How To Find Profitable Affiliate Programs – And How To Display Them On Your Blog

Today I will answer two questions from Larry Roberts.

#1. Describe ways to identify profitable affiliate programs related to your topic.

1. Adsense

It may not strictly fall under affiliate programs, but I have found Adsense to be very profitable. The trick is not to splash it all over your blog or website. I won’t say any more about Adsense here, because it could take up a whole post by itself.

2. Amazon Associates

I like the Amazon Associates program for any kind of blog. Their links are easy to set up, and they have a wealth of different types of products on their site. They don’t just have books anymore.

Books are good, though. I often link to books that have further information on the subject being discussed. Recommending books doesn’t look “spammy”. (Besides, I love books.)

Also, with Amazon links, people may not buy what you are linking to, but if they buy something else on the site, you still get credit for the sale.

3. Clickbank

Clickbank is my biggest earner after Adsense. Sometimes they are even better than Adsense. They sell only digital products, such as ebooks and videos. They recently added a recurring payment option, so that they can start to be used for membership sites.

If you recommend a Clickbank product, it must be related to your site, or it will not sell anything. Also, it works a lot better if you actually purchase the product, so that you can recommend or review it intelligently. An honest recommendation by someone who is familiar with the product works a lot better than just throwing a link on your site.

To find a product related to your site, you can do a search of the Clickbank marketplace, but sometimes the search will not find everything. Depending on your topic, you may do better by just browsing through the categories.

You can also look at the Adsense ads appearing on your site. A lot of them may actually be people promoting Clickbank products. Don’t click the ads on your site! Just type the URL into another window and look at the site that way. You might be able to get some hints about what to promote.

A great thing about Clickbank products is that you usually get paid a commission in the 40-60% range. So you can get $20 at a time, instead of a few cents per Adsense click. Of course, you don’t get paid unless the person actually purchases something, so your Clickbank sales are a lot further apart than your Adsense clicks.

It seems to be seasonal too, depending on your topic. I was doing a lot better with Clickbank in the Spring than now in the Summer. Well, who wants to stay inside reading ebooks in the summertime?

4. Large Affiliate Networks

Two large affiliate networks that I use occasionally are Commission Junction and Linkshare. Once you join one of these networks, they have many companies in different areas that you can promote. Sometimes this is automatic, but some companies want to approve you before you start promoting them.

I have not earned a lot of money from these, but it is mostly due to my laziness in searching for the appropriate programs to promote. They both have a search function so that you can find companies related to your topic.

5. Finding Little Known Programs Can Be Very Profitable

Just about everyone who has been in affiliate marketing for a while knows about the above programs. So you can do quite well by finding some program that not everyone knows about. This will make your site a lot more unique and interesting.

Here are some tips to help you find these programs:

• Do a search on Google for your keywords +affiliate. This will bring up a list of affiliate programs for your topic. Some companies have their own affiliate programs, and this is the only way to find them. I have found some very good programs this way.
• See what other people are promoting. Do a search for your keywords on Google. This time look at the Adwords ads. A lot of those ads could be promoting affiliate programs.

  If you look at the ads for a few weeks and keep seeing the same ones, those are probably the profitable programs.

• Look at your competitors’ sites. See what programs they are promoting. Keep checking back to see if they keep promoting the same ones – again, those are probably profitable ones.

6. Keep Testing

Once you find some affiliate programs, the only way to really know if they will be profitable for you is to test them. Leave them on your site for at least a week – more if you don’t get many visitors.

You don’t always know what program will “click” with your blog readers. It can be very different for different types of blogs. Even in one subject area, one blog could be focused more on products and another focused on entertainment, and different programs could succeed on each one.

Also, most programs have a lot of links to choose from – banners, text links, etc. Test different kinds of ads and links. As a general rule, text links seem to work better than banners, but there are always exceptions, so you need to test it on your site.

Test different places on your site to place the ads or links. Test different descriptions that you use to refer to them. Test everything you can think of.

It would be a good idea to write down what you have tested and the results. I did not do this, but I often wish I had.

#2. Should the affiliate programs and links flow from the topic of your post, the other way around, or a combination of both?

I believe you are asking whether you should write a blog post first and then find an affiliate program to link to, or whether you should find an affiliate program first, and then write a blog post about a related topic.

I think either one can work, and here are my thoughts on each:

1. Writing The Blog Post First

I tend to blog about what I am interested in, and then find the affiliate programs. In general I don’t find a product specific to a blog post. I find products that readers of my general subject area might like, and then promote them in various places on the blog.

In this case, I don’t mention the product in the blog post itself (unless the post is a review of the product).

I know that the conventional wisdom is that you should link to the products in the body of the post, but in the past that has seemed spammy. I think the reason it seemed spammy is that I did not really use the product myself. I don’t use ebooks about dog training, so I don’t feel comfortable pretending that I do.

Instead, I would put a link at the end of the article saying something like, “for more information about dog training… etc.”. (I used less boring wording, but I am not giving away all my secrets . Well ok – one hint – I added a photo for interest.) This seemed to work well.

It is different if I do use the product. Then I would have no trouble linking to it from within the post.

2. Finding the Affiliate Product First

Once in a while, I do find the product first, and then do a blog post about it. Two of the most successful promotions of this kind on my dog blog have been a post about Halloween costumes for dogs, with affiliate links and pictures of dog costumes, and a post about edible dog cards (the cards are printed on rawhide for the dogs to enjoy ).

I liked these because they were fun and interesting to readers even if they didn’t want to purchase the items. I don’t like to beat my readers over the head with products to buy and ads to click. I try to have an enjoyable site first, and then add in some useful or interesting products.

I am not saying you should not sell or recommend stuff on your site, or put up ads. On the contrary, I think it is unrealistic for readers to expect bloggers to blog for free, without getting paid somehow. After all, magazines and newspapers carry ads too.

I am just saying you should blend everything together into a nice looking and enjoyable mix, not a spammy looking site.