Shai gives some good tips on hope to Make The Most Out of Affiliate Programs:

‘1) Provide good reasons for readers and visitors to keep coming back to your site where you have your affiliate links. Or, if you primarily promote via email, make sure that you give readers and subscribers a lot of reasons to keep opening and reading your emails. It’s just so much easier to delete things nowadays! Just deliver great content, provide user interaction, come up with clever contests… the possibilities are endless.

2) Maximise your visibility. Working on your site’s promotions and SEO is important. If you can’t do it yourself, or if you have limited knowledge of search engine optimisation (SEO), then make sure that you get advice from people who know more than you do on this matter. Always remember that the more people who find your site, the more chances you have in showing your affiliate products….’

One tip I’d add to her great list is to keep your affiliate programs as relevant to your blog’s content as possible.

The success of Adsense contextual text links is that they ads usually match the content of the site so well. At times you’ll be reading about a particular product and then see an ad for it – the naturally thing to do is click.

Often bloggers don’t take this same principle and put it into practice with their affiliate programs. They just leave a generic button on their side bar and don’t make any effort into increasing its relevancy to their site.

The best performance I’ve ever had from an affiliate program is when I’ve managed to be blogging about something and then find an affiliate program that matches it well and have placed links to it inside or at the end of the content (with appropriate disclosure statements). Perhaps the easiest program to use with this strategy is Amazon which has so many products that can be linked via picture or text deep within your site and not just on your sidebar.

For instance on my digicam site I have links to the actual products that I write about on many of my posts on cameras. This does take some effort to set up but is well worth it.

Regular readers will notice I’ve added two small banner ads at the top of this blog – one for AllPosters and the other for LinkShare.

I do this for two reasons which I will share with you:

1. I have used both of these programs to help monetize a number of my blogs. They are affiliate programs that can be quite effective depending upon the topic of your blog.

2. The banner ads above are affiliate links themselves for these programs and will earn me a small commission if you follow them, sign up and start using the programs.

There is no pressure for you to use the programs but if you do I hope they are as successful for you as they have been for me (and more).

Each one is suitable for different topics of sites. They will not be suitable for every blog.

The AllPosters affiliate program is excellent for blogs on people and personalities, its quite good for blogs on sport, music, movies, tv shows etc. I’ve only started using the program this past month but already am seeing that its one of the better performing affiliate programs that I’ve experimented with.

The LinkShare program has a pretty wide range of affiliate programs involved in it which would suit many of the topics that I know readers of this site write about. They have literally hundreds (if not thousands) of partners that offer a range of different products and services for you to link to.

If you’re looking for a way to increase your Amazon affiliate sales you might like to check out AmazonAds – a textual ad system that puts Amazon Ads on your pages in a similar format to the way Google serves Adsense ads to your blog. I’m yet to use the program (I’ve signed up and will test it shortly) but it looks like a fairly professional package – and as far as I can see its free.

They let you customize the ads your serve to your site but you don’t have complete control over which ads will and won’t be served (all you can do is select if you want them to be ‘books’, ‘electronics’, ‘apparel’ etc). So its a basic system – but might suit some situations quite well – especially if you set them up as alternate ads for your Google ads.

They describe the system as follows:

‘AmazonAds is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display Amazon unobtrusive product ads on their website’s content pages and earn money.

The ads can be categorized by Channels (Products Category) and so you can display only “Electronics” or “Books” ad and so are always related to what you want your users to looking for on your site. You’ll finally have a way to both monetize and enhance your content pages. AmazonAds is the program that can give you amazon product revenue from each page on your website—with a minimal investment in time and no additional resources.’

Read more at AmazonAds – Because Simplicity is the key

Update: Just had an email from AmazonAds who have just announced that you can now nominate a keyword to give the ads a topic to draw ads upon. Its not true contextual advertising (ie it doesn’t determine what to serve ads for based on what is on your blog) which is good for Adsense users as it means you can use it in conjunction with that program – you simply nominate a subject and home the system will find an appropriate ad for it.

It looks like Six Apart are moving toward an affiliate program where people recommending Movable Type will get a commission from anyone buying a license.

‘Many of you recommend Movable Type as the weblog platform of choice to your customers or clients. With our new reseller licenses, you’ll be able to make money each time you sell a copy of Movable Type. We’re planning to offer generous commissions for all of you who offer software and services on top of the Movable Type platform.’

There is no ETA on when the program will go live yet.

Source: Six Apart Professional Network Overview

John Battelle also has a great column over at Technology Review that puts forward an idea called Publisher Driven Advertising (PDA). It is an alternative to the traditional approach to advertising where advertisers hold much of the power in the relationship between audience, publisher and advertiser. John argues that with the interactivity of the internet that an alternative economy is emerging that rebalances where the power lies in this interaction.

Of course the recent trend in online ads has gone to pay-per-click (PPC) which John argues is the first step to moving to a PDA economy. PPC represents a significant shift where ‘the advertiser pays only when the ad performs—when someone clicks on the ad itself. Second, paid search networks “disaggregate” advertisers from publishers—that is, advertisers no longer purchase space on the publisher’s site but instead pay for keywords.’

Battelle takes PPC a step further and suggests that the next move to PDA could be something like:

‘Next, imagine that, instead of buying into PPC networks or specific sites, advertisers release their ads onto the Internet….

[Read more...]

Here is an interesting interview with Shawn Collins (an affiliate program manager) on the topic of RSS & Blogs and Affiliate Marketing.

‘Since it’s increasingly challenging to reach the inbox of affiliates, with Spam filters, ISP black lists, abandoned email addresses, etc., I think RSS will emerge as the preferred tool for communicating with affiliates….

It makes all the sense in the world for affiliate programs to pursue and place increased value on blogs as affiliates. In general, contextual placement of ads is the best way to make money in affiliate marketing, especially if an affiliate has unique content, and they integrate text links into their content (i.e. making every instance of the word book link through an Amazon affiliate link).’

PS: Don’t know what Affiliate Marketing is? Read What is Affiliate Marketing?