Affiliate your website... official MoneySavingExpert.com discussion

There are also sites like Affilipark that allow you to create affiliate shops for free, all you have to do is buy a domain name and point at it your shop. I guess the hard bit is getting people to visit your shop and click through on the products...

Passiveincomelife wrote: »

Hi

I'm new to this forum and probably that explains why I'm having difficulty accessing new posts on boost your income. Some of the posts and comments I have read so far dated back to 2007. Please HELP!

You've probably got your settings set to show the oldest first, it used to be the default setting for new accounts, and may still be.

Go into your user control panel and hit the Edit Options link on the left. Then scroll down to the Thread Display Options section and make sure it is showing threads 'Linear - Newest First'

What do you mean by "low traffic". If you have less than 100 visitors a day you are going to struggle to make enough to pay your costs even. If you want to earn a decent affiliate income, you need to be aiming to get 1000 visitors a day.

If you don't have these levels yet or don't know what steps to take to make sure you will have them once your site matures then I would not be worrying about other income sources as there simply won't be the traffic to generate anything from it.

Give me a shout if you need any tips on increasing traffic - without knowing what you mean by "low" it is hard to know whether you consider 20 a day low or 2000 a day - it's all relative in the end!;)

Ah right I see - you are going for the "hundreds of blogs, each making a quid a day" model long term then?

I couldn't get my head round managing so many different sites so I have chosen to have less (static) sites with much more content. My first site took me about 3 months to get to 100 visitors a day. This included only working on it outside my full time job, learning enough html from scratch to code the pages the way i wanted and writing all the content.

It's growing nicely and I think long term I can see my 3 current sites replacing my full time income. It won't happen overnight though but I'm having fun!

Back to your original question about PPC services other than adsense. You could try chikita, kontera, infolinks or for pay per impression, the adify network.

I think with your current traffic you will be disappointed with them though.

The main thing to remember about blogs (or any other website for that matter) is that they are not like Field of Dreams - you know, "build it and they will come."

They almost certainly will not come, unless you are very choosey about what you write about. For example, if you write a chatty blog and talk about your hols, you might have a post called, "My Vacation in Tenerife."

A quick perusal shows an okay CPC for "vacation in tenerife" of £0.88. Problem is, there are only 12 monthly global searches for that phrase! Nobody will visit. If, instead, you wrote a post about "My Holidays in Tenerife" you instantly raise your CPC to £1.17 (but remember CPC isn't the amount YOU get for each click; it's the amount the advertiser is paying Google. You get a percentage of this). Importantly though, you also raise the global monthly searches from 12 up to 3600. So your potential per month for this phrase is about £20 - *IF* you can get to number 1 in Google for it.

Short answer: you probably won't ever get to #1 in G for it, (and there are tons of sponsored ads and others before you reach the actual SERPs listings) and many of the top sites are PR4, one of them (as I write this) with over a thousand backlinks to its page about "holidays in tenerife". You'd also have to beat Thomson Holidays at #3 so, in this example, I wouldn't be building a site or page about that subject - too difficult.

But hey, there are billions of search phrases to rummage through - I should know; I snout my way through thousands a day looking for web truffles!

For info, a couple of good tools are:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool (just google it, not sure we can put links in the forum) - to find keywords and their volumes and CPCs
SEO For Firefox extension (again, google it - I think it's still free) - to quickly assess competition (or you could buy something like Market Samurai).

But as Mismax said, visitor volumes are key to this - and if you are trying to make a few extra bucks, I'd steer clear of web2.0 or "social" traffic per se; it's not totally bad, but the people who are looking to spend money with a little urgency are those who arrive via the search engines (not via a Facebook or Twitter link). And if you use Amazon Associates as well as Adsense, remember their cookie only lasts a day, so you'll need that "itchy credit card" traffic, rather than "maybe tomorrow people".