Monetizing Your Affiliate Sites

There are several ways to monetize your affiliate site besides simply linking a button or graphic to the main advertisers page that your promoting.  You can use contextual advertising like Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network, Adbrite, etc.  There are of course other ways to monetize your landing pages, but my question is, is it worth the hassle?

This blog post will hopefully give you the pros and cons to each which will allow you to make that decision to monetize your landing pages with other sources besides the main offer your promoting…..or not!

Contextual Advertising

Let’s start with contextual advertising.  I’ll be using Google Adsense, however, any contextual program can be used.

If you’re building your landing pages correctly, by correctly I mean adding fresh content via either a blog or by adding html pages to your site, then you should have tons of extra pages or blog posts of material in which you could place Adsense on.  You could also add Adsense to the main page of your landing site.  The question is, however, should you?

I personally believe that this varies from niche to niche, however, there are a few simple guidelines you can keep in mind that should help you at least give it a try.

The most important thing I would recommend is not placing Adsense on the homepage of your landing site.  I’ve never seen this work personally in my own tests, and I’ve also never really heard of anyone that was doing this successfully without losing conversions on their main offer they were promoting!

Note: While Adsense can very well bring you in some “pocket” change by adding to your inner pages of your site, I personally feel that the time it takes to not only place the ads on your site, but also, the amount of time to optimize the ads to make the convert the best may not be worth the time.  For example, on an offer that I consistently do $15,000 dollars a month in revenue, Adsense averages about $30 dollars a month by having it on the pages.  So, its a decision you need to make.  If your just starting out, every penny helps, but if you’ve been doing it a while, it may not be for you!

Direct Ad Sales

This is a subject that isn’t talked about much around the world of affiliate marketing, however, there is a very popular ebook called “Get Google Ads for Free” if you’re interested in checking it out.

Basically, you create a landing page just like you normally would, only on your homepage you’ll have several advertising spots.  Some people place these below their main call to action, some above, generally the higher up on the page the more you can charge from them and make a profit.

This method can actually work quite well, and in fact I use it for several niches that are really competitive where the bids are higher.  However, you will most likely see a drop in conversions to your main offer that your promoting, so you need to make sure this is something that would be feasible for you to do on your site and for your niche.

Again, if you want a very detailed breakdown of how this works, you’ll definitely want to check out the “Get Google Ads for Free” ebook.  It’s no huge secret, however, the ebook will show you exactly what to do step by step.

Offer a Free Product to Get Newsletter Signups

Another great way to monetize your landing page is to offer a free ebook, product, newsletter, etc in order to get your visitors to give you their email address.  Doing this will allow you to sell a single visitor multiple times over a course of time.

For example, I have a landing page/site setup for Auto Insurance and after they click the link to goto the offer page, I have a pop-under come up as well which offers a free ebook on how to make sure your getting the best auto insurance rate possible.  Of course, in order for the visitor to receive this ebook, they must enter their email address.

I’m then able to send the visitor a couple different offers in order for them to receive more insurance quotes from different companies and for each one the visitor completes, I get paid another commission.

This works extremely well and if done properly and in a non-obtrusive way, doesn’t seem to hurt conversions to your main offer very much at all, while allowing you to possibly for years sell to this visitor.  Of course, make sure you don’t over try to oversell the visitor.  I only send out 1 maybe 2 offers per month for them to check out.

There you have it!  Three additional ways you can monetize your landing pages to increase your earnings via affiliate marketing.  I hope this helps some of you out and I know if you implement them you can definitely earn more without spending more on PPC.

If you have any other suggestions on ways to monetize affiliates sites besides the main offer of course, please let me know in the comments as I would love to hear them!

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