How to make money using affiliate marketing

Most web publishers use a CPC network such as Adsense or a CPM network
that shows banner adverts and pays a tiny amount such as $1 per
thousand impressions. I prefer to use affiliate programs that pay me a
commission for every product I sell.

Having been banned from Adsense 3 times in the past for no reason at
all I’ve had to learn how to make money without relying on Google to
send me a cheque. The reason for my first ban was that I signed up
with a site and never got round to adding the Adsense code. Then one
day I added the code to the revenue sharing program in the Digital
Point forums, quickly earned $60 and then got banned. Google didn’t
even offer an explanation. The next two bans were for starting accounts when I was already banned.

The best thing about affiliate schemes is you can’t get banned easily
and you have email & phone access to loads of people who want to help
you make as much money as possible.

Making money using affiliate marketing is way too large a subject for
me to cover it in one blog post so I will be doing a series of
probably a few posts per week explaining exactly how I make over
$10,000 per month from affiliate marketing on various blogs.

If you have any specific questions please post them in the comments. Otherwise wait until tomorrow for the first post which is about link baiting – the first
thing you need to do when launching a new affiliate site.

The first step – link bait

The key
aspect of link baiting for affiliate sites is to make sure you don’t
have any affiliate links in your posts. This might sound strange but
bloggers won’t link to sites with affiliate links. You need to wait
until your posts are about a week or two old before you start adding
affiliate links.

Remember that any visitors from feed readers or social bookmarking
sites are very unlikely to want to buy anything. Visitors who find
your posts by searching on Google are very likely to want to buy
something.

A link baiting campaign for a new affiliate site can help the site get
good rankings very quickly and avoid the dreaded Google Sandbox.
Affiliate sites are very hard to build links for so starting your
sites life as a blog allows you to build links for free and then flip
the blog to an affiliate site after a few months.

Read the rest of the link baiting article tomorrow.

BY Patrick Altoft AT 5:16pm ON Wednesday, 27 June 2007

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+