I have been using CJ for a while now, and haven't earned anything What is the best way of starting to use affiliate programs? The niche is basically iPod related modding. With a few thousand visits a day.
It's just a case of trial and error and seeing what performs well with your traffic. You don't have to go with only using large affiliate networks, there are many individual affiliate programs to choose from.
What is the traffic you are having? What is your niche? How many clicks you sent to CJ? CJ needs quality, targetted traffic. The age, niche, country etc. matters. Even with good traffic dont expect more than 1-2 conversions per 100 clicks. Your post just doesnt have any basic info needed to give an advice. Probably you need a lot more attention to detail to make money from any aff. program.
Not for nothing.... but had you read at least the initial post you would notice he is using CJ without much luck....... OP try to run several different affiliate offers on your site, I just sold and iphone site with 6 programs and have an ipod site running 5 or 6 as well
I would say some credit card ads might be nice in a store area for say buying ipods. That way the consumer can get a card to pay for an ipod if needed.
One fine day I checked my CJ account. There it was, after a year of intermittent affiliate product promotion on my blogs - I finally got something. I think its the combination of promoting by reviewing the product in your blog (with rich keywords in text) and attention to good text banner placements.
DJD, the cool thing about CJ is that they have a thousand publishers with tens of thousands of products to market. Do a search for high EPC, go to Google and see how competitive the market is and pick a hot product with decent but not too much competition.
This is just what I do, it doesn't mean it will work for you. Set up a site that looks like an ecommerce store, use Drupal or OSCommerce. Take products from CJ, put them into your store, modify it slightly to include affiliate links and take out the buy buttons etc (or to give you a little secret, change the buy now button to send customers to the affiliate link. Just keep adding products and building links, maybe let people review products or write your own reviews for those products. works for me everytime if you know how to pick products.
You will have to try to see what are working for you. This is an ongoing process. For IPod site, electronics and music download might work.
With CJ, you may want to research where your majority of traffic is coming from and join ffers geared toward your niche based on where your visitors come from. Also, make your site interesting and add content that makes your visitors want to "buy" at your site.