Technology changes with amazing speed these days.  To keep up with this rapidly evolving industry, you must invest time and money in research.  The investment is a tax write-off and will pay you back many times over in additional revenue.

Finally, be persistent with your plans.  It might take time to get established even if you have a solid marketing plan, but persistence is usually the single most important factor in determining success online or offline.

5.7 LinkShare - An affiliate program that can bring you great results

LinkShare hosts a password-protected website that offers affiliates a choice of hundreds of merchant programs. On the site, affiliates can join new programs, get links to put on their sites, and then see reports about how their links are performing and how much they have earned.

When a visitor from an affiliate's site clicks on a link and goes to a merchant's site, LinkShare keeps track of all of the transactions that the visitor makes. If that visitor buys something on the merchant's site, you get a commission. In some cases, affiliates are compensated even if the visitor doesn't buy anything, just for having driven traffic to the merchant's site.

LinkShare also provides affiliates with customer service, notifies affiliates about new programs and new opportunities, and offers resources for affiliates to learn about how to get the most out of their programs.

5.8 Affiliate management built-in with your payment gateway - ClickBank

ClickBank has a built-in affiliate program. It offers all features of a good affiliate program. There is no need to install any expensive scripts on your website. You can start signing up affiliates right away as soon as you open your account.

The beauty of ClickBank is that it integrates the affiliate management program with an in-built payment gateway. ClickBank is one of the most popular and easiest services to use for payment processing online. Sign-up is quick and you get approved and running in one day.

The ClickBank control panel is easy to use. You can get familiar with the whole system in no time. It costs $49 to open a ClickBank account as a vendor but it's free to sign on as an affiliate to market a vendor's product. This $49 is really cheap when compared with other payment processing systems. Once you open an account, all your transaction money gets deposited into your account and you are paid every two weeks.

I’m a member of many different affiliate programs and I have literally hundreds of webmasters signed up in the programs I run myself.  If you’re serious about earning serious money on the web, then you  should be to be spending a lot of time checking out affiliate programs and tracking your responses. It’s one of the easiest and most reliable ways to make cash with a website, however, it does require a commitment of time and work.

So far, we’ve covered the kind of marketing strategies that work through your website: banners, links, affiliate programs etc.  But your website isn’t the only way to get the traffic you need to make sales. 

In the next chapter, we’re going to covering how you can use e-mail marketing to drive targeted traffic to your website.