The partnership programs, also known as affiliate programs, are a source of revenue that is neglected by many internet entrepreneurs because they are not very popular, they are not actively advertised, and at first sight, the revenues are not too big.
What are partnership programs?
Generally, the partnership programs give you commissions for purchases made by your consumers. For instance, you have a website and you place a banner or a link provided under a partnership program with an online store. A consumer clicks on the link, goes to the online store and buys a certain product for which you are paid a commission in the form of a percent of the price or a set sum.
There are numerous variants of this service on the internet and you may be paid a commission for either a product or a service or a paid subscription to the certain website. The commissions vary from cents to tens of dollars, depending on the goals set under the program, the number of sales you make per month, or other parameters that are described in details in every website offering such a partnership program. There are hundreds of such programs offering a sale of hosting services, online stores, paid subscriptions in dating websites, group buying websites, Forex trade and stock exchange mediators, t-shirts with custom printing, cell phone ringtones, flight tickets, and even applications for fast loans.
The reason that such programs are actively neglected is that most people want to sell their advertising in impressions or in clicks. If you place a banner of a partnership program, you will not make money from the impressions and clicks generated by your consumers, which will be a direct loss for you. On the other hand, you will impose certain store or company’s brand “for free”, while the deal can be made even without your assistance.
For instance, a client clicks and sees the product on the website but later on, they go to the physical store in the mall and buy it from there. In this case, you will not receive any commission because the deal has not been realized through your direct intermediation. There is also another suspicion among new internet entrepreneurs that they might be deceived that there are no orders since there is no control on the process after the consumer has left the website.
Often, there are people, who will not believe you, no matter what change you offer them to make for their own good. They will find thousands of arguments about why and how something will fail, they will even try to prove it. If you are such a person, you should not go into the internet business because the changes are a daily routine there and you will have to adapt your way of thinking and working more frequently than you think. Even if you have managed to establish a well-oiled money-making machine, even if you conduct a policy of constant changes and adaptation to the new environment and find new and new, and sometimes even absurd ideas, you have no future and you will head from the phase of success to the phase of decline. That is why the above-mentioned arguments against the partnership programs will be of use to some commercial director, who has risen to the level of their incompetence, but not to a young internet entrepreneur.
The benefits of a partnership program
1. You do not have to develop and invest in your own product, neither in its advertising campaign. The product is already on the market and it is advertised by its producer, while your only job is to encourage consumers to buy it.
2. The responsibility falls on someone else – keeping stocks, payments, deliveries, communication with clients, the return of faulty products, and many other activities of the online store, which you should not bother about. You simply send the consumer to a place where they can make the purchase.
3. You can make money even without having a website – this is done by sharing the link to the partnership program through the social networks, placing it as a signature under your username in the forums you visit or in the emails you send to clients or friends, in your Skype profile and everywhere it is allowed to be placed.
4. It is not necessary for the partnership programs to take the banner positions, which you can use to make money from impressions and clicks. The different programs offer numerous instruments that can become part of your website without being considered as banners. For instance, the weather forecast, a box with the best promotional offers connected with the topic of the website, a box with real-time currency exchange rates provided by a financial intermediary, etc. What is more, you can place a banner, a text link, or even write an encouraging article about a certain product with a concrete link to where it can be purchased. There is absolute freedom about this.
With most of the partnership programs, you have the chance to earn money from consumers in up to a month or two after you have sent them to the website you promote. This way, if the consumer, who enters your website and then clicks on the link of the partnership program but does not make a purchase because they need to consult with their wife first, you will still profit, if they enter the promoted website directly and buy the product. Thanks to a technology known as “cookies”, which I will not stop here to explain, the consumer can be tracked for a really long time interval so as to prove that they have been sent there by you. Thus, no matter whether the consumer realizes the purchase on the very same day they visited your website or 20 days later, the website of the trade will recognize that the client has been sent by you and you will get your commission. Such an offer proves the good intentions and the correctness of the trader and the partnership network.
