Category Archives: Affiliates

Affiliates

Affiliate Programs Iā€™m Connected With ā€“ Part Five

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Man, how long will this go on? Until I’m done, that’s how long. šŸ™‚ So let’s recap quickly by giving you the links to previous posts on the subject: part one, part two, part three and part four. Onward and upward to part five.


Mailwasher Pro
Mailwasher Pro

Mailwasher is an actual program I use on my computer and one that I think is very powerful protection. Basically what it does is lets you view all your email while still sitting on the server. You can eliminate spam at that point or any other email you don’t want to download, then only download email you know is safe and what you want. Sure, every once in awhile timing will let one come through, but it’s really rare.

They have an affiliate program and so date I’ve been credited with 3 sales worth around $19, with one of those sales coming this week. If you follow the link you’ll see that the ads look kind of funny, but it was proof that if you write about something you like that you have the opportunity to make money from it, even if it’s not a ton of money. I have to say that I believe Mailwasher is one of my most valuable programs.

Pokerstars is the site where I was playing all my online poker, and of course that means they also had an affiliate program. I never really got to advertise this one all that much because, of course, online poker is illegal here in the states, and even when I signed up for it the sucker was illegal, though many people played on the site. Then the government started shutting things down for American players and that was pretty much that. I made no money off it, as I don’t think I have a lot of people visiting this blog that play poker, and basically, until the government relents and let’s people play online again, for money, I don’t think I’ll have enough people from other countries signing up through me.

SEO Book is a website that offers tools to help figure out how to make your website work better, gives some internet marketing training and other good stuff. I run one of their SEO programs through my browser, and back when I wanted to learn about affiliate marketing I purchased their ebook, which was pretty good. They offer an affiliate program for selling some of their products and they give you $20 to sign up. And for each sale you make you earn $50; that’s not bad.

Unfortunately, I’ve never made a sale, and I have to admit that I haven’t really pushed it all that much. I did have the book up on a sidebar for awhile, then they went through some changes and shut down the program for a short while and I removed it and never put it back. One of these days I need to get it back up somewhere because I believe in what I saw and it’s possible it can be used to help others and make some money along the way.

I’m stopping here as I only have 3 more to go, and that leaves me one more post, although it may end up being the shortest of the series.
 

Affiliates

Affiliate Programs Iā€™m Connected With ā€“ Part Four

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The best part of writing a series like this is that you have built in links to previous posts that you can take advantage of, and that others can go back to see what they might have missed. So, here’s part one, part two and part three, and now we push on to part four.


by Debbie Kerr via Imagekind

Share-a-Sale is a program like Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network and Linkshare in that they have multiple online programs you can advertise for. The main reason I joined was because I wanted to be able to highlight images like the one on this blog through the Imagekind site.

I thought I might make some money from it, but it just hasn’t ever happened. I’ve only ever signed up with a couple other programs there, but I have to admit that other than the images I haven’t really worked hard to market any of the others. So, no dollars, and just a few clicks over the years.

Chitika is a pay-per-click program like Adsense that offers ads that kind of look like Adsense. Something else they offer you is the opportunity to have them set up to only show to people who come to your site via search engines, where if people click on those ads you earn more money, but you supposedly won’t upset your normal visitors by seeing those ads.

I have made $6.16 through 3 years with the program. I finally discontinued using it because it just seemed like it wasn’t going to get the job done. I had it on 3 different websites over the years, and that’s all I’ve made; not impressive is it? I still have it on one of my websites, and in the last 30 days I made a penny; sigh…

Bidvertiser is also a pay per click program with ads that look like Adsense. As you’re noticing, there are programs that mimic the look of Adsense if you’re ever banned, and it’s possible that you might be able to make some money from it if you set it up that way. If I thought those ads would work on this blog, where I did run it once, I’d have it up since Google banned Adsense from it. However, over the years I’ve only made 85 cents total, and I’m presently running it on my finance blog.

The final program I’m going to talk about today is much different than the others. Voxant Newsroom is basically a video of whatever type of news stories you want to show on your blog or website. If someone clicks on it to watch the video, you earn money. I had thought this would be a great addition to my finance blog so I ran it there for about 6 months. I made 3 cents, and that was that. However, I want you to see what it looks like, so I created a news feed below, which is local Syracuse NY news from one of our local stations.

It’s possible that if it’s put in the right place you might be able to make some money from it. Though I haven’t used this in a very long time, it’s possible that I might add it to one of my other sites, even this one, one day.
 

Affiliates

Affiliate Programs Iā€™m Connected With ā€“ Part Three

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Hi Y’all. We’re talking affiliate programs that I’ve used and tried to make money with over the years in these last few posts. We’ve had part one and part two and now we move to part three; hold on to your seats.

Clickbank is one affiliate programs I’ve never specifically written about, hence no link to an article I’ve written. Clickbank is a program that you see a lot of big time internet marketers talking about all the time. They say they create programs, then set it up with Clickbank to help them market their products by allowing us to find products on their site to market, as publishers with their landing pages. There are some nice products there, but a lot of junk as well I have to say. I did purchase one product from them that I liked, 20 Ways To Make $100 Per Day Online, that I thought was pretty good and I marketed that thing for a long time on this blog.

And this is where things fall apart for me. According to them, I’ve never had any clicks on any of the products I’ve marketed from them, and I’ve never made a single dollar. I find that hard to believe, but it’s why I decided a long time ago I wasn’t going to market anything else they offered except for the book I’ve given the link to above. A month ago I finally removed that product from my sidebar as well; I guess just having me think it was great didn’t translate to anyone else. But over 5 years I haven’t been credited with a single sale. Maybe others have had better success than me; can’t tell you.

Solutions Medical is an affiliate program that I hooked up with to market medical billing books through my medical billing site, which I talked about on the part one post. Unfortunately, it’s another affiliate I’ve never made a single dollar from, although they do show some clicks here and there.

TTZ Media is an interesting little affiliate program in that it can highlight certain types of ads that you can put wherever and the products will rotate. You can pick one product or many products and change colors as you want to. Below is an example of the types of ads you can create:

According to TTZ, I’ve had almost 2,000 clicks over the years, but I’ve never made a single sale. Once again, it’s a program that I didn’t use a lot, but did have it on some of my other sites here and there, as well as popping it into a blog post every once in awhile. So, once again, I can’t tell you how well they pay or what payments are like. I can see how this might work for some people, but it’s never worked for me.

J-V Network is a lot like Clickbank. What you do is look through the tons of offers they have and sign up to help promote and market that program. I actually did a test with something called Tweet My Blog, which I had on this blog as the first program I used to send my blog posts to Twitter, which was neat except I couldn’t get rid of its marketing on my blog itself. That is, if anyone clicked on the link in Twitter they came to the blog and had a large banner ad at the top of the blog that obscured even the title of this blog.

Anyway, I had that post above and I heard from 3 people who said they’d added it to their blogs as well. When I went to check my stats it didn’t show I’d had any clicks, which of course means it showed me as not making any money from those sales. That was disappointing and I wrote them, but never heard a single thing back. I’ve never gone back to try it again, and I’m not sure I will. I do still get email every once in awhile from someone that’s created a new product that they’d like help marketing, but I’m just not in the mood for now.

There you go, 4 more affiliate programs I’ve dealt with. And there’s still more coming; well, you asked. šŸ™‚
 

Affiliates

Affiliate Programs Iā€™m Connected With ā€“ Part Two

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Obviously if this is part two, then there was a part one, which I hope you check out. Last time I mentioned 3 affiliate programs I’m a part of; here are some more. And, just to remind you, the links are to articles on this blog and not to the sites themselves, but there are links to those sites on some of those other articles.

Commission Junction is probably the second best known affiliate program I use, but it’s also been the diciest. I can’t say I’ve had great success with it, but it’s given me some of the best options for finding products and links to market to date. If you notice at the top there I have banner ads, and those are from CJ, as I call them sometimes. They rotate, so if you go to a page more than once you’ll see different ads, up to 5.

The best thing about them isn’t the fact that they have lots of different sizes and literally a couple thousand affiliates. The best thing about them is that they allow you to pop up specific products, with a template that’s formatted along with a “buy” button, which I kind of stole as the template for my books there to the left. The first three years of this blog had me adding a product or link of some kind at the end of every post, but I gave that up at the beginning of the year. Sometimes I pop a product in where my image resides. I use products on some of my other websites instead now.

I can say I’ve made money, but it’s been kind of iffy. I’ve talked about the problems I’ve had with some Commission Junction affiliates, which is irritating because I deserve to be paid. They don’t always support the publishers, which is us, and that’s depressing. But I have made some money here and there, to the tune of probably $400 over 3 1/2 years. Not great if you ask me, but more than some other affiliates. I’ve actually made more, but I’m not counting those affiliates that haven’t paid me.

Google Affiliate Network is Google’s version of CJ, with fewer advertisers but they’re getting bigger. Over the years I’ve made some sales, but not tons. That’s probably my fault as I haven’t used them as much as CJ except for Barnes & Noble, who just recently left them. The best thing about GAN, as I sometimes refer to them, is that if you have Adsense money and make sales with this program, it counts towards your monetary total, and thus you get to your thresholds for getting paid quicker.

The bad thing about Google Affiliate Network is that, like CJ, they don’t support the publishers. Instead, they tell you that you have to work directly with the companies, which failed me when Finish Line refused to pay me my commission, then dropped me because they said I didn’t make enough sales. This seems to be a major failing with some of these affiliate networks; they put a lot of affiliates together, but can’t make any of them treat you right. I’ve probably only made $200 in total over a 4-year period, most of that from the sale of books and DVDs.

The final affiliate network I’m going to mention is Linkshare. They’re like the other two networks I’ve already mentioned, the newest one, and they’re starting to add more companies to the mix. They’re the company that Barnes & Noble just moved to, and one of my other former affiliates also moved to. That might mean that Linkshare is the up and coming affiliate network for everyone, or that the terms are better for these companies.

The problem here is that I’ve yet to see a single sale from any of my affiliates, although once again I have to say I think this is probably my fault. Initially I only belonged to 5 programs and haven’t marketed them all that often, and now I’m only up to 9 programs. However, with the move of B&N and the fact that I like mentioning books and movies and thus putting links into some of my posts (in case y’all don’t remember, if you see a blue link that’s an affiliate link of some kind), and I do tend to sell some books and DVDs here and there, I hope that I’ll start making a sale or two over there. Because I haven’t made any sales I can’t say how well they pay.

Something you have to know for all of these is that the companies you link to will kill those links without your knowledge and, unless you’re always checking your old blog pages or your websites, you’ll have no idea unless someone notices one of your pages looking weird and contacts you about it. That’s kind of depressing, as I’ve seen many things go missing from older pages, but there’s really nothing you can do about that.

Three more down, and lots more to come.
 

Affiliates

Affiliate Programs I’m Connected With – Part One

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There’s a young woman (I’m assuming she’s young) that’s been asking me a lot of questions lately about different affiliate programs. I’ve realized that other than the couple that have irritated me lately I haven’t really written about many of them in a long time. I figured that over the next few posts I would talk about some of the affiliate programs I’m a part of and how they do for me; I hear a voice saying “finally he’s talking about making money online”.

I’m going to start by talking about the affiliate program that’s done the best for me, that being Google Adsense. It’s what they call a PPC (pay-per-click) program, which of course means if people click on the ad then you make money. And the more niched you are the more money you can possibly make if you pick the right niche.

My Adsense income has been steadily going up month after month, albeit slowly. If everything holds steady I will break $300 this month for the first time ever. Man, that’s been a long time coming, and I’m happy about it. The truth is that I make most of the money on one site, my medical billing information site, and since all the content is geared towards medical billing issues, it’s will niched because those folks pay well for clicks.

My second best paying affiliate program is Infolinks, and once again I make most of my cash from it on that same medical billing site. I’m averaging close to $40 a month from Infolinks, which is pretty amazing because the first couple of years I had it I didn’t make $40. Actually, both of these affiliate programs have proven that if you can get a site with even moderate consistent traffic you can do well, because that site doesn’t get the kind of traffic this site gets.

Another affiliate program I have that I’ve made almost no money from is Kontera. It’s like Infolinks, but for some reason when I had it on two of my other sites it generated nothing. At one point I did some split testing on my medical billing site with it and Infolinks, and Infolinks won hands down; wish I could tell you why.

Even though I’ve linked to my own articles on the last two affiliates, if you don’t go check those out I’ll tell you that these are those affiliate programs where you go to a page and you see these double lined words every once in a while, and if you hover over them you’ll see a pop-up window like conversation bubbles in comic strips.

There’s the start; stick around for the next round of affiliates.