Internet affiliate marketers depend on websites to market their affiliate products, whether through simple little landing pages or by blogging like I do. So, if you are an affiliate marketer, then an obvious affiliate program to get involved with would be one for a hosting company or other service that provides a system to place your offer.
I want to share two such different possibilities and compare their potential benefits.
Web Hosting Affiliate Program
The first is HostMonster. They are the hosting company that I use for all of my websites and I have used them for about 4.5 years I think. I have been very pleased with how stable my websites have been, which is important when you depend on your sites being up to generate revenue. I rarely need it, but when I do, there customer service is awesome. It isn’t hired out to a third party so they can get you real answers and sometimes fix your issues while you are on the phone with them.
HostMonster’s affiliate program is very good too. You make $65 for every new sign-up through your affiliate link. That’s the majority of what they collect for the first year of hosting, so they count on customers staying long-term. That shows a lot of confidence that they will be able to keep customers. The affiliate program is free once you have your hosting account.
Owning your own website gives you a lot of control in your online presence and marketing and gives you a central location to direct people from multiple sources, like the social media sites – Facebook, Twitter, etc. It’s also a lot less expensive than other systems that will enable you to get your content online, especially if you want one friendly to affiliate marketers.
Empower Network
The Empower Network is another system that I use. This is a system put together for network and affiliate marketers by network and affiliate marketers. That means that they are very friendly to affiliate marketers. As long as you content and offer are legal, you can put it up.
There are four significant benefits to the Empower Network.
1) Their entry-level offering is a blog system. There is very little setup to do unlike with a website that you own yourself, like through HostMonster. With that comes less control over how your website looks and functions.
2) They have up-sells. Up-sells equals more opportunities to make money. The up-sells in the Empower Network are valuable training programs. You could almost call the Empower Network a business-in-a-box. You buy the blogging platform and have a place to advertise. You buy the training and they teach you how to sell, then you can sell the training too.
3) 100% commissions. That’s right, for every product you sell, they pay out 100%. They don’t make any money from you selling their system. They are active in selling it themselves to generate their income.
4) A continuity program. Their blogging system and first up-sell, the Inner Circle, are monthly subscriptions. When your customer subscribes to the blogging system and stays with it, the $25 fee collected every month gets back back out every month. In short, you have a residual income.
Those are two systems that I use. HostMonster is for serious websites where you want more control of the appearance and functionality. Empower Network is for those things where a series of blog posts will work and for people who are newer to internet marketing and can make good use of the training they offer.
Which one will you use? Like I said, I use them both.
Wayne Woodworth
PS. This should be pretty obvious but I have to say it anyway. I am an affiliate with both of these companies and if you click on my link and buy, then I may very well make some money. Making money by recommending the services that you already use is the whole point of the post and I’m suggesting that you do the same thing I’m doing.
