own products from home. By learning these monetization methods, you’ll soon discover that affiliate marketing referrals and the resulting income streams from your internet business are not "either/or"... but "and and and."

Return from Affiliate Marketing Referrals to the Affiliate Marketing Help Home Page