Cash-Bandit.com

I know it’s been a long time since I posted, I have been so busy in the last few months, planning my wedding and swamped with work building lots of new sites for the new year. I wanted to do a quick review of the best converting affiliate programs of 2010 in my online business. 2010 has been a great year for me and my income has more than doubled versus 2009.

First, let me say Happy New Year to everyone and I hope the holidays were wonderful for you and your families.

I always spend some time in the new year reflecting and evaluating my business achievements of the past year and one of the most important facets I focus on is evaluating what affiliate programs I choose to promote and the money making tools I use. This is crucial since time is money and each and every moment that I spend working is precious.

Here is my list of the top 3 converting affiliate programs and the tools I use that have caused my income to more than double in 2010.

Ebay
First on the list is eBay via the Ebay Partner Network. Ebay converts like crazy, for most any kind of niche, and continues to be my best money maker.

I started promoting eBay a few years ago using BANS (Build A Niche Store) software, which is no longer supported by the developers, but my sites are still up and running and making money. While many people had major problems losing rankings with Google for their BANS stores, a fact that they attributed to BANS, I never had that problem, and the main reason is that I had added tons of  original and useful content. The rank losses really had nothing to do with BANS, but they actually occurred because people built cookie cutter sites that were thin in original content and no matter what software you might use for affiliate sites, the key is always to have tons of original content and make the site unique and useful. Since BANS is no longer supported I now use the PHPBay plugin for WordPress. This is an amazing plugin that easily adds ebay products and auction listings to WordPress posts, pages and sidebar.

Here are two posts that give some great insight into getting approved for the eBay Partner Network – Understanding EPN Approval Process and 7 Tips For Getting Into EPN.

Amazon

My second best money maker is Amazon, like eBay Amazon converts like crazy, and I have built several sites using the PHPzon plugin that started making money in their first week. Like PHPbay the PHPZon plugin pulls any products that I want to add to posts and pages, it also pulls customer reviews and user comments from Amazon, as well as detailed product descriptions, this is really useful and increases conversions ten fold.

Another great plugin that I recently bought will write more about in another post is Keywords To Websites. This is the fastest and easiest way to build affiliate blogs using a variety of affiliate programs, like Ebay, Amazon and Commission Junction. Just select some settings in the admin interface, put in your keywords and the plugin automatically pulls product listings, along with the option to pull several sources of content from the web, including a spun content module, where you can use the Best Spinner to create an article and then add the spun version into the plugin to create various unique versions to appear on all your WordPress pages along with the affiliate product listings.

Google Adsense

Lastly, my third best converting affiliate program for 2010 is Google Adsense. I add Google Adsense on all my sites, and placement of ads in specific areas of each individual site is really key. Optimal placement really depends on the respective site, but I find that placing adds in visible areas above the fold, after content, making links in the same color as the links on the site, and leaving text black on the adds works best. Adsense makes up a large portion of my monthly online income, and as as with any other online revenue streams, volume really helps, the more pages that I have ranking in SERPS with Adsense the higher the earnings.

Of course along with locating affiliate programs that convert well, one of the key elements to making money online  is searching for profitable niches and doing proper keyword research, in my next post I will provide some of my best tips and resources for locating optimal niches and markets for products to promote with affiliate marketing.