Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are programs that various companies set up that allow you to refer people to their products or services and pay you a small fee in return.  They are free to join and they provide special links for you to put on your website so when people click through them you it will track the sales that come from the person who clicked through to the website.  They track sales and your percentage of the sale and pay on a regular basis depending on their rules that they have set up.

To make a few hundred dollars a month or more through affiliate programs your website needs to get a decent amount of traffic -like I would guess maybe 200-300 people a day.  A website that is just a basic 6-8 page calling card type of site probably won’t be getting that much traffic.   To build traffic you really need to learn how to create pages based on keywords that people are searching for and then write content that people are interested in and find an affiliate product to promote along with it.

The best way to promote affiliate products is to find things that you already like and use so that you can honestly recommend them or write articles for people on how to use them or on some related topic.  The way to sell affiliate products is not to sell but to pre-sell or provide information that people are interested in enough that they become interested in the product.   Write a review on something or write a webpage on how to use a specific product or what it is used for.

For example on my clinic website one of the top pages gets found for the keyword tense muscles.  This page is the first result.  Now people who are looking for the words tense muscles aren’t necessarily looking for a massage from me in Seattle but they are looking for help with their tense muscles.   I have links to products on amazon.com which has what they call an associate program that is the same as an affiliate program.   I explain some about muscle tension and refer them to buy the Theracane and the Triggerpoint Workbook as well as refer them to a page on stretching which is another affiliate program.

So the key is in writing content about something related to what the product does or is and not putting a sales pitch into it.  It is best done by just writing about something related to the product rather than the product directly.

The other thing you need to know is that you will need to set up an advertising policy on your website to let people know that you are making affiliate income from various products.  It can be added to a page at the bottom.  Here is the Site Build it! resource on creating a FTC guidelines page.

Affiliate Masters Course Free from Site Build it! – Learn how to really implement affiliate programs on your website.

I also have not yet found a good affiliate program just for massage products.  I would love if some place like Massage Warehouse would create one where we could promote all sorts of massage tools, lotions, oils and other massage related products.

1. Start with signing up for amazon.com’s free associate program (affiliate program).
2. Find products and books that you use and recommend
3. Log in to the amazon.com associate programs website and go step by step and create a link to the products.
4. Write an article about how to  use the product or something about why you would use it and post it on your website.  Include the affiliate link at appropriate places.
5. Create a FTC advertising policy and add it to the page and your main website page too.
6. Check in every so often to see how much you are making
7. You can test different ways to link and where to place the links to see what works best.
8. Go and do a few massages and make money at the same time.

Related posts:

1. Websites for Massage Therapists