When Affiliate Marketing Try a Variety of Methods

Everyone has heard of the saying "variety is the spice of life." It's a good thing to remember in your personal life, and career. Not only does having a varied approach to things make life more interesting, it can also make good business sense –- particularly if you are making money online. Take affiliate marketing for example:

In this method, you promote a product and receive a commission when one of your referrals converts into a lead or a sale. Unfortunately you have no way of knowing which affiliate programs will work for you and your site. You just have to try a range of them.

So you should sign up to a few different ones related to your website's content and try the various banners and ads out on it. What you'll find is that some seem to work better than others, for various reasons. Obviously you should go for these programs, and ditch the others, even if they appear to you to be appealing and potentially profitable.

You should remember that even programs that start out well can become saturated and lose their allure to consumers eventually. That's why it's a good idea to constantly keep your eye out for new programs and try them out when you get the chance.

In the same way that you should try different affiliate programs, you should also try different advertising methods.

As long as you are adding good content and building backlinks to your site, then you'll be slowly rising up the search engine rankings. But don't count on this for all your traffic.

You should also use some PPC advertising. Adwords is the biggest and best of course, but you should also try out ones like Adbrite and Clicksor. You can get some good targeted traffic that way.

And don't ignore offline advertising. This can be very good quality and highly targeted. It's especially good if you are promoting geo-specific affiliate programs for your country of residence.

I'd also thoroughly recommend social networking. Everyone is raving about Facebook, but you do get better click through rates with Twitter. Twitter is particularly good for bloggers. If you tweet your blog posts you can often bring many more targeted visitors to them. If you have a lot of followers you can also tweet the odd affiliate link directly and make sales that way, too.

If you use all these various techniques, and others, then you'll be increasing your chances of success. The trick is in finding the ones that work best and focusing on them for a while.

As well as helping you make more money, this varied approach is also more enjoyable. Affiliate marketing does take a lot of work. And it can get very boring if you only focus one one thing. As that other saying goes, "a change is as good as a rest."