Test Different Affiliate Markets

 

Spread Your Affiliate Income

April 20th, 2009

Although my main focus is still with poker affiliating, I have decided to venture off into some different affiliate markets and even a local niche site.  I have had a lot of people tell me that with internet marketing or anytime you are self employed you should never really put all of your eggs in one basket, or have only once source of income.  It makes pretty good sense to have different streams of income, because if for some reason the poker affiliate market (or whatever market you are into) fell apart at anytime I would be screwed for income.  There are tons of different ways to make money online, even with affiliate products.  Over the next few months I plan on expanding my internet business a lot.  My plan is to have my poker affiliate revenue account for only 50% of my overall income. 

eBay Affiliate Program – A few people over at the poker affiliate forums have been talking about the 'eBay partner network' and how easy it is to make money with minimal work.  One of the complaints was that it is somewhat difficult to get accepted into the program.  I applied the other day and actually got accepted first try pretty quickly.  The eBay partners program allows for webmasters to put up all different kinds of tools and banners on their sites that list certain eBay listings.  If someone clicks through your links and sign up for eBay you will earn a commission.  It is really neat because you can make the listings that appear on your site relative to the content.  I have recently tested this out for the first time on my UFC Workout Shorts page, where I included two different eBay tools that I hope visitors will click and sign up for eBay.  You can basically create content around anything that eBay sells (which is virtually everything) and then put up these eBay affiliate tools, which will hopefully convert your traffic into some sign ups.

Casino and Bingo Affiliate Programs – Most poker affiliate are aware of the bingo and casino affiliate programs, which work almost the same as poker affiliate programs.  Affiliates promoting casinos and bingo rooms will earn a % of what the player loses to the casino.  Casino affiliate programs are very profitable if you get a couple big players (players that lose a lot).  I have recently created a bingo focused site and a casino focused site to test out the two markets.  If I can be earning as much as I am with poker with these two I will be really happy. My favorite casino affiliate program is C-Planet, which has been suprisingly better than most poker affiliate programs.

Local Niche Sites – This has also been discussed by some poker affiliates who were testing with local real estate focused sites and also I had read about it on an internet marketing forum.  Basically what you can do is create a site based on a certain niche within your city (or any city really) and either sell leads or advertising space on the site.  I have created a small site for London Ontario Car Dealerships that I hope will start to rank well for certain local London car dealers terms.  I am really just testing this out, but if I get enough traffic I am going to buy a nicer design for the site and start to sell advertising placements to different London Ontario car dealerships.  I also recently created a London Ontario Real Estate Agent resource. Creating a bunch of these sites and ranking well could end up being a great way to earn some extra revenue.  I guess I will see how this works out for me.

Online Dating - I have designed to get a dating site up and going to see if I can make any money off of their affiliate programs. I am signed up under CJ.com with a couple different dating sites that pay per lead and also for each paying member. If you get a lot of traffic and conversions the money can be similar to poker. I don't have much to report on it yet as my Dating Site is fairly new and hasn't been getting much traffic, but online dating affiliating is probably worth a look.

Anyways the purpose of this post was to get you thinking about different ways to make money online. Although poker affiliating can be very good money, it is also good to have multiple streams of income.  Go ahead and test out some different markets and try to make some money!