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Affiliate marketing is almost unique among the monetisation methods I’m discussing here in that you can do it from a livejournal (or any other similar community site), or even, possibly, via email and without a website at all. Essentially, affiliate marketing is when a company who sells something (books, games, web hosting, subscription services) gives you a cut of the money for driving traffic and sales to them. This is almost always tracked by link parameters - so anywhere you can place a link can, theoretically, make you money.

The problem with this lies in the fact that you are in competition with the affiliate company for the traffic. You can’t expect to put up a page about books (or even a whole blog about books) and expect to make money from affiliate linking with Amazon - anyone who’s interested in books at the generic level is going to go straight to Amazon.

You may be able to make some money by using the review technique, wherein you write up some good, key-phrase loaded content about the item you’re linking to, and put the affiliate link at the end, with a big “buy here” button, or the like. This can be done with some success, especially in speciality areas with Amazon, or less-well-known affiliate companies.

The key here is that your content has to be better than theirs, even if they have the shopping cart. You won’t manage this on Harry Potter books, or the newest, most popular MMO, since the affiliate site’s content for those will be fairly complete. You may be able to pull it off for items concerned with obscure elements of metalwork, woodwork, accountancy, or other specialised areas. If your content is better than the seller’s page, you can rely on getting some of (maybe a lot of) the search engine traffic, and then driving it through to the seller.

My current recommended method, though, is slightly different. What I’m aiming for with Gifts to Gamers is to take a different slant on the area of interest, and present content on that slant. In this case, I’m not talking about games directly, I’m talking about giving stuff to gamers. This allows me to write a good amount of content that will fit into a different niche. Amazon (or Gamestop, or whoever the particular link goes to) will focus on attracting the gamers themselves, leaving the other angle for me.

A similar approach can be take with any craft or technique site. If you’re putting up a site about woodcarving techniques, you have the chance to write a good amount of content for someone interested in learning the basics, and then linking to books about more advanced tecnhiques, workshop setup and finishing, as well as tool sites, supplies (sandpaper, sharpening stones) and so on, if you can find affiliates for them. You’re not writing about the books, but they’re a natural follow-on to your content.

Another technique, which I’ve seen used, but haven’t yet tried myself, is what I’m labelling the “barrage” technique. You take an audience interested in a given topic - let’s say old movies - and provide, on a website or on a mailing list, a huge list of “the best 100 old movies”, or “100 old movies re-released this year”, and make every one of those a link to the affiliate’s page for the movie. Confronted with so many titles, almost everyone who sees the list will click on one, and many people will buy something. Studies have shown - and, indeed, we all know from our own experience - that if specialists in any area are confronted with many products in their area of specialisation, they’ll buy something. Putting prices by your list will probably help with this, although it adds more maintenance since you need to keep them up to date. You don’t need to produce much content for this one, but you DO need an established audience, since your search traffic is probably going to be low.

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Alright, having give some outlines of things you should be doing with your website to make it work well, I’ll now discuss one of the methods of making it give you back money: Google AdSense. This is not going to be easy money, but it has the advantage of having very simple entry requirements. And let me get this out of the way before I go on to other things: If you’re going to apply for AdSense, please do so via the big button on the right hand side there. This will allow me to earn a few extra bucks on your referral, and won’t cost you anything.

Right, where was I…

Essentially, to qualify for the AdSense program, you need to have a website that is not porn, gambling, or other dodgy subjects, and otherwise complies with the policies. These aren’t hard to meet. Also, you can not click on your own ads - this will get you banned. It’s best to err on the side of caution, and ask people who live or work in the same place not to click on them either - and there are horror stories of people getting banned because some well-meaning relative set out to “give them some money” by clicking on every ad on the site.

That aside, actually making money with AdSense can be quite hard. Just pasting the codeblock for some ads on your pages usually doesn’t work; you have to give it some thought, and experiment a bit. Efforts in content, analysis, and SEO as detailed before will, however, have done a lot of the work for you. There are three more things you can do:

1) Positioning
2) Colouring
3) Selective placing

… and then experiment with each of them.

Positioning

Where you place your ads will affect how many people actually see them, as opposed to having their eyes pass over them. Optimal locations for most sites are at the top, down the left side, and smack in the middle. Very few of my layouts work for smack in the middle, but I’ve seen it done well. It can go particularly well with a boxed layout, so that you have a page element above it - a top news story or an introduction, then then ads, and the more page elements. There are many sizes and shapes of ad blocks to use too.

I’m still experimenting with placement - I found before that the left side, on dukestreet, worked better than across the top, but I’m currently running ads in three places on the individual pages - an ad unit on the left, one at the bottom, and a link unit across the top. This is too heavy on the ads for my personal taste, and the least effective one of those three will be removed soon. Sometimes you arrive at odd results - for instance, the links unit on top only works well on dukestreet if there are also ads on the left. I can’t think why, but the numbers add up. See the section below on tracking for how to identify which clicks went where. On Woodwork Ireland, I designed the shape and layout of the site around the ads at the top, and it seems to work very well.

Colouring

Google allow you to colour the ads anyway that seems suitable to you. Some people succeed very well by “blending” the ads - using the same backgrounds, borders, and link colours as the rest of the site. Others prefer to have them stand out strongly in contrasting colours. Tinker around with this until you find something that suits you, and again, experiment. I’m strongly in favour of the blended ones, myself, but you - and your visitors - may feel differently.

Selective Placing

By this, I mean what pages you put ads on, rather than where on the page. Some pages are not suitable for ads. If you have a sign up page, then you want people to sign up, not follow ad links. Likewise, you’d be crazy to put ads on your shopping cart or checkout pages. Further, there are going to be some pages that are essential to your site - information about your location, or an “about us” page, which simply won’t get well-targeted advertising.

After that, you need to keep an eye on what particular pages are earning. If your reports show that a given page is getting dozens of clicks, but only earning $0.01 per click, then that page may actually be doing you more harm than good. While this has not been proven, there is some evidence to suggest that consistent low-paying clicks (or high numbers of impressions and low numbers of clicks) give your site and account a “bad reputation”, and lead to only low-paying ads showing. And take a look at the section on MFA and AdSense arbitrage sites, below.

When this happens, you can either alter the page, so that the text attracts better ads, or remove the ads completely from it. You’ll have to judge for yourself which will work better - if the page only needs slight adjustments, then try that, and if not, go ahead and remove them.

Those are the three things you have to experiment with. There are two more things you should know before starting with AdSense. I learned these two the hard way.

Track Everything

Given I knew this was important for web pages, you’d think I’d recognise the importance for ads. But for ages, I just had the ads there, and just watched the total earnings - which didn’t move much. Occasionally, I’d move things, and go back to watching the total, which would continue not to move much. Eventually, I realised I had to track things better.

Google allows two kinds of tracking - URL channels and custom channels. For URL tracking, you enter a URL, and AdSense will tell you how many clicks, and what earnings, happened on that URL. If you put in just your domain name, then it’ll report for every click on the domain, and if you put in the full URL of a single page, it’ll report on the clicks on that page. You can also put in domain + directory, to track a section of the site.

For custom channels, you supply a channel name, and you can apply up to five of these for a given adblock. So I have, for instance, one for the adblock on the right, one for the link unit on top, and one for the footer block. I have one for the front page as well, where URL tracking doesn’t quite work, as it can be hit on “dukestreet.org” and also “dukestreet.org/index.html”. You can get as precise with these as you like.

You’re limited to 200 channels in total, including the URL ones. So you need to use them sparingly. Generally speaking, track the pages which get the most traffic, and let the rest track on the domain alone. A combination of the URL channels and the custom channels will tell you a lot about what pages are successful, and what areas of them are most successful.

Remove the Crud: MFAs and Arbitrage Sites

There are a lot of sites you don’t want to have appearing in your ads. Some are competitors, others are just bad, both in site quality, and payout. Google allow you to filter ads out by URL, so do that. Look down along your site, identify which ads are bad (go to the sites to see, but, as above, do NOT click on the ads on your pages), and add them to the filter. You can start with eBay.com, as they bid on almost every word in the dictionary, and many that aren’t, usually for one cent. Their ads are not worth carrying. There are a few as well with names like best8sites.com, or best4links.com, or the like - get rid of those as soon as they appear, as they’re only going to pay out pennies either.

Most of those sites are going to be what’re called Made For Adsense sites, or arbitrage sites. They exist by advertising on Adwords, and carrying Adsense ads themselves, bidding on low-priced keywords, and seeded with content aimed to get high-value ads. Since nobody can do that well manually, they tend to be generated by scripts, and contain no information of value. They’re a plague, and they can cut your earnings down to fractions of its potential when they appear.

Other Networks

There are other contextual ad networks, such as YPN, run by Yahoo!, and Omkase, run by Amazon. I can’t try YPN, because it’s only available to people in the US, and I’m already working through affiliate material for Amazon. Besides, the terms and conditions of AdSense prevent other contextual ads on the same pages, and I’m doing fairly well with Google for now. Some of this material will work as well for them.

Warning: Search Engine Optimisation is a black art. It’s so far from being a science that it comes out the far side, and sometimes starts looking like quantum physics. I know of one SEO practicioner in California who seems sane until you hear that he prays facing Google once a day. I’ve no idea if he’s serious; it has as much basis in reality as many techniques I’ve seen work.

The basic notion is that you need people to find your pages, and they do that in search engines. Search engines “like” or “dislike” particular factors in a page, and place them in the results for each search term accordingly. So you work out what those factors are, and build your pages to match.

Three Basic Rules:
1) Content Wins Again.
2) The Title Tag Comes Second.
3) Inbound Links Control The Rest.

I’ll expand on those now, and probably wander off on a few interesting tangents.

Content Wins Again

The search engines only care about text. You may have the best price, fastest shipping, most up-to-date news, but unless there’s a reasonable amount of relevant content on your page, you are not going to get anywhere. And the main thing that has to be in your content are the search phrases you want to be found on.

You can aim for maybe five to ten phrases for a given page - this is often called keyword loading. You’ll see mentions as well of keyword density, where someone has calculated that an optimal keyword density in your page about keyword density will get hits from search engine users looking for keyword density who want to read about keyword density. Yes, that sentence is intended to read badly; it’s what you get when you over-optimise your content, and even though it does sometimes trick the search engines, it annoys people. Don’t do it - annoyed customers don’t buy, click on ads, or the like, they just go somewhere else.

Here’s how to do it right: write your page text, ignoring any thoughts of keywords. When it’s written, look down along it, and pick out a few phrases people might search on. Think a bit about these, and come up with a few variations. Sometimes these will be easy - for “doctor who”, for instance, you can also think of “dr who”, “dr. who”, and bad spellings like “docter who”. However, someone might also search on “tardis man”, “time travelling doctor”, “scifi doctor scarf”, or any of a million other combinations. You need the ones that are most relevant to your content, and that people will be searching for.

Sometimes this is obvious, other times you need to resort to tools like Wordtracker, which tell you what search terms are in use, and suggest alternative ones. It will also do you the service of checking how mnay other sites are found using a given term. The free version only checks MSN; the paid one (you can pay for as little as a day’s access) checks all the major engines. I recommend it highly.

Anyway, you now have a list of relevant terms, and you know, or at least have a feeling for, which ones are better. Go through your text again, seeing if you can substitute some of the new ones for those that already exist, and if you can add others. Keep the text feeling natural - people are very good at spotting “artificial” text, and it puts them off.

You’re now done with that aspect. Pick one term that you think will get the best traffic - not the most, but the best - and go on to the second rule.

The Title Tag Comes Second

The title tag is in the head of your HTML document -