Make Money with Affiliate Programs

The AdSense blog has outlined the maximum number of each type of ad unit their program policies allow.

It’s actually more than I thought, so helpful to get the official word on it.

In order for your pages with AdSense to be compliant, they must not exceed the following:

ONE…
- video unit (currently only available in specific countries and languages, though we’re working to expand video units to additional publishers soon)

TWO…
- AdSense for search boxes

THREE…
- standard AdSense for content ad units, and
- 3 link units

Personally, I think this is excessive, unless you have a pretty long page with lots of text.

The May 28, 2008 episode of Affiliate Thing opened with talk about the efforts to form a new affiliate marketing trade association.

Then Lisa Picarille and I discussed the impact of the New York affiliate tax, a robot with no name at Magnify.net, and Melissa Salas of Buy.com becoming a national TV star.

Also, we chatted about a chance to win cash money by designing a new Affiliate Summit site, third party ads on Google AdSense, and what’s happening in the affiliate porn business.

Show Links

• New York Affiliate Tax
• Name the Magnify.net Robot - Get a Flip Camera
• BuyTV is Going to National Television
• “So You Think You Can Design” Contest
• Third-Party Ads on Google AdSense
• Naughty Affiliates

Subscribe to the Affiliate Thing RSS feed or listen on iTunes. You can also send a blank e-mail to affiliatething@aweber.com to get each podcast delivered by e-mail.

Stream the show on WebmasterRadio.fm or download it.

Google AdSense has announced that they now accept display ads from third-party vendors.

“Third-party ad serving will introduce a greater variety of advertising into the Google content network, increase the inventory of quality display ads competing to show on AdSense publisher sites, and offer more engaging ads for end users.

In the long run, we believe the increased inventory and ad competition will result in increased revenue for many AdSense publishers.”

In order to allow third-party ads on your site, you’ll need to do the following in your AdSense account:

• Opt into image ads
• Enable advertisers to target your AdSense channels
• Opt into placement targeting

More details at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2008/05/introducing-third-party-ads-on-google.html.

Google product managers and marketers ran a workshop on video advertising and content monetization at the recent ad:tech in San Francisco.

The session covers the state of the video advertising market, a history of video ad serving, AdSense for video, and opportunities on YouTube.

Check out the GoogleBusiness channel on YouTube for more presentations and other content.

The Google AdSense Ad Review Center is now available to all affiliates using AdSense.

This feature enables you to review all ads placement-targeted to your site, so you get more control over which ads are displayed.

Some advice from the AdSense team…

Before getting started, we strongly recommend keeping your review preference set to the default of ‘Run ads immediately.’ This will let you allow or block ads after they have run. If you choose the other option of ‘Hold ads,’ the ads will await review for 24 hours before being allowed to run automatically. Using the ‘Hold ads’ setting will keep ads from participating in the auction while they await review, potentially lowering winning bids and your AdSense earnings. Ads that you have blocked can’t compete in the auction either, so we ask that you keep in mind the revenue impact of blocking ads or switching from the ‘Run ads immediately’ setting.

You can check out the Ad Review Center by going to your ‘Competitive Ad Filter’ page, located under the ‘AdSense Setup’ tab.

More details at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2008/04/ad-review-center-available-to-all.html.

Q: Is it still possible to make money today as an affiliate marketer, or is it harder to make money with Google axing the thin AdSense sites? Also, what are the top niche sites to look at if I was starting in affiliate marketing today? I see posts about making sites based on my interests, but I don’t know if my interests will make me any money. So I’d like to create specialty sites to serve as funnels for lead gen offers. How do I get started?

A: I guess there are a couple different schools of thought here. There are mercenaries who will use products like Google Trends and WordTracker to identify the most valuable keywords and niches to focus on.

Personally, I don’t advocate that approach. Rather, I think you should promote areas that you like… topics that you love.

The reason being that there is a greater chance you’ll stay with it longer and have passion for it.

If you are going to go with trends, they change day to day, so it will require constant research and tweaking.

You might also want to check out AffSpy to find the best offers.

The Google AdSense blog has shared a couple of guideline reminders when optimizing your AdSense placements.

1. Ads shouldn’t be placed under a title or section heading in a way that implies that the ads are not ads.
2. Ads should be easily distinguishable from surrounding content.

This brings us back to recent revival of talks about affiliate link disclosure, which I discussed with Sam Harrelson on the latest episode of the Affiliate Thing.

Sam also sat down earlier this week with Ted Murphy of Izea (formerly PayPerPost) to chat about the disclosure issue. Listen to their chat on GeekCast.fm.

More details at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2008/03/another-look-at-optimizations.html.

They posted over at the Google AdSense blog that any AdSense users that are also into putting stickers on their laptops (paging Sam Harrelson) can get one or two for free.

I wonder if they got some of those movable laptop stickers from Sticker Giant?

Anyhow, how can you get some of these stickers?

So how do you get one of these glue-backed masterpieces? Easy: send us a self-addressed, stamped envelope with enough postage to return 1 oz of sticker goodness to you from our office in California via standard U.S. mail. (Sorry, we can’t help you calculate the postage to your location). Send your envelope, along with a note if you’d like, to:

Google AdSense
c/o Arlene Lee
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
USA

Supplies are limited, so send your envelope soon! Then you can stick with AdSense wherever you go. (And one last thing to keep in mind: while we’re flattered that you might want a whole box, note that we’re only able to provide one or two per publisher.)

That so reminds me of the 1980’s when I’d go to the public library and look through one of those books with free offers that required a SASE.

Anyhow, my SASE is in the mail.

Deliver high quality video content to your site and earn extra revenue. With Google’s new YouTube ad units, your users see relevant, targeted, and unobtrusive ads targeted to the video that’s being played. You can customize the ad unit by selecting individual content providers, categories, or you can let Google target the ad units to your site’s content. You’ll find these new ad units in the Adwords Setup section of your Google Adwords account.

Mark over at 45n5.com asks a very common question we hear; which is better, having Adsense on a page or utilizing affiliate links? My advice would be that it completely depends on the type of page you are designing. If it's a topic that people are gathering information, or doing some research, then Adsense would seem to fit. One of Mark's commenter's noted that they had a luxury homes page up where affiliate links didn't do very well, however Adsense earned quite a bit of money. This would make sense, as I don't imagine many people would click on an affiliate link and make any purchase related to luxury homes just from a website. Now, if you are designing a page targeting people who are in a buying mood, well this is where the affiliate links become very powerful. If you design your site as a funnel, directing people to make a purchase through affiliate links, this should be more effective than simply putting up Adsense ads. If you have a page with a bunch of informational content and articles, then try out Adsense. Give people something to click on in their search for more information. In either case, if one isn't working out well for you, nothing other than a little effort prevents you from trying out the other.