

Ask HN: Does anyone actually make any money from Affiliate Advertising? - Ardit20

I have been using commission junction and link synergy for over a year to advertise products in addition to adsense, but not one sale have I experienced.<p>Am I an odditity, or is this pretty normal?
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il
When I was in college, I paid all of my expenses- food, rent, and out of state
tuition doing affiliate marketing on the side. This was not throwing up
banners on a site, but rather running PPC campaigns to affiliate offers
(arbitrage). I also learned incredibly valuable marketing/PPC/getting traffic
skills I am applying to my startup.

Go to affbuzz.com and read all of the blogs there, you'll learn a lot about
how to actually make money with affiliate marketing. (Step 1: Stop using CJ).

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josefresco
What would you recommend in place of CJ? Direct affiliate relationships?

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iworkforthem
affiliate marketing = using $1 to make > $1. how to do it, varies from pple to
pple, some use ppv, ppc, jv, etc. like @il said it...affbuzz.com is a good
place to start.

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wolfrom
I ran a modestly successful affiliate site from 2002-2006. I did very little
work, and could have done much more to succeed (in retrospect), but it did
provide 20% of my income during that time. I recently attempted to relaunch
the site after a few years away, but found that the market is much tighter
than before (I made only a handful of sales during a two month test run; I
also believe that consumers are now more skeptical of affiliate marketing
sites.

I think that given the right market and some hard work, it's possible to make
enough to live from affiliate marketing, but I've found that I prefer to work
with friends on more ambitious projects.

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terra_t
Depends what you're selling, and how you sell it. I make maybe $10 a month
posting affiliate links to Twitter, but it's because I'm trying to share
things with people, not trying to make cash.

You'd better believe that somebody is making money on all of those "flat
tummy" ads you see all over the web. A few years ago, black hat SEO got a lot
more competitive -- you've really got to do criminal things (like hack
people's Wordpress installations) to rank of highly competitive terms.

A lot of the people who were doing black hat SEO switched over to pay-per-
click promotion of landing pages that push affiliate offers... Some people
make pretty good money that way, but you can easily blow $500-$5000 on
advertising before you've got figured out a campaign that actually makes
money...

I know of a guy who spent about $3k a day on ads and made $5k in revenue.
You've got to watch it like a hawk because if something goes wrong, you can
burn cash pretty quick

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techbio
Affiliate ads are more suited to sites loaded with product reviews,
discussions, comparisons, etc. The sort of tips that shoppers look for,
combined with an affiliate product link, creates the difference between a
stray ad, and a valuable sales proposition.

AdSense effectively determines/auctions PPC placements. Affiliates attempt to
recreate the AdSense magic in large part by building content around links to
products--in other words, marketing.

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fanatico
It's a numbers game. I'll take a guess and say that you are running a blog. In
that case, contact some companies and sell some ads directly. It's a long shot
in all directions. At most, you should be able to sustain a hobby. If I'm
wrong about the blog, sorry -- I have a blog that has a similar problem, but
it's a hobby.

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coryl
Yes, you can make tons of money from affiliate marketing.

Doing it "ethically" is another question however. If you want to make money
fast and big, its pretty necessary to learn blackhat techniques.

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Ardit20
Right. So affiliate marketing is on a completely different level to adsense.

What I have been doing is use affiliate links no different than adsense, that
is find 250 by 250 image links and put them on some location on my website.

I gather that I have been doing it all wrong and affiliate advertising is
fundamentally different from say adsense.

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dedward
Yes - some people make absurd amounts of F-U money from affiliate deals.

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ddemchuk
there are guys pushing a few hundred thousand dollars worth of offers a day.
It's a huge huge industry, but you can't just toss up some banners and expect
to profit.

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Ardit20
Do you then mean that affiliate ads are not quite suitable for an informative
website and do not quite compare or supplement adsense. I suppose I mean to
ask, do you mean affiliate ads are fundamentally different from adsense, in
the way that say walking and driving a car are different.

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ddemchuk
They really are on different levels. You can push an affiliate offer through a
review site, through an email list, through ppc ads, ppv traffic. Adsense is
pretty ordinary, and works in situations when users want more than a site or
page can deliver for the most part.

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Ardit20
So it is not a good idea to put an affiliate banner on a normal page, hence
perhaps why I have not gotten a single sale. Affiliates just require a
different strategy?

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mattgratt
you need to recommend products. I've had some success w/ list posts full of
recommended products.

