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Online Affiliate Programs

Facts About Online Affiliate Programs

Most affiliate marketers do not make much profit. Affiliate marketing is either something you really have a knack for or something you don't. You can get better with time, but it is a very slow growth business off the start while you are learning.

Affiliate Programs vs Contextual Ads

Right now I believe syndicated contextual ads may be a better idea than most affiliate programs. With affiliate programs you need to find the most relevant affiliate programs and ads for each page and then keep track of the changing affiliate terms for all the affiliate programs you are associated with.

While I still am an affiliate marketer for many products it seems to be easier to earn money from Google AdSense (Google AdSense review) since the ads automatically are (usually) relevant to the page copy. Usually it is best to be an affiliate marketer for a couple quality products related to your site versus signing up for thousands of different affiliate programs.

It is possible to mix both contextual ads and affiliate marketing on the same site.

Affiliate Programs: Quantity vs Quality

I do not recommend trying to make a huge directory of thousands of affiliate companies, but selecting target companies that provide affiliate programs that add value to the information your customers read. When I was younger and dumber I tried to sign up for a ton of affiliate programs and it was an unprofitable huge headache.

Affiliate Programs vs Multilevel Marketing

Most affiliate marketers do not make much money and many people make money off pushing marketing books at others. In a sense I view much of this as nothing more than a Multi Level Marketing scheme.

Many people who are successful affiliate marketers are only successful because the sucker more people into buying the same crap they did.

Major Affiliate Programs

Most affiliate programs (other than Amazon) are ran through a third party system.

Commission Junction was recently purchased by Valueclick and will be added to the BeFree suite of affiliate programs. They combine to make the largest affiliate directory on the web. Clickbank, Performics and Linkshare are also rather large programs.

Performics, Commission Junction, and Linkshare will generally want to work with larger clients. Amazon will do order fulfillment for around 55% of the order price. Clickbank is only for electronic information, but they have a cheap setup price ($49) and will accept just about anyone.

Smaller Affiliate Programs

Generally I recommend staying with larger affiliate programs to make tracking easier. If you are using an affiliate program to sell your items you may want to save money by going with a smaller affiliate program. Some smaller programs to note are Quinstreet, My Affiliate Program , FineClicks & ShareASale.

Buy Affiliate Software

You may not want to pay to be inside other affiliate programs & directories and may just want to lease your affiliate software.

• My Affiliate Program
• AssoscTRAC
• AffiliateShop

Balancing Affiliate Website Marketing

Keep in mind that quality, and not quantity of affiliate links is important (anything that is over commercialized becomes obvious to an intelligent person and dumb people are probably too dumb to know how to order).

You affiliate program links should be chosen based on relevancy to user and not with the affiliate profit margin in mind. Higher profit margin affiliate programs are exceptionally competitive to rank well for.

Your affiliate links should be based on the end user, as then end user experience is the end goal we are all trying to achieve anyway.

Affiliate Program Links

Many affiliate program providers accept all third party links, then only process the links to you from them. For the most part it does not matter how the affiliate links are created since they do not parse link value to the end destination.

Search engines evaluate www.mysite.com as a different document than www.mysite.com?source=affiliate, most affiliate programs are not a good way of building a linking program to influence search engine rankings, but if people see your site over and over again it can help them develop a trust for your products.

There are ways to use affiliate links to build link popularity, but most good affiliates will not be interested in using some of these since the tracking might not be 100% accurate.

Search Engines Penalize Affiliate Sites

That line is not true. They penalize bad affiliate sites. Yahoo! edits out many of the duplicate site type site-out-of-the-box type affiliate sites since seeing the same thing over and over again degrades the quality of their searchers user experience.

You can have affiliate links in many many spots on your site, but the key to being successful with affiliate programs is to create original content.

Optimize Your Home Page (For Those About to Start an Affiliate Program)

Before establishing your own affiliate program, it is important to ensure your site (or at least your home page) has search engine optimization performed on it. If you do not, a person who knows how to do it will receive top listings for people searching for your exact name. Take for instance, the LittleWoods Index, when I searched for their site I found a garbage page that was affiliate link embedded that sent traffic to the end site, only after they lose the money that the person is getting for sending them the traffic they already earned. The affiliate link I was speaking of is shopfox.co.uk/littlewoods_index/?FS

You can search Google for LittleWoods Index and see what I am talking about (unless they change their algorithm or someone at LittleWoods Index reads this page).

Affiliate Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing Tips (For Those About to Start an Affiliate Program)

Not only can you lose the affiliate's portion of the profit, but some aggressive affiliates may even be wrecking your brand image to make profits. You also need to decide how you are going to approach pay per click marketing so that you are not battling your own affiliates and driving your own marketing costs up.

SEO Friendly Affiliate Programs

Some SEO friendly affliate systems cause affiliates to parse link popularity to the main merchant's home page, which ends up filtering that PageRank down through the main merchant site. This may cause the merchant's sites to outrank their affiliates.

Affiliate Program Articles

• Writing a Book Report for Money
• Google Cash Review

Further Affiliate Program Information

• Associate Programs - Affiliate program guide and affiliate program forums.
• Associate Program Forums