Afilliate Programs

Now that you have learnt how to run a blog and use Adsense, we’re going to look at other ways of making money from a website.

One of the most common ways of monetising a site is to use an affiliate program.  There are lots of different programs – here are a few that I use:  Affiliatefuture.com, tradedoubler.com and clickbank.com.

Affiliatefuture and tradedoubler have a wide range of well known clients whose affiliate programs you can join – selling things ranging from finance to broadband, chocolates to clothes.  They are free to join, so it’s worth signing up and taking a look around their site to see if there are any programs that fit with the subject of your site.

For the next few posts I’m going to be looking at Clickbank.  Why?  Because an online contact of mine has issued a challenge to me and another contact.  I like a challenge, so I couldn’t resist.

The challenge: To build a site in the reverse phone look-up niche.  This is a niche that mainly operates in the USA where, for a small fee, if you know a person’s cell phone number you can do a reverse search to find out who owns the number.  This has obvious uses if you are concerned about who your child is calling, or to see if you can trace a scammer if they are using a US cell phone number -a subject close to my heart because I run an anti-scam blog.

The idea is that we each build a site, sign up for a Clickbank program (or programs) and then promote the site.  The aim is to see if we can achieve an income of $1000 a month from our site.  Sounds like a tall order – but like I said, I like a challenge.

I decided that if I post my progress on here, step by step, that should give you an idea of how to monetise a site using affiliate programs.

I’ll start in the next post by telling you how to register a domain name – so far we have used a free site from blogger, but sooner or later you will want to own and run your own site with your own domain name – and this is a good time to start.   So read the next post to find out how to register a domain name and how to find hosting for it.