In the previous section I talked about the ubiquitous Adsense and it’s use in monetizing your blog .In this post I want to share my views with you people about Affiliate marketing,another way of making money online and it’s pros and cons according to me.I am no big affiliate marketing expert but what I have come across by spending time on other blogs and forums I just wanted to sum it up and hope that you might get some useful tips in your venture of making money online and choose the most suitable path for your success.So shall we start ?

First of all what is meant by affiliate marketing ? Affiliate marketing is like you are the middleman for selling a product a company is producing .Let’s say a company produces a software and it wants to sell that software to the customers .You sign up with them and post their banners or ads on your site or use their link in your email signature and advertise their product .When somebody clicks on the ads placed on your blog or the signature links in your e-mail and goes to the advertisers website and buys that software you have just helped that company in generating a sale of their product and for this you will be paid a percentage of the sales proceeds as commission.This is in short affiliate marketing .It’s just not selling softwares or something like that it may be many other things like getting somebody to sign up at a website ,registering for a web-hosting package and many more things .

The next question probably,I presume,would be what is the difference between sites like adsense and other affiliate sites like CJ,Clickbank,ebay and Amazon and many more ? When you put a adsense code in your site it will display ads based on the content of your site and you will not have control over those ads,even though you can block ads from certain sites using the filters in your adsense account and run the risk of displaying less ads on your site .You will be payed money if the visitor to your site clicks on those ads ,and the amount of money you get by a single click on that ad may be a meagre 0.05$ to around some 9$( I am not exactly sure about the range) .Please forgive me if I am mistaken).So if you are running a blog related to entertainment you probably are not going to get much per click and may be your earnings per click may be more if you are running a blog on mortgage loans or credit card .One more thing about the ad-networks like Adsense, you are not bothered whether the url in the ad leads to a site which sells software and did it have a sale through your site or is a social networking site and the visitor to your site actually registered there.What actually you are bothered about is how many times it has been clicked and how much it is paying per click.But it’s different in affiliate programs where you really care about what the visitor to your site does after clicking those ads,banners or whatever on your site . So in order to generate income from affiliate programs you need to have quality traffic ,not just massive traffic i.e the ones which are going to purchase the software in the above example.But in case of Adsense you need to have huge traffic and it may or may not be quality traffic . From what I said earlier that you may be payed well per click if you are running a blog about mortgage loans you can imagine that you have to find specific topics where the advertisers are willing to pay more per click on the ads placed on your site .For this you need to do something called keyword research to find those high paying ads .

So for whom actually is adsense ? and for whom actually is affiliate marketing .Adsense might probably work better with those sites which have got huge traffic to their sites ,but you can’t have huge traffic to your site overnight it takes time and hard work unless you are very lucky and come up with a gem of a post or blog which is will make people go crazy and the chances of that happening are ,probably, very remote .So again one more question comes to my mind ? shall we wait for the traffic to increase to our site and finally get paid by adsense ?How much time it may take for you to cross that 100$ mark from adsense .One month ?two months? may be a year ?Right now there are millions of blogs are out there ,many,if not most, of which are half hearted attempts to make money online.Many of them are years old but they haven’t yet crossed the first hurdle of 100$.This is where I think affiliate marketing comes into picture for me.

I think I should have added this thing in the previous post only when I dealt with adsense.After completing the post and publishing it I felt I wrote very less about adsense and felt like I didn’t do my job correctly so I wrote a few more things that were in my mind about adsense today .I could have updated the post but I just wanted to keep it like that type only .why? I don’t know .But this is not all and still more is to come and I will talk about it in the coming days .

From what I have said earlier can it be said that success of affiliate programs doesn’t depend on traffic to a site ? I can’t say either yes or no for this question as you can be very successful if you can get lot of traffic to your website and it can become the major source of income for you even exceeding your earnings from advertising programs like adsense.So what should be the first option to start earning from your blog ?I would say you start with both but don’t expect to make some really quick bucks straight away from Adsense but rather focus more on affiliate marketing initially.Why ? because affiliate marketing doesn’t apparently doesn’t need huge traffic to generate income like adsense .You can target a niche market where there is little competiton and if you are possible to generate some leads,sales etc you can make some money which,in the mean time,will help you to build your blog and also give the inspiration to egg on for more .One more reason why I think initial bloggers should focus on affiliate marketing is ,you can’t expect massive traffic to your site overnight ,so if you kind of place your hope on Adsense to provide you income ,you might become bit frustrated and it may take a lot of time,may be months or years to generate traffic to your site .You may become desperate and may be forced to quit blogging altogether .Affiliate marketing ,as I said earlier,apparently is not related to traffic,but if you can generate some quality traffic ,it may be a little,it can bring money to you and keep your interest and hope burning. One more thing about affiliate marketing is ,if you have got some money and ready to invest in it , you can run a PPC campaign with adwords and get quality traffic to your site and start earning without bothering about traffic at all.There are many out there who are actually doing this and making hell lot of money.

So these are my views about affiliate marketing and one more thing ,I am not proclaiming that this is the the correct thing to do .Many will have a different view from me and I will be more than happy to hear those comments .In the next post I will share my views on some of the popular affiliates and how to choose an affiliate for your site.

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Blogs have become one of the most popular form of expression on internet .Blogs are also now an integral part of the ever increasing online-marketing system .They have evolved from being simple online journals ,where people used to express their feelings ,to cool cash milking cows . People like Darren Rowse and John Chow have made a fortune by blogging.Right now blogger and wordpress are the most popular blogging Platforms.You don’t have to worry about hosting a blogger blog as it is taken care by google .In wordpress you can go for the hosted version at wordpress.com or download the wordpress files from wordpress.org and host on a server under your own domain name .There are obvious advantages with having a wordpress blog over Blogger,as you can have a domain name of your own ,not a subdomain.You can customize wordpress in a lot of ways,not so much in blogger.You can increase the functionality of wordpress with the ever growing Plugins created by the wordpress community.All I want to say is wordpress is a better option but I am not saying you can’t make money with Blogger .It’s the content that matters not the style , always remember “Content is the King “.First it’s better to try out blogger and once you get used to blogging and issues sorrounding it , you can shift to wordpress to give it an authentic look .

Adsense

Google is the leader in online advertising .It has monopolized online marketing with it’s twin products “Adwords” for advertisers and “Adsense” for publishers , i.e webmasters like you and me . You open any page and you are almost sure to find a block of text with some urls with the signature at the bottom “Ads by Google”.These are the advertisements and when somebody clicks on them you will be paid for having posted those links on your site .Though yahoo and many other companies are coming into market ,Google is still the leader and it will take time for others to catch up with it . You have to sign up with Adsense first and after you have activated your account and sign in you can go to the adsense setup page and choose the ads which suits you most from the various available formats.You have got 4 options ,Adsense for content ,Adsense for search ,Referrals and Adsense for mobile,if you have a wap enabled site .By using Adsense for content you will be able to displays ads relevant to your site’s content.Adsense for search works by inserting a google search box in your blog or website .If people want to google something while browsing your site ,having a search option on your blog will help visitors and you also .Why ? when people google from your site and click some of the sponsored links you will be paid ,nice isn’t it ? yeah but I don’t think visitors will be inclined to use that option .But still it’s better to have one .I haven’t heard many success stories about adsense for mobile .I think it still needs to evolve a bit .What I have told is just a tip of the iceberg .You need to know a lot more things to start making money online from Google .I will be dealing with those things in the coming days . Hope to see you around .