Sponsors and Affiliates

Why sponsors and affiliates are important

Sponsors and affiliate programs fulfill two primary purposes for your website:
Increase revenues to your website
Make your site look more credible to Internet surfers

1. Increase revenues to your website
Sponsors would pay you a monthly fee for you to place their logo or ad on your website. Affiliate programs pay you commissions as you refer visitors to other sites. Therefore, these two methods allow you to increase revenues to your site without having to sell your products/services.

2. Make your site look more credible to Internet surfers
Sponsors and affiliates make your site look more credible to people visiting the site because others would see name-brand companies advertising on your website. This increases the credibility to others, especially if they are not knowledgeable about the affiliate program concept.

How sponsors work

On many websites you'll see Please visit our sponsors followed by some logos of different websites that would link to the perspective sites. If you had someone sponsor your website, you would place their logo on your site, and, in turn, they would pay you a certain amount of money each month.

Having sponsors benefits both the sponsoring company and also your site because it brings traffic to the sponsoring company. It also adds credibility to your site because of all the sponsors on it, as mentioned above. Sponsoring also allows your website to earn some extra money. You can charge anywhere between $50-$200 a month to have someone sponsor your site. If you had 4 sponsoring companies on you site all paying you $50 a month, which would be $200 a month, and this is at the low end of the pay scale.

Finding companies to sponsor you

As you look for complementary companies to exchange links with, you can also look for companies to sponsor you. Usually larger organizations or companies will sponsor other sites, but any business may do this. Also, as you talk to businesses about trading links or banners, you can also ask them to be your sponsor.
Initially, you would not charge a large fee per sponsor because you would not have much traffic coming to your website. However, as your traffic increases, you can increase these fees to have companies sponsor you.

How affiliate programs work

Have you ever been on a site and seen Amazon.com's little banner on it? If you click on that banner and go to Amazon and buy something, the site that you left to go to Amazon makes 10-15% of whatever you spend.

Having affiliate programs on your site allows you, as the site owner, to earn extra income on your website. Usually it's about 10% of the sale price for most affiliate programs.

Finding and signing up for affiliate programs

As you surf the surf the Internet and look for complementary sites, you will oftentimes see on websites Become our Affiliate or Affiliate with us. If you see this, you can join those sites' affiliate programs. A couple websites that list the different affiliate programs that are available are at www.cj.com and www.linkshare.com.

When you sign up for an affiliate program, the company that you're signing up under will email you the source code (HTML code) that represents the banner or ad which you would then copy and paste to your website.

It usually does not cost anything to become an affiliate of someone else. All you need to do is sign up and add the code to your site to get involved with the different affiliate programs. Then as you get clicks on the banner or ad to the affiliate program sites, and people buy, you will get paid, usually on a monthly or quarterly basis, a commission on each sale (usually about 10% of the sale). The affiliate companies have tracking software that keeps track of your visitors and purchases. You would not want to add the affiliate program banners to your products page if you are trying to sell products of your own.

Creating your own affiliate program

Affiliate programs are a great method of driving traffic to your website, and you don't pay a cent unless someone actually buys something, so it's very effective.

In order to make your website ready to accept affiliates, you will need to apply some pretty advanced programming that will track where visitors are coming from and store a database of affiliates that have signed up. This will require hiring a professional programmer to get this type of system set up, but it will be well worth the cost. A lower cost method of starting an affiliate program on your site is to use www.clickbank.com.

Online websites and resources

www.bcentral.com/articles/whitman/102.asp
www.amazon.com
www.cj.com
www.linkshare.comwww.clickbank.com