As a growing trend, I see more and more people interested in making money online leaning towards publisher programs like Adsense, Adbrite, Chitika, Kontera, etc. It is understandable that new site owners interested in making money from their sites find it easy just to add the Adsense or equivalent contextual network program code on their site and stay worry free. These money making webmasters are not much into sales themselves and it is my understanding that they don’t know how to convert the traffic themselves for which they are being happy with only a fraction of the revenue that their sites can actually generate.

 Think about it! When you place the Adsense code on your site for example, you are letting other advertisers advertise on YOUR site and make more money than what you are getting per click or even from several clicks combined when a visitor buys something or acts on it. Is it really a wise way to monetize your site? I say NO, not really. Why let other advertisers make the best use of YOUR site that you spent so much time on developing and make more money from it than you are?

If this way of monetizing doesn’t make any sense to you and you think that you would rather be on the other side of the trade, then you need to know about affiliate marketing programs that can lead you to the pot of gold. There are affiliate programs that pay as much as $100+ per sale. Imagine that! With only one sale per day with that kind of payouts, you can make $3,000 per month from such affiliate marketing programs.

So let’s get a little familiar with affiliate marketing programs and see how they work. If what you read so far interests you and you are thinking about getting into affiliate marketing, then your first step would be to find a niche that you want to promote and develop a site around that niche. Once your site is developed, you then need to sign up with few affiliate networks like Commission Junction, LinkShare, Azoogle, etc. You need to sign up with a few of them as some affiliate network would have an offer or program that others would not have. At the same time, one network may pay higher than others for the same affiliate program.

In terms of marketing your site, you have two options mainly. You can either optimize your site for search engines (search engine optimization) which will get your site ranked high on search engines. Once your site is ranked high for your search terms, you are on your way to free search engine traffic which will bring you the sales and revenue. This however is a time consuming strategy but once you are ranked, the traffic you get is free and you get to keep 100% of the sale. Other option is PPC (pay per click) marketing where you pay Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other PPC program owners for displaying your ads on their site. Since you are paying per click, you need to figure out how many clicks will result in one sale and what is your ROI (return of investment).

There are 2 types of affiliate programs you can promote. One that pays per sale or conversion and other is CPA offers or CPA Lead offers where you get paid per visitor action. With CPA offers, you are not usually making the actual sale but generating leads for the merchant. Which program is suitable for you depends on your personality as some do better with one type of affiliate program than other. Terms like PPC marketing and CPA offers will be discussed in greater details on upcoming articles so stay tuned.