Advertising & Affiliate Programs

What Are the Affiliate Programs?

They are programs that usually anyone with a website can apply to. After this you can show banners and other ads on your site. According how the visitors interact with your ads you get paid. There are three ways to get paid from ads promoting things and they are:

1) Pay Per Impression: This is simply about that when people come and a banner is loaded and shown, you get paid a little. These 'impressions', the amount of banner displays is usually calculated with 'CPM', cost per mille (Latin and means thousand). When one thousand visitors load the banner, you get a small pre-defined amount.

2) Pay Per Click: Means that when someone clicks an ad, you get paid. Surely the payout is bigger than on 'Pay Per Impression' but this one actually needs more 'effort' from the visitor. This one's payment can be pre-defined or depending on other factors.

3) Pay Per Sale: This is the hardest way for the webmaster to generate money but surely the most profitable when thinking of single instance of payout. This is because first the visitor must find the way to your website, then click the ad and eventually buy something or subscribe into a service. The money paid or commission is either a percentage of the sale or a pre-defined amount. Surely well promoted product can bring noticeable profits.

Choosing the Best Affiliate Programs for You

The important thing is to find a program relevant to your website's topic. Think also for your target group, what kind of people come into your site? That's one of the most important questions around affiliate marketing. Offer them something they would easily take a benefit from.

How many affiliate programs should you choose then? I say don't take too many to fill up your website with ads, only a couple so that they get a balanced presentation on your website, so they have space to breathe and they cover some critical spots on your site's topics. If the whole website is one big sales letter, it has a negative impact on the visitors!

Where to Find Affiliate Programs?

There are multiple websites offering lists of affiliate programs. The biggest and greatest ones are the following. They are free of course, they get a tiny fraction of every sale, like couple cents to their own pockets from every sale:

Commission Junction - Usually has more usable items to promote like laptops, cameras etc...

ClickBank - More digital products like e-books and other downloadables.

Google AdSense Program and Other PPC Programs

Google has created the revolutionary AdSense program reaching many webmasters. It has helped so many to make it easier to fund a website and even made some of them millionaires.

Adsense has the idea that if someone just clicks an ad, that already generates you a little profits. Also there are pay per impression ads mixed. Most other programs require visitors to buy something after clicking. Perhaps the best part is that the ads are intended to be as relevant as possible to your website's topic.

Of course Google isn't the only one today offering this kind of service. For example Yahoo! has a similar system. You can find more but I would recommend sticking with Google or Yahoo!

Payout Amounts

As said, Google will pay when clicked. The paid amount depends how much an advertiser is ready to bid on the keywords on their ads. Some clicks can be worth $0.10 or even below. Normally they reach up to around $2.00 but some even +50.00$ (ultra rare), you never know, it's about the advertiser's bidding.

Every niche has their own keyword collection, some pay more, some less. I recommend finding out which ones are for you. Learn how to define the most paying keywords here from here. Note that this tutorial is in "Getting Traffic" section.

Joining PPC Programs

It is very easy, you just have to fill a form and wait to get approved. It usually takes about few days. If you don't have a website yet and want help with getting one, please take the Basic Tutorial. Blogs can be used as advertisement space but just because they are easier to make, it doesn't mean they are easier to maintain.

I prefer Blogger. Remember that the website or blog must really have content to get approved. Keyword spams and other malicious things lead to banning.

Keyword Tools

Don't worry, you are not left without help here. Keyword tools can help you out of thinking which keywords are the more profitable.

Here is the keyword tools page. Note that this tutorial is in the "Getting Traffic" section too.

Basically every of these search engines have their own tools, you may want to check them out. They are very easily found.

How To Improve the Ad Click-Through-Rate

Well there are two ways and they are creating very good and keyword-rich content and secondly placing and coloring the ads. This can be handled with split testing.