Posted 6/17/08 - Joshua

So over my first couple of posts I have talked about style, and how to get some traffic to your blog. If this were a step by step process, or a blogging by numbers class, the next step would be to become an affiliate of some website so that hopefully you would start earning some cash.

This is not an easy decision to make. There are literally hundreds of website affiliate programs out there. So how does one filter through all of that and get hooked up with the right one?

Well first of all you might want to try one that doesn’t offer money but offers an insight into just how much traffic you have, and how willing that traffic is to click on your ads.

For this kind of tool I generally turn either to Pepsi or Mountain Dew. Every summer they have some kind of campaign that bloggers can use as a website campaign. Again this does not offer money but the Pepsi sites monitor exactly how many people have clicked your ad and ranks that against everyone else doing the same.

Right now on all of my blogs I am using the Dewmocracy campaign to monitor my readers and their habits. So far the results have been about what I expected.

Of course after reading the Sports Dollar, I also have a BlogBurst account that also monitors blog hits. For our purposes though, the dew widgets are better because they show how many of our readers are clicking our widgets.

Now to get paid I have two favorite programs that have been pretty successful for me. The first is www.barrystickets.com. This is a sports ticket site that offers affiliates a 10% commission on all sales made through your link. I average around 100-250 bucks per month between my blogs and my cut of these banners on www.fantasyinsideronline.com.

The good thing about this program is they specialize in sports tickets. Since our readers are generally sports fans we have a built in market for this kind of market. The bad thing is over the last few months as the economy has become soft my numbers have been off as more people just cannot afford to go to sporting events.

In this case I have gone back to an old favorite, which is www.allposters.com. I first got hooked up with them when I used to write TV and movie reviews. In that context, I made a lot of money with my readers hitting my links and buying movie posters. I myself have a large collection of movie posters I bought through them.

The great thing is they also sell sports posters. Over the last few months I have switched over to sports poster links and while I am early in that switch over, the results are very promising.

They have this cool widget that can link to 20 different sports themed products and it switches every time my blog page is refreshed. It is a very cool program.

Hopefully with that all of you can start making some money. I would also like to add that we at FIO are looking to build a network of NASCAR related blogs to help us reel in bigger advertisers. If anyone out there is interested please e-mail me jlobdell@fantasyinsideronline.com.


Have you signed up for the PepperJAM Network and eBay.com, their newest affiliate?