May 11, 2007 22:47
Category: Other Information
[]
[To Blog Main]
If you are not selling goods or service from your website, chance is you earn money as affiliate. When you start website, you can think of displaying affiliate ads in web pages belonging to various companies. This is the minimum that you can do to earn money even as you build up your web content.
Let me not give the impression that just displaying affiliate ads will bring you revenue. It will not, for the simple reason that someone has to click on those ads and, led to advertiser's site, make a purchase to earn you affiliate commission.
Clearly then, the priority is to attract good amount of traffic, just so if a small percentage of it clicks on affiliate ads, which is what happens in reality, you stand to earn money as affiliate commission. Refer my article on content-traffic-presell-monetization.
That being so, in this essay we'll talk about how you can plan to earn money as affiliate even if your website has very few traffic as is the case with small business websites.
When I say this, I stress the point that many affiliate networks and companies will simply not bother to accept your website to display their ads unless you've significant amount of traffic to show up.
From my experience I'm inclined to believe that this happens because these affiliate networks do not want to waste resources in terms of bandwidth spent, and perhaps other considerations by displaying ads if the sites where their ads are shown are not highly relevant and high-traffic attractors.
The good news is there are enough affiliate networks that are not stingy on your site being a high-traffic one, and you've fairly good chance to earn money becoming their members. Here's a list of 7 such that have stood me in good stead.
Google AdSense
By far the most popular and most easy to incorporate is Google AdSense. The advantage with it is that there is no traffic restriction for your website to qualify, and secondly you earn money the moment your visitor clicks on an ad irrespective of whether he actually makes a purchase.
Google AdSense has the largest and most comprehensive database of ad-givers. Its powerful software reads the content of a webpage and loads only relevant ads that conform to the sense of page content. This results into more chance of click-through, which consequently means more possibility for you to earn money.
With Google AdSense you can select ads in various forms, text, image and now videos. Also, do opt for Google Search, whereby if a visitor does a search on your site and then clicks on an ad in the search result page that Google presents, you stand to earn money more than usual.
Google allows you to design search result page as just another page of your site, so that visitors are never out of your website.
I've written several articles explaining how Google AdSense is a better bet than any affiliate ad network. Here are some of them:
- AdSense Revenue - Earnings Galore!
- More Earnings For AdSense Publisher
- Is AdSense Earning A Hype?
- Making Money With AdSense
LinkShare
My second favorite is LinkShare affiliate marketing network. Many ads in this site are those from LinkShare. Although it is not difficult to get approved by LinkShare, there's still a procedure of selection followed by it.
LinkShare is like an umbrella network under which several companies offer to become their affiliates. When you become a LinkShare affiliate, you automatically qualify to apply to become affiliate of companies under its fold.
To my understanding, a majority of companies within its network belong to US. On the flip side, there are companies across a wide gamut of industry segments. So it is possible to pick and choose the ones that are most suitable for your website.
Chitika
Perhaps among a few of its kind, Chitika is a leading advertising network that, when you become a member, helps you earn money as affiliate by displaying revenue-earning ads on your website.
In a way, Chitika is similar to LinkShare, but its ad display is innovative and attractive. Chitika has invented what it calls e-mini-malls where merchant offers are displayed in a mixture of contextual advertising and direct product offers.
It has other forms of ad display as well, like ShopLinc and ShopCloud$.
Chitika's displays come in various sizes, small to large, so that you can fit it in your website as per space available. Here too you've option to select from a wide range of products the ones that are suitable for your website.
All in all, Chitika is an attractive option to earn money as affiliate you won't want to miss.
Web CEO
Web CEO is a powerful suite of search engine optimization software and a complete SEO toolkit. The suite includes 12 SEO tools, each an invaluable help for optimizing webpage for search engines.
The reason I like Web CEO is because in present time no website can do without search engine optimization. It therefore has relevance for every site that wishes to rank well in search results.
The best thing about Web CEO is that it offers a free download of its software for getting a feel of its utility. See my article on download SEO software.
SiteSell
Another of my favorites is SiteSell. This site is built on SiteSell package, and everything (except perhaps my ability to write contents) that is achieved by me through this site is on account of excellent bouquet of tools that it offers. Refer my article, If I Can Do It, So Can You.
Once again, SiteSell too offers a free trial that makes it easy for prospective website owners to take a peek at what it offers before buying it.
Agreed I'm an affiliate of SiteSell. Yet, I feel SiteSell is the most comprehensive do-it-all site builder package available on the net. It's especially very useful for first-timers wishing to start website of their own, as much as it is to earn money as its affiliate.
ClickBank
A popular affiliate program, ClickBank has over 10,000 digital products to promote, where one can hope to earn money as high as equivalent to 75% commission.
Whether a software, an e-book, or anything that is digitally transferable, the web's first choice to sell them is through ClickBank.
It is easy to become a ClickBank affiliate, and all you need thereafter is to promote various products available in its 'marketplace'. There are instances of third-party small websites that exclusively promote one or more ClickBank vendor products to earn money.
Amazon
Amazon's affiliate marketing program is one of the oldest on the Internet, having launched in 1996. It's also one of the most trusted among those who earn money as affiliate.
Amazon is said to have over 1,000,000 member affiliates
, which is an envy for most affiliate marketers. It has several products to offer for affiliates to earn money.
Apart from the ubiquitous text links, Amazon has an array of affiliate products, namely product links, search box, trademarked Omakase links, an aStore widget, and the newly launched context links.
Unlike AdSense, Amazon doesn't have a cap on number of its ads to be displayed on a page. Therefore to take advantage of one of the best affiliate programs to earn money, you may think of becoming an Amazon associate. It is worth every effort.
Conclusion
There is no dearth of products to become affiliate of to earn money. But I've always believed in becoming affiliates of superb companies that offer top-quality products to customers.
After all, I won't want my visitor to have bad experience when he or she clicks on affiliate links in my site and purchases the products.
With that as bible, I'm reasonably certain the above companies are not only renowned in their fields, their affiliate programs too offer decent chance to earn money.
