Affiliate Marketing: How Websites Make Money

FacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmailFacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

 

Dollars UpMonetising a website is not that difficult, and the concept of affiliate marketing is a simple one. Getting the traffic to your site is the harder part, but that’s another post in itself. This post will be dealing with the basics of monetising your site so you can earn revenue from your traffic, and you can learn more about it by joining the training at Wealthy Affiliate for FREE.

 

Affiliate Marketing Explained

Affiliate marketing is like being a sales representative in the online world. Being a sales rep in the real world usually means you are employed by a company and marketing only their products. With affiliate marketing you can promote products for many companies, offering you a multitude of product lines to earn money.

Basically you choose your niche or topic for your website (if you haven’t already done so), you write quality content on subjects relevant to your niche. From there it’s simply a matter of finding affiliate vendors who have products that suit your website and its content. You receive a unique identifier link for every product you wish to promote for your chosen vendor.

That way, when a lead or sale is generated from a link on your website, the company knows where it came from and who to pay. You promote Company A’s products, they make a sale through a link or banner on your site and you receive a commission for referring that sale.

That’s basically how affiliate marketing works.

 

Get My Free Guide To Making Money Online

 

Traffic Leads To Revenue

As I said earlier, talking about all the various ways to get traffic could easily be a few long posts in itself. If you have pages of quality, relevant content, then that will go a long way towards you getting good rankings in Google and other search engines. And the best way to achieve good rankings is by basing your content on quality keyword selection.

Happy To See MoneyEssentially, the more traffic you have, the more chances and opportunities you have of making a sale, or generating leads and click throughs that lead to sales. People come to your website either through a search, a referral via social media or other sources, or through directly typing your URL into their browser. Learn how to generate traffic to your affiliate site with the training at Wealthy Affiliate.

They’ve arrived at your website because of the content there that interests them. They read your quality content, see your recommendation for Product A or B that will help solve their particular problem, they click through on your link and arrive at the product’s landing page. And once there, hopefully they make a purchase and you get paid. That's how websites make money.

Below is a graphic illustrating how the affiliate marketing process works. The retailer in the example is Amazon, and the infographic was provided by Wealthy Affiliate.

 

make-money-online-infographic

 

Popular Ways To Monetise

  • Affiliate links
  • Banner ads
  • Google AdSense ads
  • Lease advertising space on your site

Read my post here to discover some popular affiliate programs to sign up with and get you started.

 

Getting Started Online

To get started online you really need to learn the right ways to go about setting up a website that you can monetize. In my opinion the best starting point is to join Wealthy Affiliate. It’s free to sign up and get started with all the comprehensive training they offer. In a step-by-step process you will learn everything there is to know about setting up a niche website, how to fill it with quality content and, the most exciting part, how to monetise that content. Best of all you get 2 free websites to get you started.

The community there is also very active and helpful and will come to your aid if you have any problems or don’t understand something. Many of the members have even uploaded their own training resources that they have created, adding even further value to the learning you receive there.

Basically Wealthy Affiliate will shortcut the process and you will get started that much quicker. You will feel confident about the website you are creating, knowing that you are doing things the right way from the very start, and not wasting time going in the wrong direction.

Below is a link to one of their training videos that is part of the starter training. It’s only a short 8 minute video that describes the process of how you can generate an income from your website or blog. Well worth checking out.

 

Video of Lesson 2

 

In Conclusion

It really isn’t that hard to set up a site and monetise it to earn revenue. It won’t happen overnight, but in time you will begin to see the fruits of your efforts. Thanks for reading. Feel free to comment below, or to share this post if you found it helpful.

 

Get My Free Guide To Making Money Online

 

FacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmailFacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail
The following two tabs change content below.

Darren Burton

Site Owner
I am an author, online entrepreneur and internet marketer. I work from home and anywhere else in the world I choose to work. I've been making a living online since 2010, and you can do it too. I'm here to help.

10 thoughts on “Affiliate Marketing: How Websites Make Money

  1. HI
    Very neat and interesting post.

    Affiliate Marketing explained very clearly. Your comparison to being a sales person but choosing what products to sell, who to sell products for, and being able to sell products for different companies sums it all up. The graphic is excellent at illustrating the complete process.

    Your suggestion for ways to monetize a website are good especially using Google Adsense in addition to affiliate links and banners.

    Victoria

  2. I like. Simple,clear and understandable explanation of How to make money on internet.
    Often on the Internet can be found very complex explanations about internet marketing. Completely new person reads it and comes to the conclusion that making money with the Internet too hard for him.

    • Thanks for reading and commenting. You’re right, some explanations of how affiliate marketing works are very complex, when in actual fact the principle is very simple.

  3. This article is really straightforward to understand, and you explain affiliate marketing really well. I like your analogy with being an online sales rep. I had never seen it like that, but it makes complete sense. Wealthy Affiliate sounds interesting, but I might try your affiliate training course first and see how I go. Thanks!

    • The concept of affiliate marketing really is quite simple, and yes very similar to being a sales rep. I definitely recommend giving Wealthy Affiliate a try if you want to learn the right way to set up an online business. Thanks for reading.

  4. Hi Darren,

    It’s amazing how few people know about affiliate marketing as a way to make money online via a website.

    I have to admit, I was amazed when I found out about it a few years ago. Before I was always trying to import/drop-ship.

    Now I make money online every day through affiliate marketing and advertising on my website. But affiliate marketing makes more and is easier to manage, at least for me.

    Great post, thanks.

    • I’m surprised I wasn’t doing affiliate marketing a long time ago. It’s a great way to make consistent money online. It doesn’t happen overnight, but once you build it up it keeps on generating nice cash flow.

  5. Hi Darren, Thanks for explaining the basics of how affiliate marketing words so succinctly. While there are a few other ways of earning money from websites such as guest posting and paid reviewing, I believe you have targeted the main ones and the most important methods above.
    Great post, Kris

    • Thanks Kris. Affiliate marketing is a pretty basic business model, and quite cheap to get started in when first looking for ways to make money on the internet. Branching off into other avenues and ideas I think is a natural spin off of affiliate marketing.

Leave a Reply to Victoria Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *