Adding Revenue Streams

The Adsense program revolutionized online advertising and provided enough revenue to help grow my site to the next level. But as in any business, keeping all your eggs in one basket is risky. If I was going to someday make a living off my sites, I needed to figure out other ways to make money.

I had tried many of the generic affiliate shops in the past: Amazon, eBay, Commission Junction, etc. They all had one thing in common that I did not like... They were too big to care about a small publisher like me.

Then one day I received an e-mail from a company. They offered their own in-house affiliate program and wanted to invite me to join. They seemed to know a lot about my site and wanted to work together. We were able to setup a completely custom integration with their products into our site. However after a few months, and no sales it looked as though we had hit another dead end. Then one day, out of the blue, I received a check in the mail. It was only for about $60, but it was a check! I had earned my first commission!

I realized this was a legitimate program that paid out. I put all my efforts for the next month into providing more exposure for their products. The more work I did, the more I started to make. My earnings-per-click started climbing as I focused on targeting the products to users that were actually looking for something similar. Over the next year I would double my overall monthly revenue because of this new program.

From then on I learned to only focus my time and energy on affiliate partners, not affiliate programs. I only would only work with a program that had an actual person I could talk to, and only programs that had in-house affiliate management systems. If they gave me a link to signup and it redirected to Commission Junction, I would simply reply "not interested". I learned that too many middlemen is not good business, or at least not good for my small business.

Next up... Banned from Yahoo...