I have read that bloggers struggle to make money from affiliate programs, sometimes even when they have good traffic levels.As I see it the problem is banners!
I wrote back in July 2007 Scrap Money Making Banners. I was probably being a little dramatic, for effect, because banners can have a place within blogging.
There is, however, a lot more to making money with affiliate programs than just slapping a few banners somewhere on a blog. I don't believe that this really works, or at least not to a satisfactory level.
I've messed about with various ways to make affiliate programs worthwhile and I've found that the most successful way is to include links for them within or under blog posts.
With my main earning blogs (not this one!) I try to include links to an affiliate program with every post - and these are mainly, but not always, text links. My Celebrity Insider is an example of this. There are affiliate links in all (or virtually all) of the posts on the home page.
To do this it is necessary to have suitable affiliate programs that have products relative to your particular niche. It's why organisations similar to Commission Junction or TradeDoubler are worth joining.
They both have dozens and dozens of affiliate programs under one umbrella. This means you can usually find several schemes that will be suitable for what you are mostly writing about.
Now there are also several websites that offer context advertising whereby they automatically identify and link contextually relevant phrases with your post content.
These are okay, in some cases, but I personally don't like to see too many links in a post, especially when they are in green and underlined twice! It somehow messes up the pleasure of reading something - just my opinion, of course!
But, if you control this yourself, you are more able to direct traffic to where you wish.
The con side is that it takes more effort as you have to find the relevant links within say CJ, TradeDoubler, Amazon
etc yourself. I feel that this is worth the effort, time permitting.If you are writing about a certain book or product and have links to these they must surely generate more clicks (and more money) than random links - or random big banners.
Regarding banners I think regular Internet users now overlook them as our brains have been almost programmed not to see them.
I've always found that text ads (including Google AdSense) will out perform bigger, glossier artwork. Regarding AdSense this produces more money, in my experience, than some banner ad of the same size.
Your own opinion may be different but I like to write about what my own personal experience with the hope that some of it may be of use.
Good luck,
Mike.
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