Affiliate Programs in the USA — The Ultimate Guide to Making Money Online
Earning money from your website has never been this easy. If you are a blogger and have a content driven website, or just a personal site where you upload stuff for your subscribers, you can use this platform to generate income for yourself. You can do it as a hobby or turn it into a professional business depending on your competence, because it also determines your pay grade in this business.
And you don’t have to sell your own products to earn substantial bucks. Online merchants are willing to share their profits with you if you have huge traffic on your website that could be converted into a steady stream of revenues through sales. This is done though top earning affiliate programs. All you have to do is place ads on your personal site and link it with that of an online merchant and convert the traffic from your subscribers into potential sales.
By linking an online merchant’s site with yours, your subscribers can access the merchant’s store to make purchases, and you get to earn a commission from every successful trade initiated from your website. This is what marketing affiliate programs are all about.
Read further to understand more about top tier affiliate programs.
What Is An Affiliate Program?
An affiliate program is an income generating arrangement in which a blogger, or a website owner for that matter, earns revenues in the form of commissions through directing traffic from a personal website to an online merchant’s store and converting the traffic into potential sales. When a subscriber makes a purchase after clicking on the advert or link, the blogger gets to earn a percentage of the profits.
It is not that complex now, is it? Well, here’s an in-depth look into the whole process of easy affiliate programs.
How Do Affiliate Programs Work?
Are you aware of the long and short term effects that advertising has on a merchant’s sales volume? Allow us explain briefly about this bit. For a merchant to increase their sales volume, they have to invest in advertising. Statistics prove this, studies prove this.
The thing is, with online advertising, reaching the target consumers requires adverts to be placed where the target market is, and the only way to guarantee that the ads will reach the targeted people is to put them on sites that receive huge traffic.
What online merchant do, is develop effective ads that link to their online stores and then give out those adverts to bloggers to place them on their websites. When a person clicks on those ads, which have trackers, they are directed back to the merchant’s online store to make a purchase. Once the purchase has been confirmed, a percentage of the profit is shared with the blogger. In essence, this is what affiliate programs entail.
It is a simple yet a mutually beneficial arrangement for both the blogger and the online merchant, because they get to earn a few bucks from the transaction: you get to earn a commission for directing traffic to the merchant’s site, and the merchant gets to increase their sales volume from the traffic.
What Are Affiliate (Partner) Programs?
Before signing up for any affiliate marketing programs, you need to identify the most suitable niches for your blog. Identifying the best niche to venture into will determine whether you will be successful in affiliate programs and get to earn substantial income, or not. Therefore, it is important that you understand what niches, or themes, are available that best relate with your blog so that you can make the right choice. Offer types and devices are also important.
Niche
It is important that you find affiliate partners operating in the same niche as you, or those having the same theme as your blog. It will not make sense partnering up with an online merchant offering different products from the ones your personal site is concerned with. For instance, if the content you provide your subscribers is centred on gambling, then your chances of converting your huge traffic into commission will be favoured if you partner up with a merchant whose products are related to gambling. This way, you will have a higher chance of converting the traffic into sales and earning more commission.
Offer Types
Companies that offer affiliate programs boast different pay models; for instance, there are those merchants that offer a pay per click model, which earns you a commission each time a subscriber clicks on the ad. There is also pay per view model, whereby you earn a commission for every ad viewed on your website. The most common affiliate program model is the pay per sell, and here you get to earn a commission for every sale made from the advert placed on your personal website.
Device Type
Campaigns can be targeted only for desktop OR mobile users, given that the attention span is different for each of them as well as the interaction with the website dynamics. Good affiliate programs take this into account and usually boast guides that help you understand better how to implement this into your business model.
How To Make Money With Affiliate Programs
Making money with affiliate programs in the USA is quite easy, but it will also need you to put in some work and effort.
First, you need to identify a popular trend or a topic that a lot of online surfers are searching for. This will be your niche. You then need to determine the search volume for your chosen niche, or topic. If you already have a website, you only need to provide rich and relevant content for the selected niche. It is important to provide useful information to attract many followers on your website and increase chances of them making a purchase.
You then need to find suitable affiliate partners to work with. You don't need to find luxury affiliate programs right from the start. They will give you ad codes that you can place within your article or anywhere on your website that will drive traffic to their online stores. What you need to do to increase chances of converting the traffic to sales is to mention the products within the article. You don’t have to come through as a salesman, because this way, you risk losing your subscribers.
You can also use email marketing, where you send newsletters that have the product links. What you need to do is avoid sending spam. Sending a lot of spam is a turnoff to most subscribers and many of them may even consider unsubscribing from your website. High commission affiliate programs can explain you a lot more about this in their guides. After following the above steps and recommending products to your subscribers, you can then relax and wait for your efforts to pay up. There is a high chance that many subscribers will try out the products you’ve recommended in the article, which means that you will earn some commission after they make purchases.
What Are The Best Affiliate Programs For Newbies?
If you are a beginner when it comes to free affiliate marketing programs, then worry not for we are here to fill you in on four of the best affiliate programs any newbie should sign up for. These include Amazon Associates Program, Share a Sale Program, ClickBank, and Wealthy Affiliate.
Here’s a breakdown of the four best affiliate programs:
Amazon Associates Program
This affiliate program has some unique features that can motivate noobs to venture into the program. With this program, there are thousands of products available for you to promote. With over a million products being sold on Amazon, you will not miss a unique one to promote in your niche. Moreover, it is a trusted brand and this guarantees that you will be paid your commission once they are due. Even though it offers just 4%, the offer can increase to 8% depending on the number of units sold.
Share a Sale
Abbreviated as SAS, this program allows you to review all available products and select only the one that relates to your niche. Once you find the most appropriate products to promote, you can apply to join one of the best affiliate programs in the industry. Their commissions do vary, but it also offers 100% commission! The only drawback for this program is that they do not have PayPal integrated as a payout method. The good thing is that they are trustworthy and will always send your dues on time.
ClickBank
Another Internet marketing affiliate program newbies should consider is ClickBank. This partner has undergone a tremendous makeover and it is now probably one of the most popular affiliate partners in the industry. They have a lot of products for you to promote, which makes it easier for you to make money in affiliate program.
Wealthy Affiliate
Even though it is not as popular as ClickBank or Amazon, it provides the chance for you to make a lot of money with a referral affiliate program. It provides training for newbies on how to make it in building an online business, especially when it comes to affiliate marketing in the USA.
What Are The Ways Of Earning With Affiliate Programs?
There are various ways through which you can earn with affiliate programs in the USA: with a website or without one.
With a Website
You can use a website to promote products and using advert codes to track your sales. This is by far the easiest way to earn in this industry. Once you set up a website and provide rich content for your subscribers, you only have to add the advert links from your partners and wait for the commissions to rake in as your subscribers purchase the promoted products.
Without a Website
However, if you do not have a website, you can consider other alternatives, and these include using emails, or digital books.
Email affiliate marketing entails sending out newsletters to your subscribers informing them of the products. You can also add the links to the emails. You need to avoid spamming your subscribers because after sometime, it becomes a turnoff for them and they might consider unsubscribing from your newsletters.
Writing digital books is another alternative that allows you to promote products online and earn a substantial amount in CPA affiliate programs.
What Is White Label?
Even though promoting another merchant’s products through sign up affiliate programs on your website is quite profitable, there may be some instances where you don’t want to refer to the real merchant of the product, and that’s where white label affiliate program comes in.
In the white label affiliate program, you have the liberty to promote a product without having to mention the real merchant of the product and selling it as your own, though the merchant will handle the payment processing. You will still receive your commission as per the agreement signed on the pay per click affiliate program.
Advantages
The advantage of this model is that it allows you the freedom to build your own brand, considering that you get to sell the products without having to refer to the original merchant. Another advantage of white label affiliate program is that you get to sell the products directly on your website and you don’t have to send your subscribers to another website to make the purchase.
With this business model, you are likely to benefit from repeat business since customers will use your website to make the purchase and not have to use another site to acquire those products.
Disadvantages
You are 100% responsible with what's happening with the customers since there is no middleman. This is tied to the benefits though, but you must take into account that white label affiliate programs require you to handle some things on your own.
What Are Rebill Offers?
Rebill offers, also known as recurring, enable you to provide a product or service that is based on a membership. The customers, therefore, will be charged on a regular schedule that you set. This means that the client is charged each month for a service.
If you're looking for ways to get monthly payments, this should be the one to aim at. In other words, when a customer purchases a recurring service or product, they pay an initial price, then pay a rebill price at certain intervals. This allows you, as an entrepreneur, to have more financial stability.
What Are Traffic Sources For Partner Programs?
If you are looking to improve traffic on your blog or website so that you increase the amount of commission you’ll earn, then there are some paid traffic sources you need to review.
SERP or SEO
SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page and SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Knowing these 'technical' words will make you want to learn more about how to improve traffic to your blog from search engine results pages. For instance, Google boasts Adwords, a service which provides a platform for targeting consumers by their search terms when using their search engine. Affiliate PPC programs promote this strategy very much.
Marketing through Email
Email marketing is definitely the most powerful out there. It has a bigger base of users than Facebook, Snapchap, Instagram, and Twitter combined. If you take the time to create a huge following and readers who are engaged in your writing, you can endorse products and you can easily convert. The best online affiliate programs reviews have shown that most bloggers tend to succeed with regard to email marketing, as they use the popularity of their website through a signup affiliate program.
Social Media and Networks
Social media are the buzzword at this time, not just in the USA but across the whole world. The top 10 affiliate programs in the USA favour those who use social media in order to promote their valuable content. There's simply a vast availability of people who spend their time on social networks, and you can have easy access to many of them if you target your niche well. It becomes especially important for affiliate programs subscribers in USA who do not have a website. Pay per visitor affiliate programs work perfectly with social media.
Other Channels
The other channels of promotion include writing product reviews, coupons or landing pages, which would include the link from the top 10 affiliate programs.
What is The Amount of the Commission in Affiliate Program?
The commission you can receive through the top paying affiliate marketing programs in the USA is based on the type of product or service sold. There's a general rule of thumb - affiliate marketing programs pay more for digital products. You can receive up to 50-60% when promoting and selling digital products, as they have a higher profit rate for the source. Physical products are usually limited to a commission of around 4-15%. Most affiliate marketing programs in the USA also offer a commission for subscriptions and sign-ups, and they usually are represented by a flat figure.
How Much Can I Earn With Affiliate Programs?
There are endless opportunities for you to earn big through the best affiliate marketing programs for beginners. However, as a beginner you will see that it's quite difficult to aquire a key strategy that works - straight away. Newcomers can easily make $30-50 per day, but seasoned bloggers or experts in this industry can cash in even $1,000,000 a year. Since the US market is the biggest in the world, the best paying affiliate programs in the US provide massive incentives.
Of course, it all goes down to how much effort you actually put into the program and into promoting those products naturally. If you do your job well when promoting a service or product (and you actually use it yourself), your readers will understand its benefits more easily and this can generate higher profits. Remember that the key is to be genuine.
Where’s My Money or Good Luck!
In conclusion, if you are looking for ways to make money using your blog, then affiliate programs in the USA provides an awesome opportunity for you to rake in a significant amount. It is not a sophisticated procedure, and anybody with basic knowledge on marketing and copy writing can do it, that is if you intend to use your website.
You just have to provide rich content that is informational to your subscribers who’ll then click on those adverts and make you a few bucks. With affiliate marketing, and depending on your competence, you can make from $20 to over $3000/day. There isn't any best affiliate marketing program out there. You just have to choose what works best for you.
