Leading Affiliate Programs
Affiliate programs can be a lucrative way to add income-generating possibilities to your websites. Google AdSense is a quick and easy way to get started with Advertising on your site, but are inherently limited by the number of people that are coming to your site and then clicking through the ads.
Affiliate relationships, on the other hand, can offer much higher returns on a per-visitor basis (with higher payouts), and as a bonus, can also provide you with topics to blog about!
So how do you get started? Luckily, there are a number of companies that have created an aggregated affiliate marketplace, bringing advertisers and publishers together and managing all the tracking, auditing, management and financial transactions so you can concentrate on creating and maintaining a quality site that will attract users.
I signed up with three affiliate sites today - Commission Junction, Link Share and ShareaSale - and quickly went through their merchants and applied for the affiliate programs. There are a great variety of merchants available, from financial services to photo sharing to baby supplies. A few of the Affiliate programs for which I was accepted included Sony, Philips, BlockBuster, CinemaNow.com, Babies Online, Stamps.com, Baby Universe and Netflix.
Some of the programs automatically approve you, others review applications by hand, and may accept you (or not accept you) if your site meets their traffic ideals, subject area, and does not contain offensive material. Interestingly enough, I was denied by most of the financial services programs, although I hope to be able to reapply once my blogs have gained in traffic, popularity and page rank.
