Monday, May 19, 2008

[ARTICLE] Make Money With Your Blog With Affiliate Programs

Like many Internet users, I for one is a person who likes to in search for the possibility to increase my income and especially a source of passive income. Nevertheless it is not as easy as I though a couple of years ago. I started out noticing that there are many bloggers who capitalize the use of blog into a affiliate marketing platform which sparked an idea for me to start one such blog myself. "How difficult can it be to subscribe a blog and start putting in advertisements for users to click and earn some money from there", I thought to myself. Well, I ended up making money with absolutely nothing.

Whilst the problem may obviously be the content as I found to be a very critical factor in starting a website or a blog. It is not something as simple as starting a website and maintain it once in a while to check how much you have earned. Having understood the importance of the 'richness' of the content of my website is only a tip of the iceberg because there are so many other factors that can influence the earning potential of your website or in my case a blog.

1. The need to understand how SEO works.

SEO is a very foreign acronym to me then. SEO stands for 'Search Engine Optimization' which I used to think that it is just plain effort to increase the number of popular keywords that are being searched by users. Well, the answer to this is a big 'yes' and a 'no'. The purpose for enhancing your level of SEO is to increase the PageRank of your site when users searched for the relevant keywords. Relevancy does contributes in the PageRank ranking system but there are actually more to it. Have you notice that more and more bloggers or webmasters are subscribed to back link sites or link exchange sites? This is also one of the way to increase your PageRank. However, the essential thing to note here is that the higher the PageRank of the site that your site are linked to the higher the chance for your PageRank to increase.

2. Getting good affiliate programs.

After getting your site well-positioned in terms of keywords relevancy and ranking, traffic does comes in. But you have only a few advertisements by Google Adsense and you are probably at this very juncture wondering how come you are not earning much money. Do remember the minimum cash out amount for Adsense is $100 which is virtually impossible for most site to attained. Trust me on this, I had tried my very best and I cannot even attain cash out for quite a long time. Subscribe to more affiliation programs to expand your earnings. However, it is advisable that the advertisements should go according to the theme of your blog or else you may lose credibility. Let say, you stumble across a site full of advertisements, how would you react? For me, I would probably close the site and surf on. That is exactly the point. If you are hosting a site that guide users on online earnings, it is good to have some very high potential PTC (Paid to Click) affiliation program for the visitors to join you as referrals. I have personally benefited from this strategy. Of course if your blog is talking about jobs and career, you may want to do a review and put up affiliated linked advertisements for freelance job sites like www.getafreelancer.com for example is one of the best affiliate programs for freelance market.

3. Enhance traffic

Using keywords update and SEO techniques are ways to increase that much needed traffic to boost your earnings, but there are faster ways to do that. If you do not wished to spend any money, you may want to do some manual publicity on as many forums as you can find. Forums are sites with very high traffic which largely attributed to the concentration of keywords. You would not probably realized this until now but if you were to do a search on any words, chances are, 40% of the top 10 ranked search result are threads from forums. If you want to spend some money to get quick traffic and increase the chance of visitors joining or purchasing from your affiliated program, you may want to host some advertisements with PTC sites. The most popular sites as of current is Bux.To, probably a monopoly in this industry.

4. Appeal your visitors

Like what I had mentioned earlier, it is absolutely pointless to flood your site with too many advertisements that may adversely turned your visitors away. Human Interface (HI) is exceptionally important here. You need to have something that is simple, good combination of color contrast and nice segregation of facts and advertisements.

5. Affiliated program linking technique

Many bloggers always thought that putting banner is the only way for visitors to click on your affiliate programs. Well, it is wrong, there are many ways to this. Another way is by 'anchor text', a word linked method commonly used by GPT (Get paid to) blog or review affiliated programs. A program that pays you to blog about their client. Try to used as wide variation of relevant text and linked to the text to the relevant affiliate program. If for example you have a post with words like 'gold', you could linked it to E-Gold or words like 'books' can be linked to affiliate program like Amazon.com. Amazon is a very good affiliate program because many users buy books or multimedia discs online.

I am sure that if you were to follow the advises mentioned in this particular article, your quest in making profit with the best affiliate programs available on the Internet will not be too far off. You can have the best affiliate programs on your website or blog for that matter, but you will never make any profit if you do not have the essential attributing factors like traffic, web presence or PageRank.

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