Hi there,

I have been promising myself to try and make some money.
If I had some recommendations it might help me to pull the thumb out of you know where.

I was wondering if you will be putting up a top ten list of ways to advertise any website and use affiliates.

I have looked at quite a few affiliates but all the double talk and sales bunk is driving me to distraction.

Some of the other forums have sub-forums eg php has code snippets.
If somebody with experience recommended just one or two of each type of advertising and affilates it would be a good starting point for newbies like me.
The emphasis would be that somebody has else all ready been driven to distraction

I know you don't want every tom dick and harriette advertising affiliates but this would just be the moderators top ten ways to make money or advertise.

By the way the title of my post should drag in some viewers if they're interested in recommendations too.

Junk ked.

Show me the money!

I guess one can look at making money from affiliate programs in a couple of different ways.

1) With a products only site.
A good example would be an Amazon bookstore, using an AWS script. This type of site would simply focus on selling product and making comissions.

2) Content site
This is a more subtle way of generating affiliate income. An example would be a review site where you'd provide your feedback/opinions of a product and provide an affiliate link for it or related products.

If you are brand new to affiliate marketing, I would suggest you do a couple of things:

- Evaluate your websites. Are you going to integrate ads into an existing site? If so, what type of traffic do you have and what type of products could you advertise?

- Look for relevant affiliate programs. The easiest way to do this is to sign up for CJ, Linkshare, Shareasale, etc. There are also a whole lot of independent affiliate programs, but they may require a bit more searching.

- If you are looking for a one-stop-affiliate-program, consider Amazon as it sells just about anything and everything you can think of.

Oooh! This is a very interesting question. I wish I had the time to really post a detailed response because it's something I think a lot about.

re: Advertising

There is no simple answer to your question though. Everything is related to the type of website you want to develop, promote and potentially find some returns for your effort(s).

To give you an idea (briefly) of what I am trying to say, let me use GIDForums™ as an example.

This forum is NOT selling anything. It's simply a place for like-minded people to exchange information. So paying to advertise (promote) the site is frankly, a step in the wrong direction in my opinion. Optimising the website for search engines (SEO) was the only cost-effective way to get the site known to it's target market - and this is where I put the most effort into this site.

SEO in general, is a good idea for any kind of site, so spending as much as a month researching ideas on SEO is something worth much more than any ad campaign you can spend your money on, no matter how inexpensive or effective the campaign is.

So if you plan a website where you're simply publishing original works, for the world to read, then you should not consider paid advertising. On the other hand, if you're actually selling a product or service, targetted advertising via services like those offered by Google's AdWord and FindWhat.com are hard to beat.

re: Making $ and Affiliate Programs.

I have just one mantra when it comes to these. Go with the "middleman" and ones that have a history of payment with consistent and good reputation. There are too many scams out there and when you deal with affiliate programs that are run in-house, you're just asking to be taken for a ride. The most reliable one in my opinion (and at this time) is LinkShare.com. I don't trust any of the others.

One thing for sure, you are going to find it very difficult to make something decent out of it alone, though there are some people who claim to make a comfortable living from affiliate programs. Whether this is a fact or just "spin"; I will never know since I have never met anyone in real life who is successful at doing this.