Regular visitors may have noticed a small difference to the site lately – I’ve gone and removed the Google Adsense ads!!!

I’d spent some time reviewing the ad revenues from the different ad formats across the site, not that there are that may, and noticed that Adsense wasn’t performing well at all.

Given that it was being placed in prime position, not only on the front page of the site but on each post page, I had expected a much better return.  Obviously you, the loyal visitor, were trying to tell me something…  It was time to retire Adsense.

At first I was surprised by the actual levels of income over the last few months, especially as Adsense is my favourite ad platform, but the numbers simply do not lie. The income it generates on other sites I own is quite good, in fact I’d go as far as to say that it is one of top income earners overall – but the click through rate for this site is extremely low it became obvious that perhaps it simply wasn’t the ad platform for this site after all!

Hopefully, as a result, the user experience will be better as your not having ads rammed down your throat.  I’m not immediately looking to replace Adsense here, but if anyone has any suggestions for alternatives then please drop a comment below.

Firstly let’s clarify what affiliate marketing is.  Affiliate marketing is, simply put, earning commission through referrals. You become a commission-only sales person for a chosen company, or companies.

Typically you would sign up to an affiliate network – such as Commission Junction, Trade Doubler just to name a few of the hundreds (if not thousands) of networks and choose from their lists of available merchants to promote.

In fact it’s probably the fastest, easiest and cheapest way of getting started with making money online!

So how to get started – well there are literally tens of thousands of things to promote using affiliate marketing, from tea bags to big screen TV’s…  Obviously the latter will make you more money per sale, however big screen TV’s will also have tougher competition than the humble tea bag…  A simple tip to get you started is to pick something to promote that you know and preferably love – it’s much easier to talk about something that interests you than something you know absolutely nothing about.

Once you have chosen your niche, the find a suitable affiliate scheme – you can either trawl the networks, look for recommendations on affiliate forums or scour Google – I highly recommend spending a bit of time on a few affiliate forums as you’ll also get some valuable feedback about how the program is run.

Then it’s just a case of getting started with your promotion – be it blog, forum, membership site, ppc/ppv or even off-line marketing – the list is endless.