How About Make Money Through iTunes Affiliate Program

Nowadays, it’s a great way to make use of Apple App Store affiliate program like iTunes Store to earn extra money in the course of developing your apps. That is, anyone with blog, website or online presence is possible to get paid from all that traffic and “affiliate” links to the App store.

In the further, the use of affiliate programs has been around for ages, and it’s a win-win situation for both companies and individuals. At this place, we would like to throw a spotlight on the most popular example of affiliate programs – iTunes Store. Note that, we would also discover how to earn additional revenues by taking advantage of this kind of affiliate program.

What Is iTunes Affiliate Program?

As you may know, the Apple’s iTunes Store is such a place where TV, music, applications and movies are sold from virtual storefronts. Besides that, it has been revolutionizing the whole music and smartphone industry with its app ecosystem.

When it comes to iTunes affiliate program or affiliate marketing, it is a kind of method used to promote business and acknowledge purchasers who have been referred to their stores through a third-party. As for an affiliate in this program, he will be rewarded for each subscriber, visitor or customer brought through his efforts.

How Does It Work?

Every time when someone clicks on the”affiliate” link on your website to get into the iTunes Store and buys something there, you are promised to earn a commission on that referred sale. In detail, as your “affiliate” links to the iTunes Store always include a 24-hour “cookie window”, you will get paid for any successful purchase within your 24-hour “cookie window.” Note that, you should make sure that your link is the last one on that purchaser’s device.

In the further, iTunes affiliate program usually pays an affiliate about 5% of the sales price on each purchase. Considering that an average iTunes merchandise costs up to $9.99, it takes much time and efforts to benefit a lot from this from this “passive income.” However, the good news is that you don’t have to pay an aggregator any commission to get your products (like album or record) sold on iTunes.

Why Need to Use It?

Believe it or not, affiliate links are widely spreading throughout the Internet, and you may unknowingly click various affiliate links every day. Thanks to the APIs (applications and programming interfaces) and cloud technologies, it is possible and quite easy to put affiliate links online and track purchase referrals automatically.

To make use of this kind of free affiliate marketing, you can simply copy and paste links to iTunes store, or better yet create auto-generated links by yourself. As for more details, you can refer to the following steps.

How to Make Money from Your Website by Using iTunes Affiliate Program?

In this section, we would like to brief you on how to get started with the iTunes affiliate program. Now, let’s move on and get down to the point.

Step 1 – Sign Up for the LinkShare Network
Needless to say, the first thing you need to do is to become an affiliate of iTunes. As Apple now has outsourced its affiliate marketing campaign directly to another company named as LinkShare, you will need to register with LinkShare firstly. Note that, the mentioned LinkShare will take charge of your relationship with iTunes Store, and in the meantime, offer you a lot of tools used to create links. Click this link to sign up for the LinkShare network.

First of all, you will have to fill in your company information, such as “Country”, “Business Name”, “Company Address”, “Social Security Number”, “Postal Code”, “Phone” and much more. Pay attention that you should also fill in your tax information like “Tax Form” that starts with “W-9″ for all US-based publishers.

Below that, you will be prompted to fill in your “Contact & Account” information. As you can see, you should fill out your “First Name”, “Last Name”, “Email”, “Username”, “Password” and “Security Question & Answer.” For security, you’d better make the password as strong as possible.

Apart from that, you shall tell your “Primary Website” information, such as “Website Name”, “URL”, “Short Description”, “Page Views”, “Unique Visitors”, “Business Model” and so on. This section is designed to verify your site’s real condition. To put affiliate ads on your own site, you’d better not include anything as below.

• Information about any illegal activities that violate the current laws, including “adware”, “spam” and “spyware.”
• Information about discrimination based on disability, religion, race, sex, nationality, age or sexual orientation.
• Information about violent, hateful, offensive, sexually explicit or political related content.

By the way, you would specify your “Payment Threshold”, “Language Preference” and “Email Subscriptions.” To put an end to your information certification, you should ensure that you have read and checked the last “Membership Agreement.”

Once you are accepted by LinkShare, you will be allowed to login to your account to get your ads code and select your preferred affiliate programs like iTunes Store.

Step 2 – Register with iTunes Affiliate Program
As the title implies, you should then become a member of iTunes affiliate program. Just go back to the admin interface of LinkShare and click the “Programs” tab to search your “iTunes.” Once done, you will be able to find out the iTunes Store option. Make sure that you have read the given “Terms and Conditions” before you decide to “Apply to all checked programs.”

Usually, it will take several days to get approval from iTunes, and you have no other choice but wait patiently during this period. Note that, you will definitely receive an email notifying whether you are qualified to be an iTunes affiliate. Beware that, there still are some types of websites that won’t be accepted from Apple.

Step 3 – Embed Links to Your Website
And then, you only need to add affiliate links to your site for now. Just enter the “My Advertisers” tab and open the drop-down “Links” list. As below, there are several selectable options for you to choose from.

Pay attention that, the “Text/Email” option allows you to create affiliate links in your site’s text or email listings. And the “Banners/Images” option allows you to use generic ads on your website in the form of colourful images. Of course, there are more possibilities preserved to be explored.

Step 4 – Optimize Website for Better Performance
This step is of great necessity especially when you want to make a big difference afterwards. Optimizing your website can not only increase your website’s traffic, but also can boost the click-through rate to the mentioned iTunes Store. Note that, you can also choose to sell your own works on iTunes.