February 07, 2012
Edmonds News taps streaming sports events for revenue

discussion on revenue from affiliate links
The affiliate game is MUCH harder than it initially seems. CJ, for example, offers tons of banners and product links, but it's the responsibility of the site owner/publisher to integrate that material into their pages in a way that will entice users to click and/or buy. Basically, you need to know how to do the "soft sell," which is more of an art than a science (and it's an art I'm not particularly good at).
The *only* affiliate success I've achieved has come via my own analog contextualization. If I post a movie review, I'll also post an image/link to that film's movie poster. It adds a lot of time and effort to my regular production efforts, but it has brought in some so-so revenue. Like everything, affiliate results take time, effort and luck.
February 07, 2012
Edmonds News taps streaming sports events for revenue
February 09, 2012
Knight News Challenge 2.0: applications open Feb. 27
February 7, 2012
You've got to know the truth to tell it
By Robert Niles
February 3, 2012
Look at the bottom, not the top, of your traffic analytics to boost your website's readership
By Robert Niles
January 31, 2012
It's not the medium - it's the market
By Robert Niles
January 27, 2012
'Think before you act' and more rules for journalists on Twitter
By Steve Fox
January 25, 2012
Is Apple's iBooks Author the right eBook creation tool for journalists?
By Robert Niles
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From Robert Niles on April 2, 2007 at 10:20 AM
Affiliate sales is a tough business for publishers. It can be lucrative, but it requires more work than slapping up some links.First, you must have some original content to build a readership for your website. Simply creating you own "front end" to the affiliated stores' products won't suffice. Google's duplicate content penalties will dump you to the bottom of the search engine results.
Once you've built original content that attracts an audience (and scraped content, discussion forums or articles you've paid someone five bucks to write won't cut it), then you must carefully select products from the Commission Junction vendors that match the needs of your readers.
Ideally, your content will be geared toward people looking to make an immediate purchase. Comparison reviews and product and purchasing FAQs do well. Then, once you have your content and compatible links up, you must watch them closely, swapping for other links to replace products that do not perform.
Long-term, if you build a reader-driven database of reviews and FAQs, and create an algorithm to match them with affiliate links, you can achieve a strong profit margin. Otherwise, affiliate links remain a high-time-investment, poor-financial-return form of payment for many Web publishers.