Day 4 Continued - What To Avoid When Looking For Partnerships For Your Online Home Business

There are great advantages to being an affiliate marketer and building an online home business. There are practically no risks involved, the total costs for running a web site are roughly $300.00 dollars per year to host the site and domain name. As I have stated, the host I use gives you all the tools I mention through this tutorial in that price including the domain name registration and email and you can take a full tour of what they provide for your online home business by clicking the link. As an affiliate marketer you have no overhead, no debt, no loans, no products to purchase, salaries to pay or store to rent (a matter of fact you get a tax write off for working from your home). The bottom line is while many risk much to start a business your risks are $300.00 and some of your time. The rewards and profits can be just as much as any other business as well.

The risks involved in having an online home business lie in the partners you use to make money from your site. If a company you have partnered with goes out of business all your links in your site will no longer make money from them. So now that you have a list of some of your favorite affiliate programs you may join, lets look at ways to reduce any risks associated with them.

The main questions to ask are how many different programs should your site use and how can you be sure that they are solid companies worth the space of your web site? The fact is affiliates do not have time to research the fundamentals of a company they are going to partner with, but there are ways to diversify and reduce risks. Having only one affiliate program to draw income, your entire site puts you and every page of your site in risk. There is no problem being part of twenty affiliate programs for a site as long as the products all relate to the site theme and the pages they are on relate to the keywords the content is focused on. This is a winning way to diversify your risks for the online home business. This way if one program fails (this has never happened to me, but let's be safe here) there will be other links on each page to make income through. Now it is alright to be part of twenty affiliate programs for a site but it is not alright to have each of the twenty on every page of your site. Pick three affiliate programs for each keyword you use and also make sure to use the three best affiliate programs for each page. It makes no sense for me to have a page about "the best horse training books" and have affiliate links for horse clothing. I can use the horse clothing links on a page devoted to horse clothing with a keyword I discovered in which people are searching for say "children's horse clothing". It also makes no sense to put twenty links on every page relating to twenty different things. This will just turn off visitors and reduce conversion rates. This is going to be a successful online home business so keep with the rules.

Many times there is no need to have many merchants to sell products for. If you feel your site is going to be selling a certain item many times there are a few top programs that provide you all you need. Instead of joining twenty different programs who have the same products focus on picking the top two stable companies to work with.

A good number of affiliate programs to look for is really about ten. This makes tracking everything a bit easier and gives you enough security that if something is to happen to one it will not effect you much. Just make sure their products are top notch and they all fit within the concept of your online home business. The idea is not to give to much weight or fall in love with one program. Keep yourself diversified by picking the affiliate programs that fit your site concept and have nice products. Make sure the companies look solid and that will be enough to protect you from any risks involved with affiliate marketing and building an online home business.

The next page will look at a few more things to look at when picking out affiliate programs... Click For Next Lesson