If you're trying to make money online you'll no doubt be overly familiar with the notion of using affiliate networks. These networks connect you (as a publisher) with various clients that they broker, allowing you to refer users to a product (or service) and receive financial rewards for doing so. Affiliate networks are notoriously lucrative, but I was recently requested to review AffiliateTips.com - a website who claims to have the answers!\n\nAffiliateTips claim they help you by ;quot;forming a platform where affiliates and advertisers can meet and benefit... Affiliates are offered a wide supply of affiliate programs through which they can turn the best possible profit.;quot; So they're here to offer you advice and help you find the right affiliate network for your needs.\n\nA website I actually like\nA running joke I have with collegues, friends and other bloggers is that I never actually get requested to review things I like; I always seem to take issue with the product. However in this instance AffiliateTips is an excellent website in many ways and it delights me to be able to exercise the more positive words in my vocabulary.

\n\nExcellent content\nOne of the things that strikes me as most impressive about this affiliate portal is how good the content is; from quite broad (but excellent) articles such as how to make big money as an affiliate to the way they separate beginner and advanced articles. It means that whatever level your affiliate marketing is at, there should be some useful nuggets of information here for you. I particulary like their super-simple 5 easy steps to get started with PPC; largely because the information is concise and well worded, meaning it's ideal for beginners.\n\nA nice set of affiliate tools\nThey also have a nice set of affiliate marketing tools to help you make money online, including a set of affiliate calculators, content feeds and program searches. There's not a lot I can say about the tools that isn't demonstrated by the affiliate calculator [http://www.affiliatetips.com/affiliate-calculators.html]. \n\nFinding the best affiliate programs\nBesides having content worth reading (and it is), the other good reason for bookmarking AffiliateTips is for the program comparisons. For example, if you look at this page for dating affiliate programs, it shows the various merits and CPA of each program. Having this information broken down in such a clear and concise manner just makes life easy, meaning we can focus on using the right programs and making some good money. Check out this page listing all their affiliate comparisons.\n\nSpreadsheets\nAffiliateTips offer several spreadsheets (to download) to help you manage your finances and campaigns - something I think is a great touch. One of the best ways to ensure people return to your website is to offer them something and this should do the trick. Check out their affiliate budget spreadsheets.\n\nWebsite as a whole\nSpeaking as a web developer I think they've got a good website going; the design is quite clean and stylish and while the amount of information on offer is a little overwhelming, the design keeps it from being daunting. They are using Tables for layout which is a big no-no in development terms but overall I think the interface is fairly intuitive, the tools are excellent and the navigation manages to bring an astonishing amount of content into the realms of being managable. \n\nOverall I actually like AffiliateTips, which is surprising because I seldom get to review things I actually like. Despite the questionable use of tables for layout (something that doesn't reflect badly upon their marketing advice) I think it's a good website and one that most users within this niche should visit at least once. \n\nIf you would like a product, service or website reviewed, please email me at steven.york@seopher.com and we'll discuss the terms.

I was recently contacted by T3Leads to review their affiliate network and that's exactly what I've done. You may have read a few other reviews scattered around the Internet because they seemingly went on a massive marketing spree, chalking up reviews on high profile blogs like JohnChow.com. \n\nT3leads.com is a pay-per-lead affiliate program - they say that ;quot;We provide our affiliates with an arsenal of promo tools that are constantly being refreshed by our creative team for maximum performance. You can work with both public web sites, and private web sites own by you.;quot; So basically you sign up and they have affiliate deals for you to promote; if a user navigates there from your site and *does something* then you get paid. Simple right?\n\nSo what does T3Leads.com actually do for you?\nYou go through a nice easy registration process (which actually uses AJAX in an appropriate manner to validate your entries) you're through to the admin panel. It's a little counter intuitive because the only navigation you have is a drop-down-on-hover bar at the top. I'm a little unsure on the difference between ;quot;Public;quot; and ;quot;Private;quot; websites in this particular context and the admin interface holds no answer...

\n\nClicking on ;quot;Public Websites;quot; gives me a reasonable list of fairly generic landing pages - clearly tailored towards PPC marketing. The landing pages look like every other landing page you've had the misfortune of landing upon; each targetted towards a specific CPA goal. You're provided with a URL to refer users to (http://411payday.com/?affid=4180 for example). No prizes for spotting the subtle affiliate referal ID in the querystring there.\n\nThey're helpful enough to provide you with a list of keywords to use should you wish to drop a PPC campaign on it; which seems like an inherantly bad idea. You see the way to make money on PPC is to have enough suitably long-tail keywords with a low CPC, but specifically targetted to something with a desirable CPA. This way you can get a reasonable number of clicks through at minimal cost (because no one else is bidding on those keywords) and hopefully end up sitting in profit.

\n\nThe complete opposite thing you'd want is 100 other PPC marketers all throwing users at the same (already oversaturated) market, using the same landing page and keywords as you. The CPC will go up, conversions will suffer and you'll just be wasting your money. The landing pages aren't bad, but sharing keywords with the [x] other users on T3Leads seems like burning money to me.\n\nBanners, banners everywhere\nAnother thing that T3leads.com does that is actually pretty helpful is offer banners for both themselves and the affiliate campaigns held within. So if you're not into Pay Per Click marketing you can simply grab the source code for the banners and throw them on your blog in a decent position. Click throughs come for free, any sign ups are profit = good times. \n\nThey also provide code for a pop-up banner but anyone who uses that deserves to be set on fire. Pop-ups are one of the most evil contraptions on the Internet and we need to encourage marketers to avoid using them. They're annoying, invasive and ultimately browsers will think your website is a terrorist because of it. Pop-ups and pop-unders might convert semi-well, the CTR might be good but they're immoral - don't use them!

\n\nWorryingly quiet on how much I get paid?\nOne of the tools that T3Leads.com uses to market itself is by claiming to have the ;quot;highest payouts in the country;quot; but no where do you see quite how much a conversion on each campaign is worth. This is a little worrying for me; I'd never, ever spend money on PPC where the CPA isn't set in stone. It's called risk management. Work out the CPA, the average CPC and the conversion rate - if the CPA is low then the CPC must be tiny for you to make profit. Which I'm guessing isn't the case because you'll probably be sharing the same keywords as the other T3Leads users... \n\nPayment intervals don't matter\nThe payment interval is a delightfully short 2 weeks, but to me this doesn't matter. T3Leads inability to quote how much money each campaign signup will generate for me rules out any chance of me using it as a PPC portal. Additionally the subject matter is niche enough that very few blogs will be able to run the banners for these campaigns and see anything meaningful in return.\n\nMy advice to T3leads is to be up-front about how much each conversion is worth because otherwise uptake is going to be really slow. I'd never run a PPC campaign on something uncertain like that and I challenge anyone else to do the same. It's a nice idea and I like the fact that they're providing the landing pages, but ultimately they need to address a few of these concerns before the business takes off properly.\n\nIf you'd like to buy a sponsored review, email me at steven.york@seopher.com and I'll give you information of where to send payment.

If you're running a PPC campaign the chances are that you're doing it with Google Adwords. Your keywords are quantifiable; you know roughly how many clicks you'll be getting for the keywords you provide. However, the copy you use for the advert itself can have a massive impact upon your CTR. \n\nOne of the weapons in your arsenal is 'keyword injection' and it can (when used properly) improve your CTR and ultimately make you more money. Here's how it's done:\n\nHere's a good example of keyword injection in use:\n\n\n\nThe trick is to take the search phrase and place it in the advert - thus making the ad seem more relevent to the user. If I've searched for something fairly obscure I'll be impressed that someone is directly advertising for it - it makes me think I've found a specialist and I'll click on the advert. In the above instance I decided to search for posters from the death metal band ;quot;Dimmu Borgir;quot;...\n\n\n\nSo how is this done? It's really quite simple to do. To exemplify this I set up a quick example using posters. You simply use the handle {keyword: Blah} to enter the keywords into the ad (where ;quot;Blah;quot; is the default text). Therefore with the below advert that I used:\n\n\n\nCame out on Google as this when the user searches for ;quot;slipknot poster;quot;:\n\n\n\nIt's really that simple. It gets more complicated than that, but in the most basic terms that's it. It's questionable whether injection ads actually convert better than well written traditional ones, but that's an article for another day. This shows you how to do keyword injection in it's most basic form.

Ages ago I was paid to review TNX.net, a promising upcoming link broker system; it had a strong user base, decent statistics and looked the part. Business seems to have been going well for them too and I'm glad, but I can only imagine that experiences like mine aren't conducive to new registrations.

I'll just say that TNX works well, it's a good system and I've only seen good things with it. Unfortunately their ;quot;link calculator;quot; is underselling the system by a country mile - or at least underselling my website by a mile.

Seopher.com has 450-500 pages, 2248 comments (at the time of writing) and between 600-1200 visitors a day (depending on which statistics package you believe). I have ~700 RSS subscribers and because I sell links Google reduced my PageRank from 5 to 0.

TNX.net has a link calculator to try and entice you into trying their system, showing you how much you could earn through their system. Unfortunately, I don't believe the information it provides. See the image below for how it thinks I could be performing...\n

On the left you can see how it thinks life could be if Google hadn't taken away my Pagerank... I'd love to be making nearly $2000 a month in advertising. However, on the right hand side is how it perceives my current website. Even with a ridiculously high ;quot;link popularity;quot; figure I could earn only $3 a month. If I left it at the 9000 it figured I was, I'd only be making $1.80 a month through TNX.

Well readers, I think it's fair to say that I comfortably make more than $3 a month from Seopher.com. Sure PageRank makes a big difference, but I'm not sure it's quite $1872pcm.

Why do you read blogs? Is it information you seek or do you genuinely care about the owner of the blog? I ask this because I've seen a distinct shift in the number of active participants on some of the bigger blogs within this niche, and it appears that the focus needs to remain on high quality information.\n\nThe problem is that a lot of the high profile bloggers have stopped talking about the topic that engaged their readers; how to make money online. Instead they show you the all-star Las Vegas events they are invited to, the meals they ate and continue to pedal the same affiliate schemes at you - cleverly disguised as posts.\n\nThey're all at it. I read John Chow, Zac Johnson, Shoemoney and Problogger on a regular basis and most of them have recently stopped being useful to read... Let's have a review of each shall we?\n\nJohnChow\nThe blog I read the most often seems to be receiving less comments than it used to, balancing posts between videos of the events he has attended (without useful information he learned there), pictures of his meals (but he's always done that), affiliate campaign pushes disguised as posts... Ironically the most recent article he's had that offered advice was about how to maximise your affiliate income from search engines, and I guest posted that. I think the drop in comments on his site is because the content is less instructional and more of the narrative, and that's not what made his blog popular. \n\nZac Johnson\nI read this 'super affiliate' blog periodically but the majority of the posts are either self promotion (see me in ...), affiliate led (news from affiliate networks that ultimately benefit Zac if you sign up) and more narrative. He does however write advice occasionally and it's largely okay, but it's not quantifiable anymore and that's what I think connects with users better. ;quot;6 steps to earn 15% more;quot; is what users want to read.\n\nShoemoney\nJeremy skips between news that loosely effects the readers, competitions, self promotion and the occasional tutorial, although it's been quite a while since there was a useful 'make money online' article. \n\nYet, Darren Rowse is still king\nHe may not be as sensationalist as the others listed here, he may not be as cavalier, but Darren continues to publish high quality instructional posts on Problogger. Almost every single one of his posts is about finding your passion, improving your website or interviewing important figures within the niche. Darren continues to do an excellent job and I think that's why Problogger hasn't showed any sign of slowing down. \n\nSo that's why I don't post as much as I used to. I don't want to be one of the bloggers who publishes news or affiliate deals simply to help generate income. I aim to have all my information relevent to the user. I'm not preaching hate against the A-listers, they earn a lot more than I do and have bigger readerships; I'm just getting tired of the typical 'make money online' blog because at the moment because no one is actually explaining HOW to do it. \n