Posted on May 21, 2006 by Tom Baurley

How to get your web pages to pay for themselves: Affiliate Programs
by Thomas Baurley

I’m a age-old member of the affiliate program scheme … though over the course of the last several years have let them drop and now realize many of my older web pages are junk-filled full of old invalid codes. Who knows if any of those companies owe me anything or not because living a nomadic life, I am really bad keeping up with address changes and signing in. So in my honest opinion, sometimes affiliate programs are more work than they are worth. Though I remember when I ran a movie review website (todaysmovies.com), I used to get over $100/month from a movie link page Reel.com (the precurser of netflix) that would allow people to rent movies online, but they died, and Netflix jumped on the idea. I think Reel.com no longer does affiliate programs. At least I couldn’t find it anymore. Same thing with CDNOW. But it appears to have been bought out by Amazon. So where did the affiliate programs go? You snooze, you lose. I did make quite a bit from Amazon.com referrals, but then they changed their payment policies. The big key, is to make sure you keep up with it, passing on your contact information, and updating, and keeping your links and referral codes active. Also make sure you have relevant information that will link into their pages. Of course Google’s AdSense is a big one these days that is pretty popular. A Good resource for finding affiliate programs for your pages is affiliateguide.com. I also use www.darkblue.com. They have an assortment of affiliates to choose from and you only have to register through them. Hotelclub.com is also a pretty nifty group. I’m going to get back into them and I’ll post here when I find anything spectacular that works well. Good luck!