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If you’re a self-employed person like me, or even if you’re thinking about becoming one, you’ve most probably stumbled across this popular problem. Well atleast I did. In order to help you with some experienced guidance I’ll put down some simple rules which should allow you to reach your targeted goals for good stable income.

As you know affiliate marketing is one of the best online professions which earns experienced publishers (webmasters – if that sounds better for you). Unfortunately for us, getting online sales is not that easy and requires a large investment in terms of time, work and money (as they say time=money=work) and in the beginning its not really wise to jump into new stuff quickly.

Well, I actually did this the wrong way, but quickly figured out that affiliate advertising is not the proper thing if your website is not 100% completed (the goal is to have your website look better than the original store/merchant’s website) and this drives people off and they don’t click on your affiliate links. Fortunately for me I have few years AdSense/AdWords experience and this made me reconsider my affiliating strategy. Instead of affiliate Ads, I’ve placed Google/Yahoo/MSN ad banners so that I can get some fair clicks (usually quick low priced because of poor website quality — I’ll get on that topic in some other post).

The results were pretty good. I had 400% more clicks on the ads instead of affiliate links. Considering the low CPC value and the affiliate payout, it seems that Ad Serving is much profitable for new websites. Not to mention that having AdSense units on your website increases the Google crawl rate and helps with the indexing speed which is quite nice to see in newly published website.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not banishing Affiliate Advertising, on the contrary, I’m finding them much more profitable that AdSense after the website is completed, graphics/pictures and the whole website theme is fully developed and advertising texts have been developed and placed on the appropriate landing pages. At that new point the comparison between Ad CTR and Affiliate link CTR is the other way around. I can see that more than 15% click on the affiliate ads and I get stable 25% sales rate (note that 15/100 * 20/100 is the correct rate) which increases the overall profit from affiliate links with 300% give or take.

All I can say is that affiliating is not so easy as you may think it is. Start slow, use some PPC ads and when you feel comfortable with the looks of your website, then insert the affiliate links. If you see that the CTR is low, then it means that your visitors are not in the mood for buying and you will have to do some extra work to convince them.

BIG NOTE: I found out that some niches pay much better in PPC than in Affiliate sales revenue share!! Make sure you check both before doing one or the other. If you want to earn good bucks, you’ll have to do some hard work. There are no easy money (left).

I hope my advices will help you get on the right track so I’ll keep adding new stuff to my blog!