Getting started with affiliate marketing - any advice?

Hi, I have an ecommerce site which was hit by penguin update in april. This is currently my only site. I have learned from the penguin update, and from fellow members on here that having one website can be a disaster! So, I will be spending less time on my ecommerce site until it recovers, and want to put more time into creating new sites now. I have tried affiliate marketing before (a couple of years ago), but I never really gave it a chance. So, does anyone have any quick basic tips on things to 'do' and things 'not to do'? Of course I'm not asking for your full success method, but just some simple tips on what could make or break my new affiliate sites.

What affiliate program do most of you use? Clickbank, commission junction, or amazon? I like the idea of doing an amazon review site, where I review many products within the niche and have affiliate links for these products. I don't know how well that would work, but the niche I'm thinking of is something I really enjoy. I heard that the amazon commission is low?

My problem is that the topics I am 'passionate' about are in competitive niches, how do you work around this?


FAO moderators - I originally posted this in the affiliate programs forum and realised that the post is better suited in this forum. If you need to delete one of these posts please delete the one in the affiliate programs forum.

Any tips?

Mix it up. Join CPA networks like Neverblue and CJ and Clickbank. You can create a review site and review clickbank offers. Rank the review site and if your review is convincing you can make quite some money. Promote Clickbank offers in the posts and CPA offers on the banners. Some CPA offers will convert better than adsense.

Thanks for the tips. What is your opinion on going in to a competitive niche? It's a niche that I'm very interested in and have learned a lot about.

I have had the best experience with Peerfly and adsense for affiliate marketing. If you niche is competitive it will be much harder to get organic search engine traffic but there are always ways such as social media that you can use to drive traffic.

I would Suggest you to start with clickbank. Now while selecting a product make sure you look after these things.
Firstly, many suggest that the product should have a high gravity, well yes, it is important but that does not mean you cant promote products with low gravity. The product should have a great sales page, by great I mean it should intrigue the buyer to buy the product, put yourself in buyers position.
Secondly, if the product has a certain niche and if that niche has high google searches, then gravity does not matter. Rather you can gain more success if you start out with a less known product.
Thirdly, the promotion is the most important part, you can create review sites. But you can also create videos as a landing base for the product. That has helped me a lot.
Make sure you build all types of links, coz promotion and back linking hold utmost importance.
And lastly, don't hesitate to try, you will have to make experiments and try new converting offers.
I hope this helps and all the best

Ok, great advice i agree fully.

Thanks for the advice. I was thinking of doing a couple of different sites on different niches - both would contain a couple of clickbank products, and a good number of amazon products. Does anyone else do this? I was also thinking about doing a review site with amazon products based on a certain niche.