How Affiliates Go About Earning Commissions

Affiliate marketers are faced with multiple choices on how to promote their favorite affiliate site. I will go into more detail later on on each marketing technique but here is a list of the most common ways that affiliates use to make commissions.

1. Blogging. My favorite method. There are many individuals who make a very good living from putting affiliate links in their blogs. Well written blogs with either good information or honest and well written reviews of affiliate products have high conversions. Tip: putting an afiliate link in the main text of a blog produces the highest conversion rates.

2. Squidoo lenses. Good way to make money online with affiliate links.

3. Advertising in Google adwords. Affiliates put small google ads in the search results and pay for every click trying to make more money from the commissions than the cost of the adwords. This is very competitive and often times low profit margins. Despite the challenges there are still many affiliate marketers who do well with adwords.

4. Articles. This is becoming very popular. An affiliate writes articles and submits them to article directories. The articles contain a link to an affiliate landing page of some kind in the bio box. Affiliates can do very well with this if they are able to crank out hundreds of well written articles. The traffic quality and conversion rates from well written articles is very good.

5. Forums. Posting in several high traffic forums is a great way to establish yourself as an expert and earn commissions.

6. Ezine advertising. Many affiliates do well with this. Even though conversions generally are not as good as having your own list the cost of advertising in most ezines is very low and your ad can easily be seen by tens of thousands of readers.

7. Building your own list or ezine. This is how most superaffiliates make a large percentage of their commissions.

8. Banner advertising. Not very effective overall in generating commissions. I don't recommend paying for banners on other sites. If you have a high traffic site and have the room for a banner it might be worth doing. Another option is to use free banner exchanges.

9. Contextual advertising. This involves placing small classified type ads on other websites. These are also known as content ads.

10. Newspaper advertising. This involves placing classified ads in newspapers. The response to ads will vary greatly depending on what paper you advertise in.