Just yesterday I was looking at some old spreadsheets of mine from a few years ago. One had a list of affiliate programs and the respective login information. I couldn’t believe it, but I soon realized that I have been dabbling in Internet Marketing for almost 10 years.
Like many of you, I’ve joined quite a few programs and forgot about 80% of them. Not all affiliate programs work for every niche, but I would love to share with you my top 8 affiliate programs that actually paid me some cash. These are in no particular order.
1) ClickBank.com – This place is awesome for buying, selling electronic products. What was so (and still is) appealing about Click Bank was that you could easily change affiliate commissions of your products and easily generate links to any of their affiliate program using your “hoplink” without having to join any other program.
I have to say that ClickBank is my all-time favorite. I’ve received many checks from ClickBank and continue to receive them for products I’ve completely forgot about.
2) Google Adsense – I don’t have to tell you much about this program. Google continues to send me checks monthly for simply placing their ugly text links and banners on my websites. Mike Filsaime actually told me about joining Adsense because for him it actually helped make car payments.
3) The Internet Marketing Center – Founded by the late/great Cory Rudl, this program was great for me when I had a nice email list to blast to. Also known as Marketing Tips, they would always have cool products, introduced as Free Trials for me to promote. These free trials would usually turn into real sales.
A big plus for this program is the two-tier affiliate referral program which actually helped me make more money from my sub-affiliates than what I actually made as an affiliate. One weird thing about IMC though was that the checks came from Canada, which would sometimes take 3 months to clear.
4) Adbrite – Adbrite is cool, but very quirky for me. It is not as straightforward as other affiliate programs out there as to how you make money. I receive a few checks from them, but nothing to write home about. I did become a very famous person on Shoemoney’s website by sending in a picture of one of my HUGE checks from Adbrite.
Check it out for yourself. Brace yourself for it.
5) Commission Junction – Speaking of Shoemoney, he sure hates CJ.com, but I have to say they have actually made me some money. CJ.com is great because of the number of retailers that are listed AND they make it clear as day if you can push a product with incentives. I did make use of this when I ran one of those “Tell Your other friends about this and get a free iPod” websites.
I was running the site at FreeXMTuner.com, but it was hard to maintain the site and process the claims that a persona actaully “tried” a product.
So ok, I must agree with Shoemoney, their reporting of sales sucks. But still, since I made money from them they do belong on this list.
6) Primary Ads – Great program for making pennies here and there, but those pennies do add up. Primary Ads is best for providing programs that can earn you money by just providing a zipcode (or limited other fields). This place is great for ringtone sites and MySpace postings.
7) LinkShare – Link Share is awesome. Why? Because they have Walmart.com. Walmart provides RSS feeds, complete with your affiliate id, so it is very easy to create a aggregation store front website (using cool tools such as Bans or StoreStacker). I’ve actually made some nice cash by promoting the Nintendo Wii PreOrder campaign a few years back. I was amazed to see how effective blogging about upcoming things was. Also, LinkShare has recently updated their dashboard…so much easier to read than before.
8) Hostgator – Why am I promoting a webhosting company? Well the fact of the matter is they pay through PayPal and I really think they rock! I have referred a number of clients to Hostgator for both shared hosting and dedicated hosting. I love them and their affiliate program is a no-nonsense deal.
There you have it, my complete list of the affiliate marketing programs that have actually paid me. Now it is time for me to go to bed…nighty night.