If you have created a basic site to promote an affiliate scheme, then it is a good idea to also use other avenues of revenue. So, what else could you add to the site to bring in more money?
To start with, the easiest and most simplest way of adding to your takings is through contextual advertising, as for instance Google Adsense. With these schemes, you add the advert onto your web site page and the provider reads the content of the page and chooses from the list of advertisers available to it the most suitable adverts. They take time to work out which adverts are most budding to be clicked on, as it is as important to them as it is to you that the adverts are clicked a load.
To get started, you merely sign up for an account with Google and once they have reviewed and accepted your web site you go back to their web site, tell them the shape, size and colour scheme that you want and then they provide a bit of code for you. Copy this snippet of code and paste it into your website where you want it to appear.
At this point you will test your site and probably not see the adverts and assume, wrongly, that it is not working and you have done something wrong. This is not the case - it as a rule takes about 10 minutes from you setting up the advert on Google until it will actually display on your site. I have no idea why, it just happens!
Make sure that that these adverts look part of your web site. This could either be a matching colour scheme or a complimentary colour scheme, depending on which works the best for you. Position it so that visitors straightforwardly see it and then if they do not want to visit the affiliate merchant’s site, then there is a chance they will make you an extra bit of money this way.
Keeping to no more than a couple of advertising blocks per site, there are also other cash making opportunities. You can also add banners for other affiliate merchants. Let's say, if you are promoting hotels, holiday villas or other travel products, then a banner for holiday insurance may do well on the site. Take a look through the affiliate directory that you are using and work out what other merchants they are working with that might be useful.
Part of the success of this will be trial and error. You have to try a variety of different merchants and products and see what works best. You could do this by only changing the banner, say every week. But several affiliate sites will do this for you. You might find that the directory will allow you to create advertising pools. With these you will select as loads of different products / merchants as you want to and add the banners to the pool. You then display a banner from the pool and the directory takes charge of randomly rotating through the banners. When you notice that certain merchants are doing better than others, only remove those that don’t perform so well to maximise your income.
After this, you could start trying to sell banner adverts and other tricks, but these take lots more effort and are more advanced to find the advertisers and make an income.