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Subvert and Profit affiliate program

Has anyone tried a Subvert and Profit affiliate link?

I'm not interested at all in even registering with Digg or Stumbleupon but I'm sure many people are (the same people willing to take those post in my forums for 10 cents jobs). Anyone had any luck with this one?

Another try at affiliate earning

I've never had great success with affiliate programs. I send them tons of traffic and they fail to convert so I end up with nothing or at least very little. A recent email made me think that could change.

They generate leads for tour guides and they want people to request free travel brochures. The original email said that since the brochures were free, conversion rates tended to be high. I have a ton of travel traffic so I figured I'd give it a shot.

In the first day I sent them 84 people. I earned $0. Now obviously I can't make money if I'm giving my traffic away for free. I really don't need a poorly performing affiliate program distracting my readers from Adsense and the text links that actually pay so these guys get a few more days but if I've sent them 1,000 visits and they're still not paying for that traffic, my latest foray into affiliate marketing will end as all the others have.

How many bars on Commission Junction do you have?

I was recently rejected by an affiliate program on Comission Junction immediately after applying. I emailed them and asked them to review my site manually. They declined:

CitiConsumer Cards has very strict parameters they use to review affiliate applications. One of those parameters requires all affiliates to have a CJ network ranking of 4 or 5 bars. Your networking ranking is at 2 bars. Please feel free to apply at a later date for CitiConsumer cards if your account reaches that 4-5 bar ranking.

I suppose they do this to keep out the bad sites, but not checking my site out personally is costing them. I'm certain that they'd get a number of signups if I were to promote them on my travel blog. I suppose it's costing me as well but I'm sure I'll find otheer travel-related credit card affiliate programs to experiement with.

Sauna and bathroom affiliate marketing

Wasauna.com sells products to homeowners looking to upgrade their homes. Products include Wasauna's luxurious shower, home spa and bath products. They specailize in infrared saunas and steam showers. If you take a moment to look at the products you might be marketing, they are luxury items that most of us would love to have.

I mention them here because they have a very interesting affiliate program. Interesting because the payout is $100.00 US. If you can build a page that convices people they need a luxurious shower and then offer a link to Wasauna.com, you have a chance to earn a nice passive income.

Affiliates often don't convert traffic

I don't like affiliate programs in general for trying to monetize my web site. I find that with Amazon.com I have to send them hundreds of clicks for them to convert one into a sale. Same thing with most CJ programs I'm in.

Pay for performance is great for the advertisers who don't have to work too hard to get a decent ROI, but hasn't worked for me as a web publisher. I recently sent this email to someone asking me to join their pay for performance lead generation program:

Unless the payout per lead is quite high, it is unlikely that I would be interested. I've found that text links and Adsense monetize space and traffic better than Affiliate programs, many of which have trouble converting clicks into sales.

Clixgalore Affiliate program

I joined
Clixgalore a few days ago because I was planning to write a review of WSNlinks. I've already earned 5.00 from one sale of WSN links. It's taken me over a year to get ten bucks from Amazon and 35 or so from Commision Junction so this is a promising start. I would suggest trying them out. They've got some interesting advertisers. In addition to the WSNlinks, I'm also trying one of their ads out on my network marketing blog.

My only criticism would be that the site is not easy enough to use. For example I wanted to find another WSN Links ad so I did a search. The search turned up WSN Links, but then I couldn't find a link to the affiliate links. I guess I have to to browse through all the links in its category until I find it which is somewhat irritating, especially since it doesn't say what category WSN Links is in (I'm guessing "computer").

Adwords to market affiliate products

Here are some practical guidelines for using Adwords to promote affiliate products. Guidelines are given for how much money to spend testing new Adwords campaigns, as well as how long to test new ads:

If a particular keyword gets 100 impressions with no click throughs, that is a good sign to erase it. If a particular keyword has over 100 impressions with a click through rate (CTR) of less than 0.5%, erase it. Likewise, if your entire test product has received 100 click throughs and no sales, it's time to end the promotion of that product.

I can't agree with some of the advice. For example a low CTR (less than 0.5%) is not bad if the few visitors who click are buyers. I certainly agree that 100 clicks and no sales would be time to give up!

There's also advice on when to stop testing and begin a campaign in earnest. Basically, if the ratio of "how much you're paying to promote the product verses how much you've made on the product is 0.75 or less, keep promoting the product." In other words, you should be seeing a 25% profit margin (or greater).

Further advice goes something like this: If you can generate more than one sale of the product and still have a good cost to revenue ration, you can stop testing and create a new campaign just for that product.

Personally, I'd like to see more than two sales before creating a new campaign. I'm not a scientist, but I would guess that from a scientifc perspective, two sales might be statistically insignificant.

Affiliate advertising for your site

I signed up for shareasale.com some time ago, and I'm just beginning to explore the types of merchant ads they have available for webmasters. I would say that if you're looking for smaller merchants (You won't find companies like Ebay here) this is a good program to join as they have some interesting things like a domain appraisal service. There are a few pay per click programs, but the best of these seems to offer only 5 cents/click and that's for a web hosting company.