8 common ways to make money with affiliate marketing

After looking into the world of affiliate marketing quite a bit in the last few days, lets have a look at some of the ways people are making money with affiliate marketing.

Method 1 - Niche site
This method usually involves having a website targeted at a certain niche. Site usually has a few product pages where the affiliate links are placed and the rest will be mainly content pages linked to these product pages. Targeting the right keywords are important in this method and usually the homepage and product pages will require heavy keyword research before starting on the site.

Method 2 - PPC Landing page
This method basically has a landing page with a strong Call to Action for the product being marketed. The idea is to buy your way into profits with PPC. Obviously keyword driven again and need to be careful regarding merchant terms and spending too much. I have called it PPC Landing page, but basically any method to get traffic to the page could be used including organic search, socials, forum spamming, and whatever else takes your fancy.

Method 3 - Mall / Price comparison sites
I’ve group these lot together as they are pretty much self explanatory. Loads of products, each with affiliate links, categorized in a directory style navigation system usually run using datafeeds. Problem maybe how to get traffic to these sites as major terms like price comparison, online malls, etc are too competitive and product description from feeds have duplicate content concerns. Adding a niche mall to an established site is something that I’ll be looking at though using a script we are developing.

Method 4 - Blogging
This one is easy on paper but more difficult to achieve. Basically write good content = readers = traffic(+product recommendations) = clicks = conversions = money. Some are also using blogs to do product reviews and niche sites and making money but that is due to the CMS more than a method and does not come under blogging for me.

Method 5 - Product Reviews sites.
Sites offer reviews from the site owner or from site’s community about products with affiliate links for that product on page. Haven’t found a site that have done this well yet, maybe because a bad review isn’t the best Call to Action, I’ll keep looking.

Method 6 - Coupons / Rebates
Offering affiliate programs that have discounts seems to be effective obviously and commonly used in conjunction with the above methods. However this method describes sites that is focused on marketing itself as a place with offers, some will even send back a portion of their affiliate earnings to the buyer as a saving.

Method 7 - Email Marketing
Marketers with access to a subscriber base should do well with affiliate marketing especially in niche markets.

Method 8 - Part-timers
By Part-timers I am referring to sites that uses affiliate marketing as a secondary revenue source. They maybe information sites, forums, etc that have thrown up a few banners. Again, with enough traffic, money will be made.

Hope I haven’t missed out any biggies and I’ll probably be trying most of those methods for experimentation purposes during my journey. Hopefully I can figure out some variation of one of the above with a bit of added ummpphh for our main projects.