Disclosure: My employer ShoeMoney Media Group INC is co-owner of Auctionads LLC and while not mentioned specifically in the post below I thought it should be disclosed.
This is not the first time I have talked about these different forms of revenue but I always like to revisit the list. This time I also decided to list the pro’s and con’s along with companies who provide the services.
Affiliates -
Positives – Tons of Money, tools to get creative.
Negative – Most people do not trust Affiliate companies to pay out. In a recent poll conducted here of 730 people 58% voted they did not trust their affiliate company. I think this is due to a lack of transparency but I think we will have another poll soon to dive more into this.
Popular Companies: AzoogleAds, Commission Junction, CPA Empire, Max Bounty, XY7, share a sale, performics , linkshare
Skill Level To Implement – High skill required and a lot of imagination . Everyone one of the affiliate marketers I know doing over 1M/year in profit are great programmers and also very creative. To reach the top level of this monetization method you will need to learn how to deal with datafeeds and APIs
Contextual –
Positive – Easy to implement and setup. Cut and paste code.
Negative- Little editorial control for you, money can be hit or miss, hard for a site to start with contextual advertising because users have to leave for you to get paid.
Popular Companies – Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network, Chitika
Skill Level To Implement – A monkey can cut and paste code with contextual advertising where the real sauce is is creative implementation.
Subscription –
Positive – Implementation is pretty easy.
Negative- Takes a while for income to build up. It can take a while to find the right pricepoint and length
Popular Companies – Paypal ccbill
Skill Level To Implement – Medium skill required. Most forums have subscription integration for quick and easy setup.
Direct Ad Sales –
Positive – Highest payouts generally
Negative- You have to deal with people… hunting them down to pay there bills.
Skill Level To Implement – Easy.
Donations
100% profit
none
Skill Level To Implement – Easy.
About the author...
Jeremy Schoemaker – who has written 2412 posts on ShoeMoney.com.
Hi I am Jeremy Schoemaker and ShoeMoney.com is my blog. 99% of the post here are done by me but you will see others occasionally make guest posts. This blog is fun to write but for my day job I run several online companies.
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{ 166 comments… read them below or add one }
I like all five, but I’ll stick with Contextual for the time being.
You didn’t mention NeverBlueAds.com – best affiliate network ever. If you are doing CPA you need to check it out. I neither work for nb nor have I posted an affiliate link. Check it out guys, best support ever – ask for samantha she rocks!
Tob
Mistyped URL in Auctionads LLC
Could you discuss your reasoning behind saying affiliate marketing takes a high skill level? Most affiliate programs have copy-and-paste code (ie. Amazon). Does your comment have to do with dealing with the datafeeds and APIS’s? Maybe I’m just missing something.
Maybe I’m ignorant but what is APIS? Did you mean API’s?
nice post!
it can be easy but if you really wanna make money you need to deal with that kind of stuff. think all the comparison price websites for example, they just grab data from other site and use them to make money
So when you show sample landing pages etc (ie like this) is that just using one of the affiliate programs you mentioned or is that more of a “direct” affiliate type implementation?
I like affiliates and subscription because income can be recurring and you don’t really need a huge amount of traffic to make some decent money.
To REALLY make money on contextual ads, you need some pretty heavy traffic levels and awesome ad blending.
Great advice Jeremy.
Why not expirement? You could be earning a lot more and not know baout it
Nice list, even if it is a bit simplified. I still think that the best thing is to combine them in some way.
Also, you left out things like textlinkads, or is that included under ad sales?
“Skill Level To Implement – High skill required and a lot of imagination . Everyone one of the affiliate marketers I know doing over 1M/year in profit are great programmers and also very creative. To reach the top level of this monetization method you will need to learn how to deal with datafeeds and APIS’s”
Regarding your comments on being a successful Affiliate Marketeer, I have to disagree. I fall well above your 1M a year category and can’t program/code to save my life. I don’t even know what a datafeed is or what to do with it. All of my sites/landing pages can be built (and have been built) by people with design skills only. However I still make a very good living out of AM.
Yes you need to be creative and imaginative but technical skills? Yes they are undoubtedly useful but essential? No.
Contextual and affiliate earnings are still the way to go for smaller sites like me. I guess the rest are not that viable yet till one gets pretty bigger and more popular.
I guess TLA are somewhere along the lines of Direct Ad Sales.
I believe in the fact that you have to try out one or more alternative methods to see which works out fine or better for you. Who knows, perhaps a combination of two or more will generate much more income than what you are doing now.
You can find many good programmers for a decent price on freelance sites, great ideas are more important and most important is tons of targeted keyword traffic and that takes work.
great post here.But i still stay up with contextual ads right now.
The negative to donations is that you have to actively “beg” for them. Unlike ads where if you stick them in the right place people click and you earn, donations needs to have a constant reminder. Thats been my experience with them at least. You also have to deal with someone like paypal, which of course, is always fun.
yeah good point about TLA, yeah I guess they are semi-direct ad sales
“”Popular Companies: AzoogleAds, Commission Junction, CPA Empire, Max Bounty, XY7, share a sale, performix , linkshare”"
I admire the courage and strength it must have taken to NOT say AuctionAds here
If anything he’d mean APIs.
The only reference to APIS I could find anywhere was:
Advanced Papyrological Information System and
Advance Passenger Information System
I can handle working with API’s
Contextual advertising is way overrated. Point 5 deserves more attention, especially if you are a blogger. It’s not exactly passive income, but again bloggers aren’t supposed to be passive to begin with.
Regards, George
yes, i agree traffic is the first factor, then earning from that is second. you can convert most with good placement.
PPC is the difficult area, as well as SEO as most SEO is really about age and links.
I think it would be helpful if you put like 1-10 rating scales on those so that the comparison is a little less qualitative for those who don’t have much experience in it. For example, I’d say affiliate has the potential to be 10 compared to contextual which has a potential to be like a 5.
It also depends on the site, if you’re doing gadget reviews I doubt a donation button would work. It requires loyal readership that care about you, not SERP traffic that is just popping in and out.
Trying new things is what it’s all about, you can do it without risking too much other than your time – that’s what makes this industry so incredible. It’s not like you have to drop thousands on inventory to see if it’ll work.
Hmmm I’ve never heard of them before, anyone else have experience with them? What are some of the reasons why they’re the best besides Samantha?
I think that he meant that in order to do well in affiliate marketing, you need to be imaginative and hard working. Anyone can throw up an affiliate ad but you have to position it correctly in order to increase its profitability.
You can probably revise Shoe’s statement to be “are great programmers or can manage great programmers”, but great programmers are still in the equation either way.
50% of the pluses, 0% of the minuses, it’s nice not having to track people down for payment.
Well I don’t use or manage any programmers whatsoever so no, I don’t think they are “essential” to the equation.
I figured API’s. APIS is something totally different, not related to computers or the internet. I can handle API’s, just not APIS.
Very true. Just need some patience to work through the different options.
Are they a new group/company?
Jeremy, the disclosure up top was a smart addition. Otherwise I’d have expected to see lots of questions about that.
While i focus more on CPA. I personnally feel for diversification reason you should be experimenting with them all!
Jeremy its not “API’s” it is “APIs” as Icheb noted. You are trying (and failing) to go for a plural, not a possessive.
I thought of that line regarding contextual ads: people has to leave for you to get payed. true, true, true, I have thought about this thing often! That is why I personally think that it is difficult to make a name for a site is the main revenue stream is contextual ads. Normally you have to keep people on your site as much as possible, then you can make your site stand out of the crowd. While with contextual ads, you just pray for them to…leave your site (ok, through ad click, but it is the same, in a way). That is why here I think that unique visitors are very important, returning visitors learn how to avoid ads.
Excuse me. I didn’t know this forum was for fixing critiquing my English. I’m glad I now know, but was it really necessary to point out my ignorance on this matter for all the world to see?
And yes, I typed fixing and critiquing one after another on purpose. Not really.
You might be surprised at how well a mixture of contextual and affiliate ads performs
On your list above it’s Performics not Performix which goes to some software company.
Chitika is not contextual, I believe it started that way but changed models in order to be on the same pages as Adsense, YPN etc.
“Most people do not trust Affiliate companies to pay out.”
As far as that, I’ve never had a problem getting paid 99% of the time. As far as the trust factor, it seemed the majority of the participants in the survey did offer/lead type stuff for CPA networks, then I could understand the whole lack of trust issue. There can be fraud lots of places moreso when doing lead type stuff. Also sometimes when first starting out when you have little traffic and might get a sale here and there, that thought someone is skimming you somehow might creep in. If you progress and start getting lots of traffic and sales on the hour you’ll find most stuff tracks just fine and pays just fine. There’s always a few bad apples out there but I think most merchants want to track and pay because doing so grows their program, if you try to screw someone over, sooner or later someone will find out and that can kill your program.
I’m surprised Teddy hadn’t correct Shoe’s grammar (or spelling) in the past because, let’s be honest, it’s the delivery and not the message that’s important here. Please take note of the sarcasm.
Who built: “All of my sites/landing pages can be built (and have been built) by people with design skills only.”?
I prefer a combination of AdSense (or AdBrite), TLA and now AuctionAds. The three together, if you have enough enough traffic and basically clicks to distribute, can be a killer combination for making money.
Great post, btw!
You were the one asking about APIS or API’s so I think it was only fair that someone pointed it out to help explain what you asked…
Designers.
This may be old news, but has anyone else seen the new google logo on their adsense ads. This is the first time I have seen it.
Anyone can answer this:
What programing languages should we get good at for affiliate marketing? php and what else? Do you suggest we take a class at the local community college to get started with the basics? Or are there any really good free websites/tutorials online that can teach absolute beginners? Or even any good books for beginners? How did you learn?
I agree as well. A mixture of a few sources and playing around with them till you maximize the monetary earnings from them is the way to go.
Very true, that’s what I look for, the returning visitor ratio.
Never heard of them either, if they were so good I’d think the community would be buzzing about them.
Great breakdown on methods to profit. Currently, contextual pays out the best. Since my article directory got a PR4 in the last update, I can look into selling ads directly.
They are very good for personal support / advice. I call my affiliate manager and get ideas for new campaigns, as well as sort out any issues easily. They have lots of available campaigns, and tons of potential for an affiliate marketer.
I didn’t understand your last comment Jim. All of my websites were built be web designers. None of who are programmers, none of who know what an API or datafeed is. And nor do I.
Contextual is a good way to monetize, but it doesn’t always pay the best.
I’d imagine people have different results with different methods, so I think it’s fair to say there is no “best” way to monetize a website.
I think that PHP is sufficient, many people have talked at length about the power of the whole LAMP stack. I think imagination is more important but having a solid idea of what’s programmatically possible is important too.
On the contrary, I think contextual is horrible for small sites with little traffic. Subscriptions will work if you have valuable content but a slow growing reach.
TLA has an affiliate program though.. $25 for every new signup.
Right now, my daily volume is my biggest challenge. I receive hundreds of unique visitors, not thousands. Once my volume increases, I can look into other types of revenue.
Frankly speaking, I don’t trust affiliates either. I was surprised to see how many others don’t either. Paradoxically, I was also surprised to see that it has such a high monetization potential…
Oh I misunderstood, i thought you meant that you had software that built sites for you and so I was wondering who built the software (errr programmers). I just misunderstood your initial comment, that’s all. Cheers
I think it’s time for us to start pushing affiliates a little more. Hopefully I will be surprised.
Yeah, donations are funny. Unless the site is providing something, like a plugin or app, I don’t do the donates. I’d rather go through the ads and donate indirectly!
Good blog post. I think the best option, once your blog gets to a certain size, is to try to attract specific advertising from people in your industry.
i was out for vacations and see this great post today …
It is verywell written.
Affiliates marketing is real tough you need alot of skills as per your saying. but what i think along with skills you should need the right visitors that convert. Entertainment sites (Offering Free servies) for my experience are the poor Converting medium.
Finding right customer at the right time is what i think the key to affiliates marketing. I am learning and hope to come up with some solution that help me to build some good income with affilaties.
Other source of incomes you mentioned are just a juice that many people will take if you have designed a good bar.
I agree. I use http://www.adpeeps.com to expirement wtih dif. offers to find out which convert the best.
It also works good for testing different ads.
Or just have an insane # of unique visits a day
Yeah, a lot of people I know make some GOOOD money through TLA.
Becareful some are just out there to take your ideas.
I don’t think were talking about monetizing blogs specifically more “websites” in general. But yeah, specific advertisers for a blog or ANY site normally pay better than anything.
3 of 5 for me. I’ve never done subscriptions, and never asked for a donation.
By the way, I’m not sure that these are all totally passive, as you still have to produce enough content, or run enough PPC campaigns to keep traffic levels up. But when the ‘work’ is fun, then you’re hardly working at all.
How about paid to review sites like payperpost, sponsoredreviews, etc? They are offering oppurtunites in the range of 10-1000$ for bloggers.
You also need a good product to promote to begin with
You summarized quite well the downside of contextual ads. I keep promising myself to ditch those AdSense ads, but somehow I can’t let go of the 10 cents I make daily
To skip the API part and actually answer your question, affiliate programs give you much more freedom to tinker with the look, and you can use them in just about any way imaginable. If you throw in stuff like link cloaking and the expertise required to find the products suited to your website you will soon see that this domain is quite complex
Thanks geegel. I appreciate finally getting the response I was looking for.
Donations CAN bring in a decent amount of income. I have some busy forums that have a simple paypal button which has brought in a few thousand dollars. Not too bad for doing nothing.
Yeah. I have. They’ve been doing alot of different things lately. Sometimes they put a Google logo up. Sometimes they make the entire ads in italics. Some links have a shopping cart next to them (which I think means that site uses Google checkout?). I think they are just testing the waters to see what works best.
Great post — I think it’s a very accurate breakdown of different online marketing ventures. Specifically key here is the fact that affiliate marketing has a HIGH level of difficulty to successfully implement on a large scale. There is a lot of web rhetoric that seems to indicate that it is absurdly easy, which makes me laugh each and every time I hear it.
nice topic to discuss! very informative
I would have to think donations would have a downfall of not being to profitale.
WOW, this is great. I can’t believe I have not started sooner with making money on line with website advertising. I wonder what makes more money, advertising or having a site that sells a product and or service?
Do donations really pull in any profits? I guess if you have tons of traffic the numbers just work out, but it doesn’t seem like too many people would pay when they don’t absolutely have to, unless its for a good cause.
All good information to know; thanks for putting it all in once place Jeremy. I will definitely be experimenting with these various methods on my site.
I’m still stuck with this Google Ads, not like what expecting. But still experimenting this Google Ads, anyone have way to increase traffic ?
I like the gold and silver bidding on my blogs , I think its a real expected add on.
Thanks
The beauty of shoemoney is that he tells it like it is. Everyone is tripping over themselves to do last year’s money making idea.
experiment to get the best results
My blog only have Contextual
You might sell links with “Text link ads” if you have good PR and lots of sites.
Thanks for the tips. Do you think some niche blog or marketing niche perform better ?
Right now I only have kontera and adsense, I can’t even figure out how to put adsense on my site. But I’ll figure it out. I have just started to blog and have little to no knowledge of php and css so I’m having a little trouble
this sounds excellent… the only problem is how do attract direct advertising?
i hate pointless comments like this… of course you did do well shoe… ( could this comment be pointless? DAM!)
Direct ads and affiliates are kind of difficult for smaller sites despite the flexibility.. CPC is best till the site has developed fully
I somewhat new to the CPA model and do ok with adsense, but i do agree the being able to setup sites with api feeds takes it a another level. You can take a 1 page site and tudn it into a 200,000 ofr someone elses content. …aghh I need to hit the php for dummies book.
Contextual is probably still my favorite because of the instant income and easy implementation but I want to get into alot of direct ad selling soon.
I would have to think donations would have a downfall of not being to profitable.
What is Contextual and how do you make money with it?
thats because in my experience neverblueads sucks balls.
I use almost all of the forms of advertising above, but I am most successful with Google Adsense and Affiliate advertising.
well …good posting….but which one i must do 1st for beginner like me????
I like google adsense … but the most difficult to make more traffic …
affiliate marketing is kind of a mystery to me sometime. still need some more knowledge to get the right way of using it as one of the monetization methods. but definitely passive income should be the model to follow.
thanks, you give me hope…now I just need action.
Affiliate marketing is definately the hardest to master, but if you’re starting out as a new disciple utilize other forms of income first as your learning to master the affiliate waterways.
Your posts are always things that are on my mind. Ok, most of them.
Nice ideas there.
Affiliate marketing is hard to master, but the payoff is awesome.
From WikiPedia (from google) “Contextual advertising is the term applied to advertisements appearing on websites or other media, such as content displayed in mobile phones, where the advertisements are selected and served by automated systems based on the content displayed by the user.” Basically adsense and the like.
You mentioned people not trusting affiliates to pay out as a reason they avoid some of them, I did a paper on this topic and interviewed 90 students and found that it might be simpler than that (90 is too few, i know).
What I found was that they already had adsense accounts and a cj account and a couple of others, they didn’t want more accounts giving little payments each, they want one main account with a large balance and easy to use control panel.
Managing each one seperately was the biggest complaint, not trust, from these 90 people. Big sums brings big satisfaction and I guess the work required to control lots of little incomes was enough to keep them away.
Passive income is the best. It pays your bills and can be counted on.
Yes, you are right. But most people are using the first one – Affiliates.
affiliate marketing is certainly an extremely hard thing to understand, every day I get closer and every day there seems to be something new I don’t know…
I’m a programmer, just not a web programmer. I’m trying to really get started into all of this affiliate marketing business. Glad to find this site.
Donations would be great! No penalties from the big G, readers don’t get sidetracked or annoyed by ads, and if you set yourself up as a not-for-profit, presumably they’d be tax free too.
db
With me, Azoogle is the best affiliate company, second is CJ. I made at least $20 per day with Azoogle, not bad for me
.
great ideas, I am going to try to pursue affiliate ads more, haven’t learned it well enough yet to really make any substantial money from it like I have with selling direct advertising and with google adsense.
I have been using most of them, and I saw YPN, Adsense, Auctionads, Direct sales gave me most of the affiliate money
Using affiliate ads as content is huge in this regard. You build it once and traffic continues to roll in. The money might not be there all the time, but if the payout is big enough per sale, it can be a great source of income. Easy way to make an extra 1000 or more per month.
So, Jeremy, when are we gong to see you write an ebook or something? There’s some more passive income and I’m sure a ton of your readers would purchase ANYTHING you write on internet marketing, affiliate marketing, or anything like that…
So, how soon brother!?
Just out of curiosity, did you guys ever do the follow up poll that you mentioned in this post? I think it would be interesting to see the results.
having your own info poduct would make a great selection to passive streams of income but you have an autoresponder and other things
Thanks for all the informative comments – I’ve been struggling along with many of the issues raised here – obviously I am not alone!
Affiliate marketing was “sold” to me as an easy way to make a few dollars, well it hasn’t turned out to be so easy………
I would like to know if someone know what is second things after adsense ?
good ideas. i should make a website
I do contextual and affiliate.
My biggest problem at the moment is lack of traffic
Great advice, time will tell I suppose. Thanks
I wish there was a resource to tell you if you are making money within norms for adsense in Re: to eCPM and CTR. And how that changes over time.
Hard to course correct without the charts to do so…
Direct ad sales have to be the best – if you can get them to pay up front.
Hey Shoe…where is your donations button? I want to donate you some money for your awesome posts…thanks for everything friend!
You know I haven’t earn a cent from internet. Well I know we can. But at times hard for me. But now I have a premising blog. I can wet my hand by monetizing it. Will look in o your tips thanks.
for me subscription should be the top income. donation and other ads doesn’t hurt at all.
IMO the important thing for any of these to work is to know how to build up traffic.
I like all 5 but i will stick with MLMarketing.
you missed one, begging,
Right now I am using GoogleAdsense and PepperjamNetwork. I am so new I have not gernerated any profit right yet but I know I will soon.
Thanks,
Rob West
Subscription is a good way to make passive income but you need to be an expert in the thing that you are offering and it can take up abit of your time when enqueries starts coming in.
I have done subscription in some other niche but hey, it’s really taking to much of a time.
Can anyone suggest any subscription method they are using and maybe i can tweak it into my subscription model.
million thanks
I am not sure if donation will work. I have not try it though. I would appreciate if anyone who has done donation to give some valuable feedback. Would love to hear it and any tips to position it.
Cheers!
Thanks for the info. Great blog.
http://www.nela.in/
Awesome post. Very very informative for those people trying to make some extra cash.
Wow nice info! I would still say contextual is the easiest to start, but hardly any money at the beggining
an oldie but goodie shoe – i love this article as it’s definitely giving me insights on where i wanna take my blog.
Yeh this is a good summarising post about monetizing blogs. keep it up!
Becareful ….. and really useful… keep it up..
Very down-to-earth review…and for once, it didn’t go over my head!
I believe in the fact that you have to try out one or more alternative methods to see which works out fine or better for you. Who knows, perhaps a combination of two or more will generate much more income than what you are doing now.
Hi Jeremy- I love affiliates. I only advertise 3 right now – and I have had my site for about 4 months. On one of them I have made $600 last month-totally passive! We write about this affiliate extensively on our manifest-passive-income website. We only use affiliates that we know-we have used their products and/or services, and we are huge fans. I believe this is the only way to gain trust, and ultimately be successful making this type of passive income.
Best of Luck to all,
Kim
Very nice blog.Thanks for the valuable contributions to this site. Have good works.
Great blog and valuable article.
Thanks.
I lost my pagerank because of contextual ads. Now i cant get it back.
I use CJ and its ok, not bad but it could be better.
מאמרים הינה אפשרות נוספת ליצירת כסף, כתיבת מאמרים והפצתם יכולה ליצור אפיק חדש של הכנסה
nice website !!
Great article. Thanks for taking the time to write this for us!
Thank you for the article, especially the recommendations of the affiliate program that can be trusted to pay commission.
Do people really donate? I’ve never seen anyone actually do this. I wish someone would donate like..I don’t know…a million dollars to me.
Being a designer gives you loads of opportunities to develop passive income, like designing icons for websites and selling them through image banks.
I really liked this article, this one goes right into my stumble upon akun
Nice post!
I am a big fan of contextual advertising. It replaced my full-time income in just 3 years!
I also just added Vibrant Media’s In-Text ads. This really is something a monkey could do. There’s nothing to learn about ad placement. Just ad the script. The script will turn a few words on every page into ad links.
Overnight I was making an extra $760 dollars a month!
You need to have 500,000 page impressions a month to apply for Vibrant Media’s program. If you don’t, you can apply for Infolinks of Kontera. These programs are well regarded as well.
I hope this information is a big help to someone.
I just don’t get it…… Why build a blog and take the time to grow and maintain it if your not going to make money? Do people actually blog just for the fun of it?
Seriously… Please explain.
Regards,
James
I keep checking the website for new tuts but this one has been very interesting and knowledge full .