Jeremy Shoemaker, aka Shoemoney is well know amongst internet forums but has recently started a radio show on webmasterradio.FM.

This week’s show is about making money from forums and social networking sites. I’d guess there will be a bit about monetising through advertising, which can be difficult enough as forum users are not distracted from the forum content that easily. Hopefully he’ll also talk a bit about doing business through forums, forming business relationships and maybe buying and selling websites etc.

I listened to last week’s show and it is well worth your time to listed to this guy.

Somebody’s told you about affiliate programs, and how his pal is making thousands of pounds a month for one hour’s work a day – all of it down to running an affiliate programs website. You want to do it too? No bother, easy money – em, yes and no.

Making a few quid each month out of affiliate programs is easy money – with relatively little effort you should be able to pay for your website hosting and maybe have enough readies left over for a meal from time to time. Place some links on your website and forget about them.

If you really want serious income from affiliate programs though, you will have to apply yourself as hard as in any other business. It takes a long time and a lot of effort to build up the traffic to a website to the point where your advertisers are paying you hundreds or even thousands per month.

Where do I start with affiliate programs?

First off you need to have a website. Preferably a website that focuses on a niche subject that people are interested in. That might be football, underground fusion jazz, looking after tropical fish or anything else. It is pretty much guaranteed that there is some knowledge in your head that the rest of the world would find useful. Buils the website. Lots of pages, lots of text. Avoid bells and whistles at this stage, they will just trip you up with search engines.

Once you’ve got a site online you need to find some advertisers who’s adverts complement your site. The best way is two go through one of the big affiliate marketing networks.

Commission Junction
Tradedoubler

By signing up with one of these large networks, all your earnings go into one pot and are paid out as a lump sum at the end of each month. This is great if you have several adverts earning small amounts each.

Both of these affiliate network companies have detailed instructions on getting the best from your adverts. They will keep you updated on new programmes and some have specific tutorials aimed at maximising your affiliate revenue over peak selling times like Christmas and January.

So I sign up and the affiliate marketing money just pours in?

No. You really do have to work at this bit.

First make sure everything in your site is optimised for search engines. You’ll find more in the rest of this site about optimising your website, or go to a site like www.searchenginewatch.com for really detailed instructions.

Get links pointing at your site. Contact people who’s sites complement the subject of your site and ask to swap links with them. This is a crucial step, and is very time consuming. Set yourself a task to contact a few people every day to swap links and before too long your site will start to perform very well, attracting not just visitors from the other sites, but search engine spiders, resulting in high rankings for your affiliate marketing website.

Use all other standard practises for promoting your site. Advertising, flyers, business cards, mailshots. Watch the return on investment on everything you spend though. If your affiliate revenue doesn’t match your spend, there’s not much point in continuing with that method of marketing.

Submit your affiliate site to search engines, directories, and anyone else offering free listings.

Increase the content of your site. Write new articles all the time. Set yourself a goal. Add one piece of new information to your affiliate website every day. Not only does this increase the content, but it also helps with search engines as they see your site as an active site, and deserved of higher rankings.

Check back to your affiliate network regularly to see what your income is, but also to look for new advertisers for all your new content.

I’ve heard Adsense is a good way to make money? Yes. very good, but it is not strictly an affiliate program, more an advertising program and we’ll look at that in more detail in another article.

All of the above can be studied in much more detail and we’ll follow up on key points in future articles.

What you need to get started with Adsense: If you’ve already got a website generating lots of traffic, Adsense from Google is an excellent way to make it pay for itself. With Adsense, you add a selection of adverts from Google to your pages and each time someone clicks one of the links, you earn some money.Sign up for an Adsense account at www.Google.co.uk/adsense . You’ll need to let them know your site details so they can review it to make sure your site is appropriate for their content. The adsense approval process takes from 24hrs to 1 week.

Once you’ve been approved you can start adding the Adsense code for whatever banner style you choose, to your pages. You can change the colour and style of the ad’s through your control panel. Then all you do is upload your pages to the web. Google senses what content is on your page and displays appropriate adverts from their advertisers.

Should you find that a direct competitor is being advertised on your site you can block their Adsense adverts through your control panel.

Play around with different placements of the adverts and different colour schemes to see what gives the best click-thru rates. The more traffic you’ve got, the more chance of gaining those clicks, so make sure your site is optimised and submitted to the search engines.

Once your account is over $100USD at the end of a month, a cheque is generated 30 days later and sent to you.

If you live in the UK, ask your bank how to lodge your Adsense cheque. Most banks make a charge of £5-10GBP. If you’re making plenty of money from click-thrus though, this wont bother you much. Depending on the deposit method of the Adsense cheque into your UK account, it could take a couple of days to 6 weeks to credit your account. Ask your bank for the quickest method.

UPDATE: Adsense now send cheques in GBP so you can deposit them straight into your UK bank. They also now offer a EFT - electronic funds transfer to cut out the post delays.