Advertiser and Affiliate Program Review for Webmasters
by: Shawn K. Hall
I am frequently asked what website sponsors and advertisers I recommend. Your website or business may enjoy the capacity to obtain direct advertising revenue, in which case you will receive 100% of the income generated by advertisement placement. However, not everybody or every website lends itself to having specific dedicated advertisers. For those there are innumerable affiliate programs, which abound on the internet.
Here you will find a review of my own personal experiences and advice with ad affiliate programs. This list is by no means exhaustive, nor could one ever be.
Clickbank
Clickbank pays anywhere from 10% to 99% for the linked materials, all of which are simply affiliate links to products you preselect. These can be used with Adsense. You have to have a certain volume of selling or they will deduct money from your account every couple weeks. And you can "sell" products (like ebooks, code and software) through their interface as well.
Overall, this isn't a bad gig, but many of the products have that "spammy" feel that entice people into buying using FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt), instead of any tangible benefits of the product or service. This is definitely an "impulse buy" clearinghouse.
ShareASale, Managed Performance Marketing
ShareASale pays either flat rates or a percentage of the sale for transactions. Like LinkShare and ClickBank, this program provides access to some vendors that are simply not available elsewhere. These can be used with Adsense, too.
We haven't had a lot of luck with ShareASale, but that could be because we just haven't pushed it. There are over 2,000 programs available and over 500 of those are exclusively available on ShareASale, ranging from pay-per-sale to pay-per-lead to pay-per-click. By far the best payouts are percentages from actual sales (of course), which is the highest number of available programs. Payouts are as much as $500 per transaction (yes, seriously) or five times the sale price. It could happen. ;)
AdBrite
Next up is AdBrite, which promises to sell ads on your site keeping only 30% of the fees. Like Text-Link-Ads, you have the option of selecting advertisers' before they display, enabling you to selectively remove those ads which you disagree with or are direct competitors - as opposed to Google, for example, where these types of ads display until you discover and remove them.
Since this is not contextual (instead it is based on keywords you provide) and you have the authority to preapprove every ad for use on your site, this can be used in conjunction with Adsense.
Amazon
Amazon, of course, has a pretty good affiliate thing going on, but they only pay a small fraction of what you can earn by others (it starts at a mere 4%), and it is based on actual conversions, not just click-throughs. The total payout might be more per actual conversion, but you have to have a very high volume to make this worthwhile.
Annette and I have been extending the Amazon links on our sites so we can use the income to support our massive video addiction. The new ad formats are working quite well. The recently released "aStore" feature also provides a very simple storefront for your websites with a mostly simple editor and the same breadth of product selection as the Amazon you know and love.
As long as you link products directly or use the aStore service, you can continue to use Adsense on the same page.
CafePress
CafePress isn't so much an affiliate program as a custom printing company with a very broad selection of products (from shirts to DVDs to books to teddy bears), but they do, in fact, offer a form of affiliate program for recommending the products of others, in addition to the commissions for sales of your own designs. CafePress pays as much as 20% for affiliate referrals.
Since there is nothing contextual about the CafePress advertisements (in fact, you'll find that you have to make your own banners and product links manually), these are completely compatible with Adsense.
Adsense
Adsense ... Well, duh. Adsense provides a very worthwhile advertising mechanism.
Adsense pays you 50% ad value for legitimate click-throughs and can earn you very good money for sites with a large amount or very well targeted and professionally written content. A site with a dozen pages of quality content can earn as much as a 50,000-page site with ramblings that touch on equally as many topics. And yes, I'm speaking from experience. ;)
Adsense is so effective that people dedicate their entire coding careers to generating content targeted not to users, but to the highest value keywords within this behemoth ad network, with the goal of luring people to their sites for the sole purpose of having the user be so dissatisfied with the content that they quickly leave through an advertisement link. While this type of thing is no doubt "effective" at generating revenue, it will never result in a repeat visitor.
I'm afraid that Google Adsense is going the way of DoubleClick and Commission Junction in their data collection practices. Very invasive. I seem to be the only one that cares much about it on any of the forums I participate in, though. It's as if people don't think Google can do any wrong.
Adsense also has referral programs for themselves and for Firefox, and can provide a revenue-generating search feature for your site (Adsense for Search), which works exceptionally well on sites that are already indexed by Google.
In closing...
These are the affiliate programs I currently use in any fashion from an insiders perspective. There are other vendors (like Commission Junction) who I, as a website visitor, refuse to be involved with, so I would not use or recommend them. Others, like the now defunct Christian Books and Mentura/FamilyPass (I won't waste your time with that story) have affiliate programs, too, but have only very specific vertical markets where they work well. (These have both gone out of business and is no longer an affiliate option.)
Some things you should be aware of in advance are the linking strategies and cookie durations of affiliate programs you use. For example, Clickbank have a "very well known" linking scheme which is blocked by many advertisement filters, preventing you from generating revenue from users of those services.
If you are interested in signing up under any of these consider using the affiliate referral programs on a site you like who promotes them (like this one), so we can get the kickback if a vendor provides one. Google, for example, provides a $100 incentive for referring others (if the new site earns $100 within the first 6 months), Chitika offers you 10% of the click value of sub-affiliates for a year, I think. Others do anything from a progressive MLM scheme (Clickbank) to laugh heartily in your face.
Regards,
Shawn K. Hall
https://12PointDesign.com/
https://ReliableAnswers.com/
Money is the root of all evil.
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