Make Money with Website Templates – Template Monster’s Affiliate Program

Template Monster is a popular online store which offers readymade website templates for webmasters and businesses. Other products from their large inventory includes pre-made Flash templates, Wordpress and other CMS themes, logos as well as osCommerce templates for online stores.
Affiliates earn 20% commissions on all purchases made via their affiliate link or template shop. Templates generally range from $5 to $3500, which means that you do have a chance to make some substantial earnings.
I do like the fact that Template Monster’s affiliate program uses permanent cookies, which means that when someone visits Template Monster via your affiliate link, a cookie is set on their browser which allows you to get commission from purchases even a few months later when the visitor revisits Template Monster to make a purchase.
This is useful because the visitor may not buy something on impulse but may return to the site a while later to make a more thorough purchase.

What is the target market for Template Monster’s products?

I assume that the majority of the potential buyers would be businesses or webmasters who are establishing new business projects or ventures.
While there are CMS and blog templates, I doubt most bloggers would purchase them as there is a large variety of free Wordpress themes readily available. You might just do slightly better with bulletin board crowd, although they have their fair share of free templates as well.
Other web designers might also be a possible target market. Your affiliate links for Template Monster would perform well on websites largely dealing with webmaster, business or design orientated topics.
Similar to the affiliate program for Best of the Web, Template Monster could also be used as an add-on referral if you are providing a professional service (SEO and Marketing etc.) for a client.

How do I make money with TemplateMonster.com?

There are three main ways to make money with Template Monster:
1. Refer visitors through your affiliate link to the Template Monster website.
2. Set up your own online store with the ready made store templates and scripts from Template Monster
3. Refer other affiliates to Template Monster’s affiliate program. This is known as a Supervisor program and allows you to receive 25% of the sum they earn as commission.

What Payment Methods do Template Monster offer?

Template Monster will only pay out via four methods: Moneybookers, ACH transfer, check and wire transfer. The minimum withdrawal amount is $800 via wire and $100 for the other three methods. Payment is made on a monthly basis.

Affiliate Dashboard & Stats Tracking

Template Monster includes a pretty detailed commissions statistics program that is built in all affiliate dashboards. You can track your own and your sub-affiliates earnings as well as monthly traffic statistics for your template shop.
There is also an ad campaign tracker which is an analytic tool that allows you to gauge the usefulness of your advertising channels.
How this works is relatively easy: you’ll just need to include a modified link in the banner or promo ads that you buy on other websites and the campaign tracker will monitor the number of clicks and conversions from each advertising campaign you run.

Template Monster’s Affiliate Forum

What I really liked about Template Monster’s affiliate program was the forum which allows you to interact with other affiliates and discuss sales techniques or conversion rates.
You can also ask for reviews of your site and banner placement. Free and open to all registered affiliates, the forum has some useful information as well if you need tips on how to better your sales.
The only drawback is that most of the threads and discussions in the forum are months old which indicates that not many users are actively using the forum.

Affiliate Tools and Promotional Materials

The affiliate tools section for Template Monster are quite advanced and offer a whole range of promotional and conversion methods. For the basic affiliate, you can chose from a range of static or dynamic banners which you can simply copy and paste to your website or blog (An example of a static banner can be seen below).
If you are running your own Template Monster store, you can choose to establish your own chat system which connects your visitors directly with Template Monster’s live chat support. You can also turn on or off merchant systems and determine the price/commission ratio for sales generated through your affiliate links and banners.
An interesting feature is that you get pick and choose any template from Template Monster and pay for it using your commision while receiving a 20% discount. This is useful if you’re running new online projects and want to put up a new site template.

Other Related Affiliate Programs

Template Monster’s affiliate program is managed by MyTemplateStorage.com, a website which also manages affiliate programs for Site2You and Template Tuning, both of which are online website builders.
You’ll have access to the stats tracker and affiliate tools for both these websites as well through the MyTemplateStorage.com central dashboard.

How much will I earn with Template Monster?

While I’m unable to find any apparent faults with Template Monster’s affiliate program, do bear in mind that I’ve not used their affiliate program and promoted their products extensively and so I cannot comment on how well they convert as well as their potential for profit.
I will however be straight up with all of you who might be interested in signing up for their affiliate program so you’ll have no illusions about how much money you will make. According to the research I’ve done in their forums, the conversion rate for Template Monster seems to be around 1 sale per 1000 targeted visitors, with a lot more affiliates doing much worse.
By targeted visitors, I’m referring to visitors who arrive at your website through Pay Per Click ads or search engines through highly relevant search terms.This simply means that you shouldn’t expect a lot of sales unless you’re willing to spend time and money either targeting the right keywords and ranking for them.
PPC advertising will help but you’ll need to pick the right keywords and generally know how to manage your costs and campaigns.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are affiliates in the forum who reputedly sell 5 to 10+ templates in a day, with each individual template bringing in commissions of $30 to $600.
Like every other affiliate program out there, you’re likely to earn a lot more money if you are aggressive, persistent and skilled at the entire process of driving targeted traffic to your site.

Signing up with Template Monster

If you’re still interested in giving Template Monster a try, here’s the signup link. Note that this is a link for Template Monster’s affiliate referral program and you should be using a similar link (with your unique id) if you chose to refer other affiliates to Template Monster as well.
Do any of you have any experience promoting Template Monster’s products? For those of you who are web designers, are their products reasonably priced? I have considered purchasing some templates from their site and a second opinion would be very useful indeed.
**This article contains affiliate links.