You have might have read a lot of headlines that sound similar to this one above, or make promises like this one seems to. You have may have even read some of those articles all the way to the end, clicked on some of the links and read all the information on those links. You may have evaluated the information and come to the conclusion that it wasn’t valuable… that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard… or whatever that! IT WILL DESTROY MY REPUTATION!

If you to it right, it can enhance your reputation. I’m going to give you some tips that will give you an opportunity to monetize your website or blog, while preserving your brand. One of the best and easiest ways to monetize your online properties is to join some affiliate programs and advertise them on your site.

Affiliate programs are the answer

Why affiliate programs? Simple. When you are an affiliate marketer, you don’t have to build or create products yourself. All the work of writing an eBook, or recording an audio track, or programming a software product is taken care of by someone else. But that isn’t the end of the advantages. You also don’t have to create any marketing materials – those are all created for you by the person who builds the product and is running the affiliate program.

Another big advantage is that you really don’t have to manually keep track of ROI or conversion rates. Really good affiliate programs will provide you with affiliate management tools that are based on one of the top affiliate software programs. The software programs will keep track of all kinds of metrics that will help you optimize your affiliate marketing effort.

Five tips for choosing affiliate offers to promote

1. Look good earnings potential – You want to make sure that if one of the people you refer to an affiliate offer buys, that you will make some decent money. Some people think affiliate programs offering high percentage payouts are best. I prefer to look for opportunities where you can make a ‘big hit’ from a sale. This affiliate program for promoting sales interview tools gives you the opportunity to earn almost $50 per sale.
2. Choose programs your readers will like – It is critical that you choose affiliate programs and offers that your audience will appreciate and be interested in. It wouldn’t be very effective to choose to promote affiliate programs and products for vegetarian dietary products on a site that is dedicated to hunting. However, if you have a website that helps people find careers is sales, it would be great to promote something like How to Get Into Medical Sales.

3. Look for affiliate programs powered by software – When you sign up for an affiliate program it will quickly become obvious if the owner of the program is serious about helping affiliate members be successful. If you are automatically redirected to a page in an affiliate marketing software program, you can infer that this is a serious affiliate program. If they don’t have a managed affiliate program, it should give you pause. Their are several top name brands like iDev Affiliate, LinkShare, and JROX JAM. My favorite is JROX JAM, which you can get for free here: http://websitesthatdrivesales.com/recommends/free-affiliate-management-software.htm

4. Make sure the website is NOT anonymous – What I mean is, make sure that there are real people standing behind the website, people with good reputations, who take customer service seriously. People who let you know who give you contact information with phone numbers are more likely to treat you well. They are more likely to be on the up and up and deal with you fairly. If you can find a picture, bio, and phone number of the website owner, chances are they are trustworthy. You will also be able to search the Internet to find any complaints about them or their program. Peggy McKee, the Medical Sales Recruiter, is one of the country’s leading sales recruiters – she proudly announces her site ownership on the about pages like this one: http://30-60-90-day-sales-plan.com/about/

5. Choose affiliate programs that have support programs – If you are choosing a piece of software to buy, you probably wouldn’t purchase it if there was not support mechanism in place. It would be wise to use similar criteria when evaluating affiliate offerings. If the vendor doesn’t have a support system in place – something like a help desk or help desk software – then they probably don’t care about their customers. When they do, you can be fairly confident that they are trying to keep customers satisfied. If they AREN’T trying to keep customers happy, their poor service will reflect poorly on you, and tarnish your online brand.

Here are a couple of affiliate programs that hit on all cylinders, that I recommend if your site’s visitors would be interested in these subjects. One is an affiliate program for a sales interview tool that targets sales professionals – you can check it out here: http://30-60-90-day-sales-plan.com/affiliate-program-details/. The other is a program that has a broader appeal – it targets people who own businesses that either have no web presence or under performing websites; you can get all the information for it here: http://websitesthatdrivesales.com/blog/home/affiliate-program/