Affiliate Marketing Revenue

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Affiliate Marketing - working with merchants.

2008-03-01T07:26:00.000-08:00

"Sign up today, here's your banners - now paste the code into your web pages and start making money!" How many times have you seen that blurb on a company affiliate program sign up page?

For a lucky few webmasters with a visitor rate of hundreds of thousands a month, this may be the case. For even fewer it may mean overnight financial success, but for most of us involved in affiliate and web marketing, nothing could be further from the truth. Being an affiliate is hard work - but also very rewarding when you team up with the right merchants.

If you aren't already familiar with affiliate programs, you may want to visit the pages linked throughout this article - these tutorials will give you a basic overview of how to go about making money from Internet based affiliate programs.

If you've located a company offering revenue sharing opportunities for products and services that complement your web site genre, it isn't enough just to put up banners and buttons. As mentioned in my other articles, writing up a review page of the product or service will definitely help boost sales, especially if you are recognized as being knowledgeable in your field.

Communicate with your merchants

But let's take it one step further - and this step could not only increase your sales, but also save you some heartache in the long run. It's really simple - contact the merchant, let them know what you are doing to promote their product and ask their advice as to how you could improve your marketing. After all, the merchant knows their product best - well, we hope so! They would also have a very good idea of the strategies used by other affiliates to boost sales. An affiliate tips page, provided by many companies, usually won't give you vital and current "insider" information, so it's important to approach merchants directly.

By contacting the merchant, you are also showing your enthusiasm for marketing their products and services - that you are aiming to be what's known as a "power" or "super" affiliate! Any merchant who understands affiliate marketing knows that over 90% of sales are generated by less than 5% of their affiliates. A good merchant will recognize your efforts, provide you with further information and resources and may even boost your commission rates!

Dealing with merchants:

a) If you go to the trouble of emailing a merchant and they don't respond the first time, try again. If they still fail to respond, think twice about continuing promotion - a lack of communication can also be indicative of other problems - including payment. Also bear in mind that some merchants work on the shotgun principle. They make big promises, set a high payout threshold knowing that few affiliates will ever reach it, then get as many affiliates promoting their products and services as possible - maximum exposure, minimum cost and effort on their part. It's not a good business model for them to utilize in the long term and after a while affiliates drop away, but not before the company has raked in thousands. Many MLM (multi-level marketing) programs also work on this principle - only the guys at the top generate any serious revenue.

A good way to protect your payments is to sign up for affiliate programs well established ad networks such as Offers Quest or FastClick.

Working with a major ad network means that even if you only make a few dollars from each program, those dollars all feed a common account, accumulate rapidly which allows you to reach the payout threshold in a shorter space of time. Most ad networks work with merchants on a "money up front" or monthly "pay as you go" basis, minimizing the risk of unscrupulous merchants suddenly disappearing with your hard earned commissions.

Demonstrate your web marketing prowess

b) Unless you have a very high traffic web site, don't ask the merchant for higher commissions in the first communication. So many affiliates do this and end up being totally ignored as the vast majority of affiliates probably can't deliver on their "forecasts" - which are usually just dreams. If you don't have a solid sales record for the product or service you are promoting, you'll need to prove yourself first - put some thought into your promotion and rack up a few sales before attempting to secure higher payout rates.

Be professional in your communications

c) When communicating with merchants, ensure you use a professional manner. If you have suggestions of how a merchant could improve an offer that would convert into more sales, let them know, but be very polite and constructive in your feedback - "Your banners suck" just doesn't cut it. Remember that the Internet as a trading place is still very new in comparison to the business platforms of the last few millennia. Some of the quality companies offering an affiliate program may be just breaking into this side of marketing and will appreciate any feedback you can give them.

A wise merchant understands that good affiliates aren't a dime a dozen and treats them with respect, assists with resources and provides prompt payments. A wise affiliate understands that a merchant wants quality promotion and sales performance for minimum outlay. Successful merchant/affiliate partnerships are struck when both parties understand these points and work together - resulting in profits for both parties.

Marketing - what quality affiliates & publishers want from affiliate programs

2008-03-01T07:18:00.000-08:00

If you're thinking of starting up an affiliate program for your company, or perhaps you're just getting into affiliate marketing as a publisher; the points for consideration below may be of value to you.

In most affiliate programs, the top few percent of affiliates generate the vast majority of sales; so you want as many quality, or "super" affiliates participating in your program as possible.

So what do these super affiliates want? The following are some of the features that quality affiliates look for when deciding on programs to participate in.

Solid product and merchant site

Before you contemplate implementing an affiliate program, ensure that your product is rock solid and your site is presentable. Affiliates (aka publishers) don't want to send valuable traffic to pages that won't convert or to products that don't work. Learn more about creating effective landing pages.

Trustworthy company

Take the position of the affiliate for a moment and visit your site's company profile pages. Do these pages provide enough information to instill confidence in a potential affiliate that your company is trustworthy?

The affiliate marketing industry is rife with stories of unscrupulous merchants offering great commission levels and then not paying on referrals; so it's understandable that many publishers are a little gun-shy.

Good affiliates really check over a company before joining a program; especially if they are going to be giving you broad coverage on their site, which is what you'll want. Particularly in regards to your affiliate program, put a face to the name of whomever will be managing it. Many of the principles of reassuring customers apply to reassuring affiliates.

Communication

It's a good idea to have a dedicated point of contact for your affiliate program and that person is prompt in responding to affiliate inquiries. Affiliates shouldn't be viewed as annoying, they are important partners in your business.

If you should strike problems in your program, be up front about it rather than defensive. Most quality publishers are quite forgiving when it comes to glitches as long as you're honest about it and resolve the issue.

A regular newsletter can help remind affiliates of your existence - many affiliates sign up to programs and then get side-tracked; never actually getting around to publishing up promo material. A newsletter also helps instill more confidence in your affiliate network that you're proactive and the program is evolving. If you decide to offer an affiliate newsletter, flaunt this on your program details page.

If you receive feedback from your affiliates about improving the program; consider it carefully. Bear in mind that good publishers are masters of their trade. If they suggest something to you, then there's usually very good logic behind it. You want increased sales, they want increased sales - everyone wins :).

Residual (recurring commisisons)

High one-time payouts can be a good way of attracting attention, but if you can; offer a residual commission option too; i.e. a percentage of the customers payments paid to the affiliate on an ongoing basis.

Offering residual commissions is especially attractive when in relation to high value subscription services. Quality affiliates know that one of the keys to success in the affiliate marketing game is to build up multiple residual income streams which can help see them through the lean times.

Residual commissions are most successful when based on the life of the account rather than a set period.

If possible, when calculating commission rates, don't just base it on the industry norm - take a look at your own customer lifetime value figures. You want to offer publishers the best deal possible, but not to the point where the clients they refer won't turn a profit for you.

Avoid the MLM stigma

2nd tier commissions, i.e. commissions paid on sales made by an affiliate who was referred by another publisher, are a great option to include in your program; but offering 3rd tier and beyond commission levels may give the impression that your program is MLM (multi-level marketing); aka network marketing. In essence, it would be. There have been so many scam MLM schemes both on and off the web in recent years that these types of commission structures can really scare off potential affiliates.

Some affiliate program directories refuse to list programs with commission levels beyond the second tier and if you're using PayPal to pay commissions, you may find they close your account. PayPal is particularly sensitive to merchants who run multiple level commission programs due to the MLM stigma. Learn more about MLM.

Promotional material

It's great to have attractive banners, but not if they weigh in at 100kb. Bear in mind that banners etc. can bog down an affiliate's site page load time; so keep your creatives pretty, but keep them light. Some publishers are adverse to using any sort of graphical banner, so it's important to include options such as basic text links.

Quality affiliates are very busy people - the more brain strain you can take out of the development of promotional material, the better. Further to banners and links, many affiliates find promo page content such as as paragraphs or full articles very useful. Often, they'll edit the text to suit their own purposes, but by providing these materials to them greatly decreases the amount of time they spend in developing pages.

XML feeds are also being used by an increasing number of merchants - these feeds basically provide a copy of your stores products that you can update, and those updates are reflected on the publisher's site in real time.

Reporting and tracking

This is *very* important. Publishers really need an interface where they can monitor their progress 24/7. It's certainly not enough to send out a monthly report via email as this doesn't allow the affiliate to make tweaks to their promotion on-the-fly based on their performance.

There's also the trust factor - quality affiliates are somewhat skittish by nature; usually because of previous experiences where they've been screwed by a merchant. The transparency that a reporting interface offers provides affiliates with a level of reassurance. Read some affiliate software reviews.

Cookie duration

Top affiliates know that most purchases don't occur on the first click. In fact, many people purchase products days, weeks or even months later after being exposed to them. For this reason, if you're using cookies for tracking referrals, the cookie should be set to expire in a minimum of 90 days. If you set cookies to expire within a week, I can guarantee you'll miss out on recruiting top performing affiliates.

Payment thresholds

Commission payment thresholds should not be set too high - $25 to $50 is the industry standard. Any higher than that and an affiliate can feel it's a little risky to join your program. If you're a small company, many quality affiliates will consider you guilty until proven innocent. That is, you won't gain their trust until their first payment comes through.

If possible, also allow your publishers to be able to set their own custom commission threshold above the minimum you have in place as banking/processing small commission payments may be somewhat a headache for the larger players.

Depending on the structure of your company, you may wish to consider paying out on even lower thresholds than $25/$50. This minimizes the amount of liability your company has towards affiliates at any given time. Using an option such as PayPal does make lower payment thresholds quite viable and combine with the option of custom payment thresholds your payment terms can appeal to a broad range of affiliates.

Payment options

Most affiliate marketers are able to receive payments via PayPal these days - especially those based in Western countries such as the UK, USA, Australia and Canada. If you intend on using PayPal, make arrangements to upload commissions in a batch file and fund your account via eCheck. This will minimize the amount the affiliate needs to pay in PayPal fees when transferring the funds to their own bank accounts. I love using PayPal, but the slice they can take out of commissions paid via normal means can be rather huge.

Even though PayPal payments are very popular with most publishers; it's still wise to also offer a check or bank wire option. If these two options require substantial resources on your part in order to process payments, then raise the minimum payment threshold to suit - it's just important to have at least one popular payment option where the base minimum threshold is $25 - $50 maximum for the reasons mentioned above.

Payment regularity

The norm is NET30 - NET60 (30 - 60 days after the sale). This will allow you time to weed out any fraud and process commissions. If your payment schedule is over NET60, you may find this throws up a red flag to potential affiliates - after all, if you've been paid for the sale already, why shouldn't your affiliates also be paid?

Clear terms

Your program terms should be clear and as brief as possible. If your terms are loaded will legalese and grey areas, this may also scare off potential affiliates.

If you are offering residual commissions, I suggest that in your terms you include something along these lines:

"Recurring commissions are paid for the lifetime of the account, as long as you are actively promoting our services"

Most publishers will accept this without any problem; after all, if they are interested in residual commissions, then that indicates they envision the relationship with your company as a long term arrangement.

Something you want to be very clear on are issues relating to spam and stealware - have a zero tolerance spam policy, but police it fairly. Affiliates using stealware should be terminated with extreme prejudice.

Ensure the policy is highlighted in your terms - not only to alert affiliates, but if there's a case where one of them does spam, irate consumers can see quite clearly that it's a practice your company doesn't tolerate.

The issue of affiliates promoting via email has become a rather hot topic, especially since the precedent was set where a company was fined due the activities of their affiliates.

Good publishers will still want to legitimately market your products via email using some sort of method, so my advice on this issue is to not allow affiliates to use affiliate links in email marketing, but get them to have a landing page on their site and to drive email sourced traffic to that page first. This can help distance you from the activities of your affiliates to a degree if an unscrupulous partner decides to run a spam campaign.

In the interests of both your affiliates and your company, it's of crucial importance that you have a lawyer look over your program terms before implementation.

Summing it up..

As mentioned in a number of points above, aside from financial incentives, the trust issue in an affiliate program is a huge component. The way an affiliate evaluates a program probably boils down to these two considerations:

- 50% commission on a $100 sale = $0 if there's no sales
- $1000 in commissions = $0 if the company won't pay

Affiliates will monitor their EPC rates carefully; i.e. how much revenue they generate per hundred clicks. If you have a high EPC rate, flaunt it - it will help attract the bigger players.

Remember that a potential affiliate will evaluate your program not just from an publisher standpoint, but from the potential customer angle as well. Balance both sides of the equation in the way you implement a program to prevent initial negative perceptions from occurring, and you'll be well on your way to building up a healthy network of quality affiliates driving appreciable levels of sales of your products.

Making affiliate marketing successful for you

2008-03-01T07:13:00.000-08:00

What is an affiliate program?

With the proliferation of goods and services now available on the Internet, advertisers look to individuals and companies to help sell their products by utilizing webmasters and others to spread the word.

This can be in the form of banner advertising on affiliate sites, text links, reviews written by affiliates, direct email etc. The advertisers compensate webmasters by paying them for displaying the ads, or for click throughs sent to them, or (as is most common these days) a commission on sales resulting as a referral from their web site or email message. For a more detailed look at the getting involved with affiliate programs, view the learning resources and tutorial links at the end of this article.

How can I make money from being an affiliate?

There are many thousands of affiliate programs out there, all claiming to be the best. Some of them will give you the impression that all you have to do is implement their banners and links and wait for the commission checks to start rolling in. This CAN be the case, but this scenario usually only applies to very large sites with massive web traffic that is relevant to product or service on offer. For most of us, being a successful affiliate requires a little more work!

As the range of goods and online services offered via the Internet has grown at an incredible rate over the last few years, therefore so has the competition. Web site visitors need to have a very good reason for clicking on a link or banner.

Choosing the right banners

In most affiliate programs, you are offered a wide variety of banners to place on your site - very few of them will be effective. If you can attain a click through rate of 2%, then you are doing very well. It has been our experience, and this is generally speaking, that graphically rich banners do not perform as successfully as their simpler counterparts. The main reason for this is download time. If a banner is the last thing to load on your page and the banner ad is excessively byte "heavy", by the time it has loaded your visitor may already have scrolled down the page - missing it entirely. Heavy banner ads can also slow down the loading of your pages, or critical elements of your page and you can lose your visitors altogether! A graphically rich banner can also confuse the actual message - the artwork and marketing blurb can be imbalanced. For these reasons, we suggest that banners you implement be no more that 15kb wherever possible.

Banners that have "extreme" animation, such as rapid flashing, are also something to consider very carefully. While these do achieve high clickthrough rates, they are also highly annoying. If you do decide to implement this form of banner advertising, use it very sparingly.

When selecting any form of graphical advertising, try and keep the theme of your site in mind - while graphical ads are meant to stand out and catch a visitors eye, it shouldn't be to the point that everything else on the page is totally ignored. Wherever possible, ensure that all banner ads (and any advertising for that matter) uses a link that opens in a new window. That way, if a visitor does choose to visit one of your advertisers it is easy for them to return to your page and review what they actually came to your site for!

Pop ups and pop unders

Many companies, but mostly agencies representing a number of advertisers, now give their affiliates the options of using pop up and pop under ads. Our opinion - pop ups are evil. They annoy visitors and are usually closed before they even have a chance to load. Go for pop-unders and preferably those that only display once per visit. See below for further articles on this subject.

Using Text Link Ads.

One of the most successful forms of advertising are text link ads. They are bandwidth friendly, don't take up a lot of space and can be easily implemented into most page layouts. Good text links ads don't just scream "buy me!", they also offer some information as to why your web site visitor should investigate the offer. A company should also supply you with very short text links which only state the product or company name. The reason for this is so that you can implement the links directly into the content of related articles and reviews.

Articles and product/service reviews

Now, this is where a bit of hard work comes in. Your regular site visitors will view you as an authority on particular subjects, so why not write a review on a product or service you are advertising? This also supplies excellent content for search engine spiders to latch onto. We have attracted many visitors to our site using what I call "adarticles".

But there's a catch......

If you are going to use the adarticle concept to promote products, you need to believe in what you write. Research the product and company well. Contact the company and let them know what you are doing and ask for further resources and assistance. Once you have created the review, send them the link - you may be surprised at the response you get.

One of our advertisers was so impressed with the effort we put into promoting his company's product that he gave us an extra 15% commission on each sale! This form of web site advertising is a bit time-consuming, so choose your products carefully. The information that you supply to your web site visitors will help them formulate a decision, so be honest in your sales copy. If you are successful in this promotion strategy, over time your reviews won't be seen as hype and bluster, but as a reliable source of information - everybody wins!

Email advertising as an affiliate marketing tool

Direct promotion via email has boomed over recent years, but has brought with it mountains of spam. If you intend on using email as a method of advertising products and services, ensure you stand behind the products you're promoting and make yourself available to answer any questions.

An effective promotion technique we have found is to combine email with the adarticle strategy. In our ezine we occasionally put a summary of a product or service, just enough information to stir the curiosity of our readers. The summary then contains a link to the adarticle on our site. The benefit of this is not only that you have a good opportunity to promote the product or service, but while visitors are on your site they may also look at other sections. The advertiser benefits through having highly targeted potential clients visit their site.

Original marketing strategies

Using the two above strategies combined, you can tailor your own campaign. Visitors sometimes become blind to the advertising resources supplied by companies and your efforts in coming up with something original may spark their (and the company's) interest.

As an example, our hosting company has provided great service to us over the last 18 months, which made us very confident in promoting their hosting solutions - so we approached them and negotiated a great deal for all parties involved. They have increased visibility on our site, we receive fantastic benefits in return, while promoting a service we really believe in! Using this example, you can make many of your alliances and business partnerships more beneficial to all concerned.

Successful affiliate marketing requires patience

If you are certain that your web site can generate fantastic sales for a certain company, contact them to negotiate a tailored arrangement. If they aren't too enthusiastic to begin with, be patient - companies are approached every day by affiliates wanting to cut a "better deal".

The reality of it is that many affiliates cannot deliver what they promise, and the companies are aware of this. Implement their links and banners, go the extra mile with adarticles and other unique strategies, generate some sales and then approach them again. You'll probably find that they'll have a change of heart. Good affiliates are a scarce thing, and if you are performing they'll be very keen to keep you!

Also bear in mind that most forms of advertising take some time to kick into gear. Putting a link up for a couple of days and then pulling it down because it is not generating any interest may not be a reflection on the product, but just in the way that it is being presented to your web site visitors.

If you have run successful campaigns before, try to remember the elements that made it a success. What works for one product may not necessarily for another, but it's worth a try. Again, if you are having problems with promotion, contact the company. They will more than likely have thousands of affiliates and will know what strategies are working. A good advertiser may even go to the trouble of reviewing your site and provide you with some tips and hints based on their observations.

Network Advertising Agencies vs. individual advertisers.

One of the easiest ways to get involved with affiliate programs is through one of the major advertising agencies. They will offer you hundreds or thousands of advertisers to choose from and payment will be consolidated.

It can be quite difficult to keep track of a number of individual advertisers, but this shouldn't turn you away from considering individual companies to represent on your web site. If the company is well known, has a good product, offers excellent affiliate support and commits to regular payments with a low payout threshhold, they can actually perform better than some of your agency associations.

This is particularly the case if the company offers residual income; i.e. that you receive monthly commissions from referred clients to services such as web hosting, magazine subscriptions - for as long as the client is with the company. Affiliation with these individual advertisers, over time, can build a steady stream of income for you.

By the way, be extremely wary of affiliate programs that you have to pay to join - they are really MLM (multi-level-marketing) associations. There are some very successful and respectable MLM offers around, but also many that are scams. Do your research into the company offering the program.

Successful Affiliate Marketing - unplugged.

Be careful of who you advertise for. Many companies set a minimum payout level they know not many will achieve. They greatly benefit from the fact that thousands of affiliates will not make any real money from the association and over time these affiliates will drop off when they can't hit the target - but the company has benefited from the traffic, with minimum outlay.

One sale here, two sales there - it all adds up for them. Consider this - a company launches an affiliate program with a minimum payout level of US$25 (industry standard). They then recruit over 20,000 affiliates. Only the top 1,000 affiliates actually generate enough sales to receive payouts on a regular basis. The remaining 19,000 only average one sale each, lose interest and drop away. These 19,000 affiliates made nothing, but the company still raked in what could run into millions of dollars of sales.

Successful affiliate marketing boils down to survival of the fittest, the fastest, the wisest - but mainly those who put the most effort in. Don't be discouraged if after a couple of months you haven't made enough money to retire - it does take time!

Looking back over our figures, it was approximately 6 months from when we began getting *really* involved with affiliate programs to when it really started to pay off the effort we had put in. The longer you are involved with affiliate marketing, the more savvy you will become as to what will work and won't. Then your effort vs. return will reap greater income in shorter periods of time.

Affiliate marketing can be exciting and frustrating with many highs and lows, but one thing's for sure - it's never boring!

Make money from your web site - the best banner ad networks

2008-03-01T06:40:00.000-08:00

There's more than just contextual advertising networks as a means of generating revenue from your web site. In some scenarios, contextual ads just don't work and you need to be able to take greater control over what appears in the ad space. Consider utilizing banner ad networks.

Banner advertising payout rates have definitely decreased since the heady days of the late 90's, but there is some good news for web masters looking for a flexible and reliable way of selling banner ad space. Banner ads have come a long way with many different options and variations on creatives. On a related topic, if you're more interested in implementing pop up/under ads as a means of generating income, learn more in our pop up and pop under revenue guide.

Teaming up the best banner advertising network rather than intensive marketing to individual clients can save a lot of time and provide you with a steady income. The size of that cash flow is a numbers game - the more relevant ads you display, the more you will probably make. The networks provide the clients and the ads, you simply implement some code in your banner space and the ad will appear. In your association with these companies, you will be known as an "affiliate" or "publisher".

We decided to research the best banner advertising network for publishers/affiliates who have a site of our size. We tried many different networks, but only one stood out - more on that later. Many promised a great deal, but returned nothing. Some networks allowed very unethical advertisers to peddle their wares. On investigating a number of networks, we also discovered a few of them did not pay in accordance with their terms and conditions - worse still, some did not pay at all.

The following is a list of desirable affiliate/publisher features that you should look for before agreeing to "rent" out your prime advertising space to an agency:

Targeting

Does the network provide ads that are relevant to your subject area or that would appeal to the users of your web site? Irrelevant ads will not only fail if you are participating in a CPC campaign, but they may annoy your visitors.

CPC, CPM and CPA options

A good ad agency will give you a mixture of CPC and CPM ads. CPC ads pay when a visitor to your site clicks on a banner through to an advertisers web site . CPM advertising is based on $X.XX per thousand views (impressions). Another variation is CPA - a visitor clicks a banner, passes through to the advertiser's web site and either purchases (a sale) or expresses interest (a lead) in the companies products or services. CPA pays the highest but usually has a much lower conversion ratio.

Control over ads displayed

The better ad networks have comprehensive publisher/affiliate administrative interfaces where you can preview a banner and decide whether you want that particular campaign displayed on your site. This is particularly useful if you (or your visitors) object to certain kinds of advertising - such as those wonderful flashing ads that we have all grown to love ;0) - an interesting and amazing fact is that those flashing ads do draw high clickthrough rates - figure that one out! If your agency is really on the ball, there will also be visual flags in your administration area to indicate that the ad contains references to adult material, gambling or tobacco related products etc.

Default ad control

Most agencies have quotas on the number of ads appearing to particular users. After that quota is filled for the hour or day etc., "default" ads will be displayed. These banners do not earn you any money - but they do tend to display community oriented ads, so you can also be promoting positive social messages - but be sure to check this out before signing up. Quality agencies will also give you control over these default ads allowing you to display your own offers instead. This gives you further opportunities in making money from this prime advertising space. If the default banner rate is too high in proportion to paying banners, and those non-paying banners promote other businesses, then these networks are well worth avoiding.

Rates

The days of the $10.00 CPM ads are pretty much well over, unless you find advertisers yourself by direct marketing, but there are still great payment rate differences between networks. Shop around carefully. You should aim to receive on average US$1.00 - $4.00 CPM or at least US$.15 - $.20 CPC.

Referral Bonuses

Another way to benefit financially from your publisher/affiliate association is to be paid a percentage of any referrals of new affiliates or advertisers to the network from your web site. Again, the rates vary greatly between networks, but an ongoing rate of 5% is a level that can provide you with decent residual income in the years ahead. With advertising campaigns quite often running into thousands of dollars, it is possible to draw a good supplementary income from referring advertisers.

Payout Schedule

Look for a banner network that pays promptly. I came across a couple of agencies that paid up to 4 months after the end of month! A common pay schedule is anything from 15-30 days after the end of month.

Terms and Conditions

Before joining any banner ad network, ensure you read the terms and conditions carefully. The banner advertising industry is well known for its share of fraud - perpetrated by all parties. Some agencies combat this with Draconian rules, which gives publishers and affiliates very little flexibility - look for an agency that takes fraud seriously, but still gives you some room to move. It is also EXTREMELY important to read the terms and conditions carefully, otherwise you may be breaking the rules without even knowing it. This usually results in termination of your account and forfeit of any money that you have made.

Variety of mediums

Many major ad networks now also offer interstitial, in-vues, pop-up and pop-under campaigns and other advertising creatives as a means of creating income from your web site. For a more detailed look at the pop-up and pop-under industry, read our guide.

And the winner is..

So, back to the results - who did we find to be the best banner ad network? The Valueclick Advertising network. Learn more about why we chose them as the top banner agency.

Making Revenue Everyday - Survival in Online Business

2008-02-29T17:54:00.000-08:00

You've been working your site for months; burning the candle at both ends to promote and refine your online business. One morning you wake to your inbox full of sales orders or commission notifications. Kaching! Finally, success!

After a few days or weeks of this, you start to think about what you'll do with this new found wealth, after all, $x per day multiplied by 365 adds up to a fair amount of scratch.

The dreaming begins. A new car? A boat? A house? A holiday house? Heck, just to get out of debt would be a start. It's a wonderful feeling to be able to not only dream this way but to discover that these things are truly possible to achieve.

.. but...

The reality of online business

The Internet giveth and the Internet taketh away; especially if the traffic you're getting is from organic search.. that is, the free listings provided by search engines. Your traffic may continue at that level for years, but it may also literally dry up over night. I was reading a study recently which stated small online businesses that don't have a bricks and mortar store get on average 2/3 of their traffic from organic search listing. Could your business survive such a loss?

Survival strategies

Running a successful site/online store purely via the grace of search engines is a white knuckle ride indeed. Probably one of the best bits of advice I can give to anyone who has stumbled onto high ranking good fortune is to save as much of that cash as you can and continue working like mad for a while.

Build a nest egg up to at least 3 months of living expenses before you start spending too much of it on other goodies, and especially before you quit your day job - 6 months living expenses at a pinch if you can wait that long :)

During this saving phase, try to implement strategies to make your site more "sticky"; to encourage your visitors and customers to keep frequenting your site. Newsletter, blog, forum, competitions; these are all good options - particularly newsletters or a blog. Keep close tabs on your industry, don't let what the cash can buy you cloud your thoughts too much. You need to think about what you'll do should the free traffic suddenly dry up. Approach your cash management as if tomorrow your business will disappear.

Rainy day revenue streams

If you generate income through affiliate programs and you're offered a choice of large one-time commissions or residual (ongoing commissions), if the company is solid; go for the residual commission option - this revenue may be what keeps your mortgage paid if things go wrong and buy you a little breathing space.

My wise old Chinese accountant once told me back in the days when I was selling computer equipment something along the lines of; "you won't get rich selling products, sell services". This was at a time before the Internet really took hold in Australia and "soft goods" became commonplace. Still, he was correct - selling hard goods is a hard game - inventory to maintain (unless you're drop shipping), handling costs, tight profit margins. Software, information products and services is definitely a good way to go; so if you deal only with hard goods, consider subscription services as a way of generating an ongoing flow of income.

Debt, saving and investment

While things are good, still try to keep capital investment down if possible during this period and certainly don't become over-committed credit-wise. That rainy day revenue saving could serve you very well, both psychologically while you're still doing well and especially should you suddenly hit the skids. How frustrating would it be to run yourself clean out of cash during a slow period when maybe all you needed was to be able to hang in there for one more month?

By the same token, don't be too tight when it comes to reinvesting back into your business - growth is a good buffer against hard times. Determine a safe percentage of revenue to reinvest that still sees your bank balance grow and then stick to it.

Entrepreneurial spirit vs. safe play

I've been making a living purely online now for over 5 years and the web has been very generous to me - but I still have a "day" job in the online world. Often I wonder if I had jumped away from the job at particular points if I would have been able to pretty much retire by now. I'm not complaining about my income, I've been very fortunate; but there's nothing like a family and mortgage to throw a bit of cold reasoning water on an entrepreneurial spirit that can sometimes get a little heated :). And perhaps that's not a bad thing.

No doubt you'll come across rags to riches stories, and they do certainly occur - but the rags to riches to rags scenarios and the rags to even older rags occurrences are far more frequent.

Chasing your dreams is great, throwing everything on the roll of a dice can be exhilarating - but always consider what you can lose by doing so. It's the old gamblers saying of "don't bet what you can't afford to lose".

Get rich slow... and keep it :).

I wish you all good fortune!