I run a pretty large website -- forum based -- that does pretty good traffic (approx 4 million visits per month). I use a variety of programs to earn money from the site. Between Google Adsense, CafePress, Amazon and two search type links to CJ advertisers I earn about $1,000 a month. My niche is one that could generate a good deal of business in my industry (a popular electric guitar model) I know that lots of folks use my site to make buying decisions and there is a lot of buying that goes on from my members. Commission Junction looks to me like it would offer perfect opportunities to have a online "store" set up to sell the products of my niche. However, I find that, in general, CJ is not completely intuitive to use. I feel pretty lost when trying to use it. Currently, I have a CJ link to a search generated page for items available in my niche on Ebay. And I have one major CJ guitar advertiser link set up on my pages with a search window to search for products with that advertiser. In really good months I can do $500 a month in CJ commissions with just these two links. But most months are about $150 to $200. Amazon only brings in about $20 a month and CafePress (selling branded items from the site) brings in about $150 a month. Google Adsense brings in about $600 a month. I guess this is "OK" in terms of income, but I'd like to know how to step this up. I've contacted my main CJ advertiser and asked for help but they said they couldn't provide any. Are there consultants that can help me do a better job of using these monetization tools like CJ to increase my monthly income? I see websites like mine with whole "stores" set up for people to buy every kind of site-related products. I assume they are using some kind of application or web-service to do this. But I don't even know what to search for or look for. Maybe there are packaged applications, or a really good conference that I could go to to learn the ins and outs? There must be some gurus on this stuff somewhere. Can the folks here give me some help to get me started in the right direction on this? I'm looking for suggestions of where to turn to, what to look for or even what to call what I'm looking for to do an effective Google search for help. Thanks
You might be better off searching for affiliate program for guitars. Some might have store you can set up for your site.
I've contacted all the big players, they all use CJ and none of them have any kind of store application that can be branded and used in my site. Thanks
Adsense is one of the best affiliate programs for forums, I suppose. You can also try some cpa networks to promote some free trial offers that have very high payout rate. (Some of them are even 2000%!)