Affilliate Networks

How about affiliates? In your experience does anyone ever make money from them?

– Charbarred, The Plugg

Affiliate marketing is seen by many as the one true goldmine on the Internet. Others see it as a waste of time, energy and space. I have had some success with affiliate deals but the key is to pick the right one.

If you think you can just sign-up with Amazon or eBay or even art.com and throw a site up and have the money roll in you are going to fail. Why? Because everyone else is doing the same thing!

Do you have any idea how many affiliates are in the Amazon program? What about eBay? I do not have exact figures but one offshoot of the eBay system has about 24K members. See what I mean about putting up a lame site? It will not work.

I have tried the Amazon affiliate network but I made nothing there. Technically I made $0.88 but I will never see that money because of the minimum payout requirement. I ended up taking the Amazon links off of my sites because even though they were generating hundreds of thousands of impressions and thousands of clicks there were no sales.

I then moved on to the new eBay network AuctionAds and saw some success. It was a variable success though and it most often hit on Mondays. I used their tracking system to figure out which articles on which sites were generating the clicks that converted into revenue and fine tuned it to the point where it now pays a reliable monthly payment.

I also dabbled in game reviews for a while and found some small success using the Fun Again Games affiliate system. I never made enough to make it worth my while though I was able to turn those funds into games by using them as store credit.

The simple fact of the matter is that affiliate deals can work but only if your site is a niche site that focuses on one thing and is popular. You can’t just throw up an affiliate link store and expect people to buy things from you. You need to write about the products you are trying to make money off of without it appearing to your readers that that is what you are doing.

Have a question for dad? Send it in!

Money used under Creative Commons License from flickr user jenn jenn