Affiliate Programs and More – SEO

This article is mostly for domainers who are still learning to develop outside of Adsense. A week or so ago I posted about the basic elements required to have a $2 million property online broken down in number of leads / income generated per day.

As we all know Adsense and other forms of PPC have declined over the past year but developers who have real content with a mix of other revenue sources have continued to see growth in both impressions and revenue.

First of all you need to understand your market. Whether it’s the flower expert / domainer combo Domain Shane who knows more about a Lilly than all of us combined or Morgan Linton’s deep motivation to inspire us and learn about every single topic in this world to conquer the web you also need to understand your limitations and get focused.

(Morgan has no limitations so like a young Jedi he may just surpass you all)

As domainers many people own hundreds if not thousands of names which all sound cool and quite likely the owners know something about the industry but too often when you look at your portfolio you probably feel like jack of all trades and master of NONE – this is human nature – Einstein’s are very few and far between.

The first rule of thumb is define what you are developing or what you WANT to learn about. Passion comes from having love of a topic – SUCCESS comes when you have time to focus on that SINGLE Passion.

This does not mean you can’t succeed at a wide range of things but for each one you need to commit the time. For new developers you need to take the time to focus on one project, the second will be easier and so forth – but without committing time to learn you might as well just stick to flipping domains.

How to find other Revenue Possibilities outside of Adsense?

SEARCH THE ORGANIC and PAID LISTINGS for sites without brand names.

If you’re looking for information on car insurance then odds are Allstate.com is not going to have examples of affiliate programs as they are only interested in selling their own products. Do a Google search for your industry’s main keywords and find popular sites that have advertising realted services you think will match your content.

Although Allstate may not have what you’re looking for a site like 123ABCInsurance.com (random URL) quite likely has an affiliate relationship with a publisher of car insurance ads if they are ranked in the first page or showing in the Adwords ads. This method can be used in any category for finding popular affiliate programs.

In fact, I would say that a LARGE percentage of advertisiers are still playing the PPC arbitrage game with single revenue coming from affiliate programs so click on the Adwords ads you see to find more examples and sources of who people are using to earn income outside Adsense.

THINK ABOUT AD PLACEMENT BEFORE DESIGINING

A lot of first time developers don’t really think about incorporating ad placements other than a 160×600 or 300×250 block from Adsense however quite a number of standard sizes exist.

http://www.iab.net/iab_products_and_industry_services/1421/1443/1452

This is a link to all the standard online media sizes as coded by the Online Advertising industry (yes, there is one – quite likely more popualr than any domainer group – sorry ICA

Most affiliate programs will provide custom graphic work for your website if you show any kind of volume so do not limit the design just to the popular 2 sizes most people use with Adsense – leave your design open for change.

The lesson here is to contact and call companies direct about affiliate programs. Not only will you sometimes score a higher payout but also get the custom content you need instead of being subject to just what the affiliate manager uploaded to a site like Commission Junction.

UNDERSTAND WHAT AFFILIATE PROGRAMS LOOK LIKE

Affiliate programs are more than just links.

Take unemployment.com – one of the great sites owned by one of the masters of industry in the domain space who I will leave nameless. At first you may think the ad to the left for Stimulus Grants is an ad served by Adsense or something similar but its not. When you click on it you end up at this page

http://www.stimulusgrantapproval.com/

and … remember these words ….

Always scroll down to the bottom of any lead generating page in your industry.

As you can see here there is an affiliate program for grants which seems to provide some really great high quality images for your website as well. I’m not familiar with this program but I do know grant leads pay well and having less Adsense will certainly help with SEO in the long run.

Adsense was never launched with the intention for people to create sites made for Adsense with 3 or 5 units of ads and 100 words of content in total. It was created for additional revenue for CONTENT publishers to earn revenue. You are not a content publisher with a made for Adsense site – you are a spammer and Google will catch up to you, mark my words. Remember, Google’s first and foremost goal is to reward relevant, original and fresh content in the SEO rankings.  FRESH is not a one pager that was put up a year ago.

Some of the BEST Affiliate Programs

Insurance

SureHits.com – http://www.surehits.com/

Insurance.com – http://www.insurance.com/about-us/affiliate-program.aspx

eHealthInsurance.com – http://www.ehealthinsurance.com/about-ehealth/affiliate-program

HealthInsurance.com – http://healthinsurance.com/hi/Affiliates/Overview.aspx

Weight Loss

Jillian Michael’s through Linkshare or quite possibly direct – remember, always call and ask them direct if you are a publisher with good and consistent traffic.

http://www.amwso.com/jillianmichaels.php

up to $55 a sign up (tiered schedule)

Mortgage

LeadPoint – www.leadpoint.com – These guys are the best. Not only do some of the most popular mortgage sites around use them (such as mortgageloan.com and leadsteps.com) but they have a number of options such as URL forwarding, complete custom forms, direct form post and more. Payouts are WEEKLY !!!!

Quinstreet.com – These guys are one of the largest marketers in the world yet many people reading this probably don’t know who they are except they paid a $20 million + sticker for Insure.com. Visit this page and speak with them – they do a lot more than mortgage.

http://www.quinstreet.com/who_we_are

HOTELS & TRAVEL

Expedia.com – many of the big travel sites use a simple expedia affiliation located direct at ian.com or expediaaffiliate.com – For example, take a look at londonhotels.com or most all of Federated Travel’s hotel domains to see how one could use this code.

Booking.com – probably the biggest affiliate provider to hotel publishers outside of the USA with still a super strong presence in the USA. One example of a custom display of thier affiliate code can be found on LasVegasHotels.com

OTHER LEADS

LeadPile is pretty good from what I’ve heard (have no experience with them). What I have seen is a lot of thier form code is iFrame stuff and I’m not a fan of iFrame’s for anything.

FOREX

I know a couple people who use the eForex affiliate program and do very well

http://www.eforexaffiliate.com/affiliates/rates.php

DENTAL PLANS

Dentalplans.com offers text links, banner ads, LANDING PAGES and more for your dental insurance domains.

AFFILIATE COMPANIES

Of course, for the newbies the main affiliate companies that offer 1000′s of affiliate programs are Linkshare.com and Commission Junction (cj.com)

Just remember every developer will almost always go through this stage

Stage 1: Website = No Revenue

Stage 2: Website + Adsense = Revenue

Stage 3: Website + Adsense + Affiliate through Affiliate Companies = Revenue

Stage 4: Website + Some form of Text Ads + More Direct Relationships + Some Affiliate Company Stuff = Revenue

Stage 5: Website + Some form of Text Ads + Direct Relationships = Revenue

There are 1,000’s of affiliate programs out there – some good, some not so good so read the affiliate blogs and learn about all the revenue that’s available. Even better spend a few bucks and attend an affiliate marketing conference like:

http://www.affiliatesummit.com/

The money spent to attend this conference will quite likely be worth 100 times the cost of any single TRAFFIC conference to people who want to get serious.  On the home page of affiliate summit they list over 850 companies attending … 850 !! ….. have there ever been 850 companies in attendance at a TRAFFIC show??

And all of these 850 companies have interest in talking to you about how to earn affiliate income!

You already have your domain  … so graduate and move forward.

Good luck to all - there are many more sources but I only have so much time so hopefully this helps some of you.