Affiliate Marketing

This is the fifth post of my Affiliate Marketing: a Beginner's Guide series.

Like many other posts here, I'm writing about the stuff I wish I knew when I first started blogging. With so many affiliate programs to choose from it is hard to know where to start. I had a hard time figuring out which affiliate program I should try.

The "best" affiliate program depends largely on your niche. If, for example, you write about dating and relationships, your best bet is to sign up with a dating website's affiliate program.

Having said this, let me tell you what has worked best for me and share my comments:

Clickbank has out-performed every other affiliate program I've tried. Most of the products on clickbank were specifically designed for online affiliate marketing, which is a big advantage. Many of the clients offer 75% commission to you, the blogger, for sales. Clickbank also gives you a ton of valuable information in terms of analytics: hops per order, etc.

Shopzilla has been a consistent earner for me as well. It is sort of a modified pay-per-click program. This means you get paid for clicks (vs sales), but the earning potential isn't as high as with commission affiliates. I have a couple of pages/posts that regularly earn 3-5 dollars a day with Shopzilla. This services is more of a slow, steady earner for me: the daily profits ad up.

Amazon.com has one of the most well-known affiliate programs on the internet, and some bloggers do quite well with them. I personally have not made much money with their program, but it is a good one to use for book and video reviews, etc.

Commission Junction is the program used by Dell.com and several other well-known companies.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. I'm just sharing some of the programs that have worked for me.

Should You Use Adsense?

Should you use adsense on your blog? I'd say it really depends on your blog. As you can see, I use it here at Beginner Blogger Tips (as well as a few of my other sites).

But I don't use adsense on my two most popular blogs.

I decided to completely give up on monetizing my personal blog (kuyakevin.com). I had two problems with adsense there:

1. It wasn't earning much money.

2. Since my personal blog is more spiritual in nature, ads for religious wacko groups kept appearing.

I also removed adsense from my fitness blog (strongandfit.net) once I switched to affiliate marketing. I was running into two problems:

1. The ads that show often advertise the same products I'm selling through affiliate marketing, which means someone else could "steal" my commission.

2. The other ads are what seemed to be bogus products ("lose 20 lb in 20 days," etc).

Here are a few more random thoughts:

*I think most blog readers understand that you, the blogger, are personally endorsing whatever product shows up in adsense. You'll just have to decide what you are comfortable with.

*It's always good to experiment with more than one way of making money. Adsense may or may not be the best for you.

*Maybe geographical issues come into play here. One nice thing about adsense is regional ads automatically show up on your blog--this could be a huge advantage if your visitors are not concentrated in one country (or region).