Most of the bloggers are more interested in earning revenue through different ad networking agency. These advertising networking agencies work like a middle man between you and the advertiser. They take a % of revenue from both you and the advertiser. There are number of advertising model exists in the market. However, very few bloggers show interest in online affiliate selling.
For those, who are not accustomed with the term online affiliate sale, I would like to spend few words. “Affiliate sale” is selling someone else's product and take a commission from the overall sale revenue. It is nothing different from setting up a shop and selling products after adding your profit margin. Let us take an example; We are showing a banner advertisement for Walmart in our website. Now, if any visitor sees and clicks on this advertisement, he will be taken to the Walmart side. When the user clicks on the banner on our website, it passes a reference code, by means of which The Walmart website can capture source website, from which the traffic has been sent. Now, if the person buys something from Walmart site online, you will be getting a percentage of the entire sale revenue.
However as you can understand, there is a probability factor works behind getting the percentage of the revenue. It is not guaranteed as it is in the case of "Pay Per Click" or "Pay Per Mile". Thus, obviously people are not interested in putting advertisement for online affiliate sale. Still, you may see that many people go for online affiliate advertisement. I do categorize these people into two broad categories. 1. people, who have carved out a niche for them and have good popularity for their website and 2. people, who have just started blogging and yet to generate proper revenue with any other advertising model.
If we look deep into the websites, which fall in category 1, you will be able to understand a stark similarity among them in many respects. The first and foremost important factor is that these websites are in existence for quite a long time (at least 3 years). With the due course of time, they have carved out their own niche and always put affiliate advertisement pertaining to the same niche. The best example is Wpbeginner. Wpbeginner is a blog started by Syed Balkhi in 2009. This site revolves around everything about Wordpress. The main source of income of this blog is online Affiliate Sale. When, people were searching around for their questions around Wordpress, wpbeginner has done a tremendous job by putting all the knowledge base and news under the same umbrella. Over a period of time, it has got immense popularity and currently have an Alexa ranking around 2900 and Google page rank 6. It means that it has got good authenticity. That is one of the major points for the success in online Affiliate Sale.
I am not here to dishearten you, in case you have also put affiliate advertisement in your site, without much success (as do I). But, you may want to check whether your ad is aligned to the niche of your blog. This can be further enhanced, if you put ad in article page, which is aligned to the context of your article. For example, if you are writing about Wordpress themes, it does make sense to put an online Affiliate ad for site selling Wordpress themes.
The next question is how you get an appropriate affiliate advertisement. The easiest way to find out a site in the same niche as that of yours is that you just go to his site and find out the kind of advertisement has been put up there. It's okay even if the ad has been put up by some advertising networking company through PPC or PPM model. You must ensure that the ad is aligned to the central idea of your blog. Now, just go to that particular website and sign up for Affiliate sale. You can also go to some third party Ad agency, which manages affiliate sale. If you have good traffic from the USA\Canada, a good choice is linkshare. Through linkshare, you can apply for Affiliate Sale for different companies.
Photo Credit - Web Design Hot - http://www.webdesignhot.com/ [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Thanks for the article. I am a newbie blogger. It helped me in clearing doubts what to choose initialy for monetization....
ReplyDelete