Is Affiliate Marketing A Viable Alternative To Using Adsense?

What’s up with Adsense?

Well Google recently decided to tighten it’s acceptance guidelines for the Adsense program. This is an attempt to weed out all of the junk sites out there basically taking up cyberspace.

Some of the changes include the following

1. Your website must sit on a top level domain, which means you need to have your own domain name and hosting.

2. Your domain must be active for at least 6 months.

3. Your Adsense application info must match your domain records. Don’t try to cheat they will be checking.

You can get more info about this on Lisa Irby’s blog at the link below:

http://blog.2createawebsite.com

So what do I do in the meantime?

Well there’s always Affiliate Marketing, you know that’s where you sell other peoples products and services for a commission.

Affiliate marketing does not have to be blatant “hey buy this”
advertising, you can subtly slip in a review or a recommendation for a product and include their affiliate link in your blog.

If you can find product or service that is relevant to the topic of
your blog and you do a good job of slipping it in, you can stand to
make some good money. Affiliate marketing generally pays more per
sale than you would make per click with Adsense, but you have to have visitors that both click on your affiliate link and purchase the product.

The best way to make sure readers purchase the affiliate products you market is to pick products your audience will be interested in and that are relevant to your blog. If you blog about weight loss, chances are no one will respond to your affiliate marketing attempts at selling ringtones.

Keep your marketing attempts natural and make sure they fit in with the flow of your blog. There are plenty of places to go to find affiliate marketing
opportunities. Many websites such as Amazon and eBay have affiliate
programs. Your favorite website or company may even have an
affiliate program and it can’t hurt to look, especially if they are related
to your blog.

Why Not Join An Affiliate Network?

You can also find affiliate marketing opportunities on websites that
specialize in connecting companies with publishers. The good thing
about using one of these websites is that you have a huge list of
products to choose form and the website will manage your payments
and track your selling statistics. Here is a list of websites you can use
to find affiliate marketing opportunities.

Clickbank – The most popular affiliate marketing website,
Clickbank offers bloggers a dizzying array of products to market
as an affiliate. All of their products are digital products, such as
e-books and reports.

• Earn as much as 75% per sale.
• Also earn recurring revenue from subscription products.
• 10,000 products you can promote.
• Single-page order form optimized for digital product conversions.
• Real time sales stats, with ROI and campaign management tools.
• Direct deposit of your earnings, now with weekly payouts!

Commission Junction – This affiliate website operates in
much the same way as Clickbank. Companies add their products
to the Commission Junction marketplace and publishers add links
to these products in their blogs. Commission junction offers a
wider variety of products, however, some require visitors to buy
a product for you to get paid and others require visitors to sign
up for newsletters or fill out a form.

Link Share – Another affiliate website that connects affiliates
with products to market. You can pick from a wide variety of
products to market on your blog and like Commission Junction,
you do not always have to sell something in order to get paid.
Sometimes the required action is to get visitors to sign up for a
newsletter or fill out a form in order to get paid.

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to make money from your
blog. Remember to keep your marketing attempts natural and try not
to “sell,” rather rate or inform. Most affiliate websites that connect you
with products to market will keep track of your earnings and statistics which makes them very convenient.

To learn more about Affiliate Marketing Get your copy of
Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook

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