Most home based business workers know what affiliate programs and web sites are. At first they think or hope that just having a banner posted on their site will generate a stream of income. This is a fair expectation but it takes some work, deliberate steps, patience and testing to make it happen. Both an affiliate program and a web site can be combined to make residual income. By testing you can optimize this combination.

To be earning residual income from your web site and affiliate program on it you have to go about it the correct way. To make these two modern tools work together, like peddles on a bicycle, you have to make them go together. Think of this as being like a good dating partner. We need to make them compatible so they do well together. There are strong marketing reasons that demand this compatibility. Primarily, visitors to your site are there because they are interested in the products you are selling.

Therefore it is logical that your affiliate program needs to be related to your products. If they are or appear to be unrelated this is a big interest turn off to your site visitors. If your web visitor sees banners for an affiliate income residual program that is not clearly related to your site they will feel you do not know what you are doing and lose any possible interest in making purchases from you.

Worse yet, they may perceive it as unreal or even a scam which kills all sales immediately. You want to have related article and banner or ad content or your site to make your visitors smoothly click through them. Do you see why it is important to have your advertising and all web site content highly related now? Ad locations on your web pages is important. You want a smooth flow of ads, including pop ups, that do not compete with your web content. Sloppy organization will anger your visitors and they will leave immediately.

Try this test: have a completely separate page for ads and affiliate programs. Sometimes it works and steady results happen. Visitors will appreciate this courtesy and may visit your ad links page for the courtesy you showed them by not shoving your ads at them.

You can also work them onto your product or article directory pages in different locations. Once again, the trick here is to test and see what works best for your home or other pages. Highlight them as diplomatically as you can, this is important, making it clear they are affiliate ads and will open in another window when someone clicks them. To do otherwise will confuse and anger visitors.

If there are lots of pop ups they will leave your site and not come back. This is a very serious mistake. Our purpose here is to relate product, ad and site. Keep smooth flows for reading and be sure they do not interfere with the visitor purpose on your site. You must understand this marketing rule.

The advantage of merging affiliate programs with your business web site or free article directory is that it gives you multiple streams of income. These multiple streams of income are putting your eggs in different baskets to optimize your web pages and get as many sales as possible. Business and customer moods and impulses fluctuate for many reasons. Good selling items one day are poor selling items on other days. Giving yourself more than one stream of income gives balance to your sales figures and brings up the slow sales periods.

This will give you more financial stability at all times. It can keep slow sales days or weeks from ruining your profit totals. Adding residual income home programs to your web site is fairly easy.

The hard part of this is testing the different affiliate products to find the ones that work the best for you. You may get tired of the word, testing, at times but it can make you successful if you do it. In conclusion, testing and placing ads by you, the home based business owner, will make the most income for your business.

Multiple streams of income will raise the bottom levels of your sales cycles. They will boost your morale and image while you learn the benefits of incorporating all of this together. They will make you a better inter net marketer.

James M. Lowe writes original articles about home business opportunities.