July 30, 2005
Affiliate Programs - Can you really make money?
Affiliate programs a great way to earn revenues from your web site and all you hard online work. However, if you think you are going to get rich quick from affiliate programs you are probably in for a world of disappointment.
We use affiliate programs as one way to generate revenue for our sites which include, mensplayground.com, mpdating.com, and directory.mensplayground.com to name a few. Does it work for us, the short answer is yes. Here are the top strategies that we use;
#1 - Target Your Program
We promote a variety of affiliate programs from consumer products, adult products and subscriptions. You can view some of these programs in our affiliate section. However, one strategy that we use is to target the affiliate program to the content that we are promoting. Simply putting up links everyway is not really effective, however, as you can see on our hair removal section, we have targeted the Body Bare Shaver affiliate program specific to the content we are promoting.
#2 - Track Results
It is important to continually track your programs. We recommend matching your stats to the affiliate program stats to ensure that the program is working for you. Another advantage to tracking is that if you make content changes, ad changes, page layout changes, you can track the results to increase your conversions.
#3 - Patience
You know that old saying, “patience is a virtue”, this is true. Affiliate programs is about patience. By this I mean you need to play with positioning of the ads, text vs. banner links, and continual promotion of the program. Here is an example, when we started promoting body shavers on MensPlayground.com we had nothing for 2-3 months. We knew the products were good, our content was good, but could not get conversions. Half way through the 4th month, the sales started and have not stopped, it has been 2-years now. In fact they continue to increase because we have added other programs and created competition within our body shaving section. The moral of the story is this, eventually somebody will buy, but chances are in won’t be the first time they click through.
