Affiliate sales are one the most effective ways to make money on the Internet. Unfortunately, many affiliates take for granted the success of others and don’t fully understand exactly what it takes to be successful in making affiliate sales. Chances are good you have a website and you’re trying to monetize website traffic. Affiliate sales are a great way to earn an income and I’m going to show you just how easy it can be and give you solid examples to build a fortune upon.

Let’s get some misconceptions out of the way first.

• Affiliate programs are not get rich quick schemes. If you are trying to make money by this weekend, sorry, wrong article.

• Affiliate products do not sell themselves. If you’ve got some sales experience, you will need to draw on it, and if you do not have any sales experience, you’re about to get some.

• You are not going to convert or sell your affiliate product to every person who visits your website or that you solicit. The chances are good that you will convert less than 2% of your visitors.

Now that we know what an affiliate program isn’t, let’s get started! Affiliate programs come in all shapes and sizes, and it’s your task to find the right program for your websites niche market. If you run a web development discussion board, for instance, it wouldn’t make much sense for you try to sell your visitors jewelry, as jewelry is not correctly targeted to your visitors. It would be to your great advantage to offer affiliate products that your clients would likely purchase, such as web hosting services in this case.

Likewise, it is equally as important to find an affiliate program with a high payout so you can actually make some money when you do make a sale. Our affiliate program, Crucial Cash, offers an industry leading payout of $101 per split-shared hosting account sale.

Affiliate flexibility is also extremely important. With the Crucial Cash affiliate program, you have the ability to discount our services by generating a coupon in any amount you wish up to the full $101 commission. This coupon amount is deducted from your available $101 full payout. For instance, you can offer your visitors a coupon for $49.99 off of Crucial Web Hosting in affect waiving the $49.99 setup fee!

Your referred client would only pay the initial $9.99 monthly fee, saving them a great deal of money. This sale would provide a commission to you in the amount of $51.01. The coupon offers you, the affiliate, the flexibility to control the pricing of the product and thus the conversion rate of the offer.

Simply putting a banner or text link on your site doesn’t work. Successful selling to today’s market demands much more than that. Web surfers are basically blind to banners—many studies show that most web surfers now completely ignore these graphics even at a subliminal level. This is where you need to turn into a salesman to be successful.

The number one rule of thumb in sales is you will never sell a product if you don’t create some excitement around that product. Think about it, what’s the last product you purchased that you were not excited about? Generating excitement about your affiliate product will drive your sales. Your job is to figure out the best way to do that.

Forget the banner. Look for alternative ways to present your affiliate product. There are many proven methods for increasing affiliate conversion rates. There are even more great examples for you to learn from on the Internet. Simply viewing how others are trying to make money using affiliate programs can be a great way to generate ideas and new concepts of your own.

Personal reviews provide insight into the product and turn into personal recommendations. Statistics show that 77% of online shoppers use reviews and ratings when purchasing a product, and product reviews drive 21% higher purchase satisfaction and 18% higher loyalty. Reviews are great for SEO as well. Your product review will be indexed by Google and other major search engines. When a client goes to Google and searches for "Crucial Web Hosting Reviews" your review is sure to be found—what a great way to generate affiliate sales!

Another proven method to increase affiliate conversion rates is to show your visitors how the affiliate product adds value to something else you are offering. A fine example of this very concept can be viewed at one of the top Crucial Web Hosting affiliates, Plogger.

Plogger is an open source image gallery freely available for download to all visitors from their website with a high converting twist. The hosting page is a pitch for the Crucial Web Hosting services.

This is an excellent example of a high converting affiliate. With this type of marketing and sales you can easily achieve a multi-thousand dollar a month income stream.

Pearible is another excellent example of how the correct wording leaves a far better impression on the visitor. In this case, the website is actually hosted with Crucial. This is a fine example of putting your money where your mouth is. If it’s good enough for Pearible. it’s good enough for anyone!

The primary lesson to take away from this introduction to affiliate marketing is that products do not sell themselves. You have to take advantage of all the sales and marketing tools that are available to you. Then and only then will you be a true entrepreneur building wealth on the Internet and not frustration.

Click here to sign up for Crucial Cash and start creating your coupon codes today. Your success is limited only by your desire for success.