I've been involved in affiliate programs since 1998. I've never have had much success with them. I've tried several different places, Commission Junction, Amazon.com Program, and Linkshare.com. I've also tried doing stuff through clickbank and that didn't work either. My question to people who are doing well with affiliate programs. What works the best. Do you find it's better to have many products on your site. Is it better to have just a few. I have people click through but they seldom buy anything. Any tips would be appreciated.
My best (read "only") decent affiliate link is one right in the text that links to an example of what the page is about. Nobody seems to buy through banners and standalone ads (though they will click them). But that one text link in the body of the page has sold five of that item the last month. Not sure if that is success, but for my little 30-visitor-a-day site, it's a pretty good ratio. So, I'd say a few links strongly relevant to the page, and directly recommended in the content. Quantity is not quality here.
Interesting. I've used clickbank for a while now. My site is relatively new, and I've got some standalone links and banners. As geej says, a few people click, but no one buys. I'll have to try the inline text links. A few months ago I tried using AdWords to drive people to the affiliate link. Interestingly enough, this actually worked. A few days I was getting up to a one in ten conversion ratio. I guess maybe when people are searching google they're more likely to click on something they're actually interested in, rather than something that just happens to catch their eye.
I think it's far better to focus on a topic and develop your affiliate strategy around it. The more you understand about any given field of knowledge the more capable of selling something you will be. And yes, many people searching google are actually interested in buying something, appart from that they tend to feel google's results/ads are more trustworthy than your banners/ads/links/whatever.
What works for me is to stay within the same theme. I have an Internet marketing blog and I coach people on how to market online. In addition to my services, I offer affiliate products like web hosting, content management systems, shopping carts, web conferencing systems, auto responders, etc. Things my customers and newsletter readers will need anyway. I avoid any other affiliates that don't fit this product line. Works well - about 1/3 of my income comes from these. Garland Coulson, "The E-Business Tutor" Market while you surf! Creator of the FREE Traffic and Research Toolbar for FireFox and Internet Explorer http://www.freetrafficbar.com
I don't get much traffic to my site so my sales are very little. It's a travel site so the one that works best for me is a search for flights (banner). It's the only 1 that gets poeple interested, the rest do nothing for me.
What about Amazon. I thought about using Amazon affiliate ads for a while, then I realized that if I ever did manage to sell a book on Amazon, it would probably end up making me about 50 cents. Let's think about that. Bye bye Amazon.
build an opt-in list and send out quality info such as articles with affiliate links embedded in them (like Acer said), once you've got 3,000 subscribers the rest should be a breeze