Do you know your website or blog will pay you, but how is a good question. Below are some proven ways and tips:
Google Adsense
This is a good way to make money from visitors to your site. Google Adsense pay you for each person that clicks on an advert placed on your site – from as little as 2cents a click to $25 per click. It’s worth doing the research on how much people are paying for particular keywords so that you choose a profitable site.
That being said, my best site attracts literally thousands of clicks per day that are only worth a few cents – so just make sure that people are prepared to pay something for the subject you are so keen about. You can find out more about this rather unusual technique from Adsense Peanuts. Find out more about Google Adsense with our secrets and tips.
Commission Junction
CJ manage the affiliate program for many of the big company names like Yahoo. You can sign up to Commission Junction quickly and then apply to individual programs.
You can search their programs by advertiser name, products or links. Hence, in our example of “vegetarian dog food”, you could search on the “products” box for this and find merchants who are selling this. They also have a very useful tool called the EPC, which reflects how much has been earned for every 100 clicks. For example, if the EPC is $5, this would mean that for every 100 clicks, Commission Junction has paid out $5.
Now it becomes a simple math game, if you refer 100 customers to this program each day, you can expect to earn $5, 200 customers earn $10 and so on.
This is just a rough estimate of traffic, but it certainly helps in choosing one merchant over another, when they’re selling the same product. Also, it will depend on how relevant the advert is to your site. In our example, a “vegetarian dog food” advert placed on a site about dogs is likely to be more successful than one placed on a site about home cooking!
Clickbank
Clickbank offers a range of products including ebooks and software. You can search their marketplace for items to sell that are closely related to your website’s niche. Although it’s harder to break in to affiliate marketing as a beginner, there’s certainly big money to be made. The first book I ever read on the subject, Ros Gardner’s Super Affiliate handbook remains for me the best one.
Amazon
Although it is possible to sign up as an affiliate with Amazon, many people have found that they pay a very low commission rate, so it’s barely worthwhile.
eBay
As an additional stream of income this might be useful, but I don’t think many people would suggest you make it your sole income source as an affiliate.
