Affiliate Links

Commission Junction Affiliate Network

Putting my keyword research (research) aside for the moment, I have decided that filling the advertising space on the right of this blog should take preference. As I have said previously, the ad spaces are available to be rented by anyone who wants to pay for them. If I could manage to sell each of the four advertising spaces for £52 a month, for the whole 12 months, I wouldn't need to do anything else during the experiment. As it is fairly unlikely that that will happen (unless the visitor numbers of this blog suddenly jump to 50,000 a month) I have decided to fill them with Affiliate Links.

Affiliate Links, for those who don't know, are links to a retailers website which contain a special identifying code or ID. If someone clicks on one of the links and then goes on to purchase goods or services from the retailer, the affiliate (me) receives a commission on the sale. Think of it as someone standing outside a shop telling passers by about a great deal to be had inside. For every person they convince to go inside the shop and buy something, they receive a percentage of that sale.

Choosing which affiliate links to add to this blog is the tricky part (I already have accounts set up with most of the large affiliate networks where the merchants and links are found: more on that shortly). Obviously, in an ideal world, I would want to choose the merchant that pays the highest commission and has a hugely popular product. In reality that doesn't often happen. Merchants with hugely popular products don't really need affiliates to send them sales leads. If this blog was about, for example, car insurance, I would choose some of the big insurance companies to affiliate myself with. Financial merchants often pay high commissions for targeted leads, so that would be great. The problem is that most people who visit this blog aren't going to be looking to buy car insurance, and so few (if any) will click on the adverts and then proceed to take out car insurance.

This blog does have something to do with finances and money, so there is perhaps the possibility that I can find a finance merchant that offers budgeting services or financial advice. Maybe I will experiment a bit, fill the four slots with completely different adverts and see which, if any, prove the most popular.

Information about becoming an affiliate of a retail website can sometimes be found on the website itself. In the past, many websites ran their own affiliate programs so you had to apply to each website individually. Nowadays affiliate networks, which contain links to hundreds or thousands of different merchants, do the hard work of assessing new affiliates, collecting statistics and calculating commissions. In most cases, you sign up to the affiliate network, give them details of how you will be promoting their merchants (on a website, in email newsletters, etc.) and then choose the merchants you want to work with. Often the merchant will have to accept or reject you from their program, depending on things like the content of your website or your proposed promotion methods. Some of the biggest affiliate networks are:

Webgains
Affiliate Window
TradeDoubler
Commission Junction
Affiliate Future

This is by no means an exhaustive list. If you want to know more, just Google "Affiliate Networks" and you will be drowned in both networks and information about them.

By this time tomorrow, I hope to have all four of my advertising slots filled with an affiliate advert. Any money they earn before the start of the experiment will not be counted.