I have a fairly popular blog that gets approximately 1.5m visitors (not visits) per month, mainly from North America and the UK. I have noticed that the majority of people here promote affiliate programs through search engine keywords and landing pages. Is there space for a site like mine to use affiliate links next to (and inside) articles? I'm interested in finding out how to best integrate the links into the site and content as well. Has anyone used affiliate programs on a large site and been successful?
it would totally depend on the niche of your site, and how you present the affiliate products / services in the articles, for example if your site was based on health products and you had say, an article on weight loss - integrating the product from an affiliate site (cj.com?) within the article would mean the user has something to relate the article to. In this scenario the user was looking for information on a certain niche (weight loss) found the information within your article via SEO and then proceeded to purchase a product that was recommended via that article. The majority of the time its finding the correct people to target with products, if you have an active site, promoting affiliate products should be pretty straight forward if you stick to your same niche + most importantly the content people are looking for.
Do what a lot of pro-bloggers do: Make occasional (once a week or month) posts on your blog and act natural promoting a product. Look at shoemoney promoting Omaha Beef and making $$$ - http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/12/17/give-nebraska-beef-for-xmas/ Include a cloaked affiliate link Profit!
If you are getting that much traffic, then I would give it ago. If you don't give it ago, then you would never know how it would have performed for you.
NeverblueAds has some great campaigns going on. Their account managers are friendly and seem to know what they are talking about so you may want to give them a shot. p.s. the link above is an affiliate link, their direct url is at www.neverblueads.cm