Affiliate Marketing is one of the simplest ways to make money. Merchant appoints a middleman and asks him to sell the product in exchange for commission.
Affiliate marketing is a great way for brands to supplement the daily online marketing activities. For affiliates, it provides scope for huge passive income.
Why Hosting Affiliates
The internet is a vast place. It has more reach. People love to shop online. They love to read online. They participate in online debates through comments. Internet offers you fantastic marketing opportunities. When your customers are practically living on internet, it makes sense for you to turn your physical business into a digital business.
Everybody doing online will need a website. More and more people are signing up for domains and hosting space. The potential in hosting affiliates can be seen in the stats of growth of hosting companies.
So the question is: Why should you sign up for hosting affiliates?
The reasons are simple:
- Web hosting affiliate incomes have been known to routinely outperform earnings from Adsense and similar ad serving platforms. Adsense pays you in cents for each click, hosting affiliate pays you $50 USD (or more) for each sale.
- You don't need exact-match niche either. You can create a site about any indirectly related topics like website design tips, reviews of themes, coding tips etc.
What's the Catch - Issues that could occur with Hosting Affiliates
Hosting affiliates offer good money. Some affiliate programs reward as much as $200 per sale. That's ridiculously good! But that does not means it's all hunky dory all the time.
There are two sides to every coin. So it's better to aware the pitfalls of hosting affiliate programs. It will help you pick good programs and filter out the rest.
A. The Customer Retention Period
Your referred customers must stay past this "lock in" period, only then they will pay you any commission. The customer needs to have minimal disruptive experience during this period or they will switch out.
B. Customer Support
The support agents found with smaller hosts are generally slow and not technically savvy to answer queries quickly. You woudl want to avoid such hosts.
C. Voided Leads
Again, small hosts tend to introduce confusing conditions to cancel any lead's payout. It becomes difficult to argue because tracking each sale is painfully tedious. Hence, affiliates need to do their research before starting their promotion.