From Robert Niles on April 2, 2007 at 10:20 AM

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.

From Mac Slocum on April 3, 2007 at 5:33 PM

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.

From Melissa Bushman on April 15, 2007 at 5:13 PM