We have mentioned a number of times how Affiliate Marketing can be used to generate income for your site. In today’s post I wanted to give a few tips to get the most out of Affiliate programs, for use on your site.

What Are Your Readers Looking For?

You need to consider your audience that visits your site. Why are they there? What are they looking for? Are they shopping for specific items?

Understanding your audience and why they are viewing your site, can enable you to promote affiliate products that are relevant. There is no point in promoting weight loss supplements if your website promotes car accessories!

Promote Quality Products

You should only be promoting quality products! Everybody is the same, we all like to make sure that we are getting good value for money. Promoting products that are rubbish, just because they offer a better commission for you, won’t work. Respect your readers and promote quality products, with good reputations, that they will find useful.

Your Own Recommendations Work Best!

There are countless products and services available online for you to choose from, to promote on your site. However, generating money from them isn’t as simple as merely adding a link. You need to actively promote and recommend the product itself to your readers.

On a daily basis, people keep returning to your blog because they trust what you are writing about. You need to maintain this trust by being open and honest about any product that you promote. The easiest way to loose visitors is to promote affiliate products that you clearly don’t use/isn’t relevant to them.

The best results that I have had from affiliate programs is when I give an open and honest review of it. One of the most successful programs I have been involved at on OnlineIncomeTeacher.com is with the email auto-responder, AWeber. I refer to it a lot in many posts when relevant, because not only is it a tool that I use to distribute my FREE eCourse, but it is a tool that I recommend to other bloggers and website owners to build their own email list with.

Link Positioning

There are many places on your site pages to place Affiliate Links, but some work better than others. Think about where your reader will be looking on screen when they are viewing your website.

Blog posts are a particularly good place to include text-link ads, but also above and below each post is a good position to include advertisement banners.

Your website header is a prime location for adverts, as this is clearly visible to everyone that visits any of your pages. In comparison, adverts placed lower down on your pages towards the footer area, won’t have the same impact.

Contextual Advertising Works Best

The best thing about contextual adverts like Google Adsense, is that when someone is reading a particular post on your blog and they see an advert for that same product, they are much more likely to click on it, than if they had seen an advert for something else.

Affiliate programs work best, when they are used in this same way! A link or banner ad to a general homepage (e.g. Amazon), wouldn’t be anywhere near as effective as multiple links placed throughout your blog article that advertises products that are relevant for your readers.

So, for example, a blog post about hand-held gaming consoles might include a review of the new Nintendo 3Ds product. The most effective affiliate program that you could link to within that post would be one that links to a page selling that Nintendo 3Ds model.

The Amazon affiliate program is great for setting these links up, and I use it myself to promote products on my sites. It can be a little more work, but I find that it is well worth the effort.

Don’t Put All Your Affiliate Eggs Into One Basket!

Treat your website/blog as a business! Diversify your income streams, so that you are not relying on one affiliate program. There are plenty of products out there to promote, so there is no need to just concentrate on one.

Think about all of the different things that your website focuses on. Try to find numerous products that are relevant to each of those and promote when relevant.

Build Other Revenue Streams

There are many ways to earn money online, you don’t solely have to rely on affiliate programs. I find it fun to build up my business and find new ways of monetizing my websites. Affiliate advertising is one of the best methods for generating income, but it is not the only one. Try to incorporate different methods and experiment with what works and what doesn’t.

Check out our post on ‘30 Ways Your Website Can Earn You Money!‘ for some methods that you may not have originally thought of.

Don’t Fool Your Readers

Don’t try to trick your readers into clicking on links that will make you money. The only thing that you will achieve by doing this, is that you will loose readers!

Tracking Your Affiliate Link Results

The majority of affiliate programs include some type of tracking or analytic statistics package, which will allow you to see which links are working. These tracking tools are very useful and will allow you plan future affiliate strategies.

Traffic = Money!!!

You can have the best links, promoting the best products, located in the prime positions on your pages, but if there is no one visiting your site then you won’t make any money!

Traffic is key to making money online. The more visitors that see your affiliate links, the more likely it is that one of them will make a purchase. Constantly work to attract more traffic to your website.

Please leave your comments below & feel free to ask any questions.