The highest paying affiliate programs online, in terms of dollar amount earned per conversion, are primarily related to the finance or travel industries. Finance affiliate programs include credit card offers, ranging from $20 to $120 per approval, student loan offers, and home loan offers. Travel affiliate programs include both flight sales and vacation packages.
Making money from a site or blog in these industries only requires a small readership. Even with an approval rate of .5%, one hundred readers a day can garner more than $1500 a month from credit card applications.
Our advice is to focus your blog or site on a niche within the finance or travel industry. For example, low interest college student credit cards or summer vacation packages. Here are some examples of affiliate programs within each high paying industry.
Finance Affiliate Programs
NCS Reporting - NCS Reporting provides access to affiliate programs for major credit cards and other finance products. Reporting is pay-per-click based and pays several dollars per click for targeted traffic.
Performics - Performics, which is part of Doubleclick, provides affiliate programs for all major credit cards with payouts ranging from $20 to $100 per credit card approval.
Driver Loans - Driver Loans is a lead generation site for auto financing loans. Average payout is $9.60 per lead.
Next Student Affiliates - Provides student debt consolidation and loan referrals. Pay outs start at $100 per validated application.
Travel Affiliate Programs
Orbitz - The Orbitz affiliate program is managed through LinkShare. Commissions from $5 to $30 can be earned on various travel products.
Travelocity - The Travelocity affiliate program is managed through Commission Junction.
The highest paying affiliate programs, in terms of percentage, on the other hand, are mostly digital goods. These include ringtones, wallpaper, music, ebook and software affiliate programs.
Highest Percentage Affiliate Programs
Thumbplay - Thumbplay pays out $8 per lead, or 200% of their monthly subscription rate of $3.99.
Amazon - The Amazon mp3 program will pay you 10% for digital mp3 sales. When it was first started, the percentage was 20%!
We have created a static page that we will continually update with the highest paying affiliate programs. Our goal is to eventually create a list that ranks affiliate programs by both performance and payouts. If you know of any other well paying affiliate programs please let us know. We welcome your comments and feedback.
Traffic exchanges and traffic building tools have been around since the start of the Internet and are now popping back up in the form of nice looking “Web 2.0″ “Widgets.” If you understand how to navigate, these traffic exchange tools can help to bring users to your site. Today we will discuss two services that we are going to try on this blog and will update you as we gain more experience with them. As always your comments are appreciated either below, or contact us.
Both services publish your RSS feeds; one handles the syndication by mixing your feeds with other members feeds (and distributing via third party blogs) and the other is strictly your feed, but you are responsible for syndication. Both services are also trying to create a destination for Publishers on their own websites as a place to come to pick up free content.
The first service is called Blog Rush, which can be seen on the right hand side of Cwire.org. Blog Rush aggregates several participating publishers RSS feeds and displays them on publishers websites who have embedded the Blog Rush widget. Blog Rush’s easy to use back-end tracks how many times their widget is shown on a publishers site and gives publishers a credit in that amount of usage. Those credits are automatically applied towards the publishers own content appearing on other web pages. If a user clicks on a link on the widget, the user is brought to the publishers web page. Here is a link to a page that has a video on it that better explains it.
The Blog Rush service allows you to earn credits for both displaying the widget and getting other blog users to sign up. Some bloggers so far have only received a few clicks for every thousand displays of their widget. However, it is possible that these users are more valuable since they will be coming from targeted links on blogs similar to your own. We will provide an analysis of our results with Blog Rush in a later post.
The second service is called Spring Widgets, which allows you to syndicate your RSS feed (without having to share the space), but you are responsible for your own distribution. This service is great if you have a feed that you feel your users would want to display. Unlike Blog Rush, there is no aggregation model and no built in distribution.
Yahoo! has been trying to catch up to Google for sometime now, specifically in the area of advertising revenue. CWire recently gave the Yahoo! publisher contextual link platform a try on our site. This platform has some interesting features that may give Google a run for their money and is an excellent alternative to Adsense for monetizing your website or blog.
The Yahoo! Publisher platform gets a 10 for ease of use. That along with the ability to use other publisher interfaces is a major plus for blogs like CWire. For example, you can easily submit your website for inclusion into Yahoo!’s search engine and you can also easily submit your feed for inclusion in their RSS feed directories. These tools are all under the heading “Drive Traffic” - you cant beat that!
Yahoo Publisher vs. Google Adsense Summary
For Publishers: The only downside to Yahoo! publisher is that there are simply not as many advertisers as there are on the Google Adwords platform (which means that ads may not be as relevant to your pages). However, several anecdotal studies by blogs have show that the payouts are competitive to Adsense. For Advertisers: The flip side to the above, is it may create a buying opportunity if you are looking to advertise your site or service via purchasing keywords. In fact, Yahoo is currently offering advertisers a $25 credit just for signing up. If you have ever thought about buying keywords before, this may be the time to do it - or at least give it a shot!
Note: Do not use BOTH Adsense and Yahoo Publisher on the same pages of your site/blog. Their terms of use strictly forbid this!
In our never ending quest to make cwire a great resource for internet entrepreneurs, we are proud to announce two new tools to the cwire website.
Internet Monetization Calculator - Although the math is not too complicated, we created a simple tool that allows you to compare the different ways to monetize your website (CPM, CPA & CPC) and allows for you to calculate potential earnings.
Thank you for visiting CWire.org, a resource for web developers and entrepreneurs. We encourage you to add our page to your RSS Feed and subscribe by sending your email address to info at cwire dot org.
If you read the recent article in the New York Times, you are most likely interested in the following:
Domain parking is a way to make money through the natural type-in traffic of your domain names. You essentially are using a service to put up ads on your unused domain name. You only need to make about $.60 a month per domain name for this to be a profitable enterprise (assuming you paid $7.00 for registration).
The most common type of domain name that gets type-in traffic is a typo domain name.
Typo Domain Names A typo domain name is a domain that is based off a typo of another more popular site. For example, ituns.com is a typo of the popular itunes.com service from Apple. A site parked at ituns.com could probably expect to get a couple thousand visitors a month just from mistaken type-ins.
To find typos to register, you can use a Typo Generator Tool. People have been using this trick for years so it can be hard to find domain names, but if you keep up with fresh topics (e.g. search for typos on the name of an up and coming pop star) you might score big.
Mistaken Domain Names Another popular domain name type for parking, are domain names people type-in when they are “guessing” at a web site URL for a product, company, or celebrity. For example, I might type-in orvitz.com after mishearing a commercial for orbitz.com. Similarly, I might type in downloaditunes.com, or zuneplayer.com, etc. These are harder to score with since you are guessing at the potential type-ins you will receive.
Domain Parking Services
Here are a few services that offer domain parking. Note that there are several services that only deal with business that require large quantities of domains before they will accept you into their program, this post sticks to the programs that do not have such limitations:
Sedo Summary: Sedo is the 500lb gorilla that may have invented the process of domain parking (or at least created a simple interface for doing parking domains) Pros: Easy, all you do is point your nameservers in the direction of Sedo and fill out a few fields in their sign up process and you are good to go; minimal technology skills required. Sedo will also allow you to list your domains in their domains for sale section which includes a simple traffic stat counter. Cons: Sedo uses Google’s adsense platform (their website says that they use “partners such as Google”) to supply advertisements to parked domains, which adds another layer of intermediary (one more partner to take a slice of a pie that remains the same size). For example, Google and Sedo split revenue generated from advertisements and then Sedo splits revenue with you.
Domain Hop
Summary: Domain Hop is run by the people who bring you Kanoodle. Kanoodle is a search engine that sells pay per click advertisements in a similar fashion to Google. Pros: There is no “middle man” as in the case of Sedo. Domain Hop claims on their homepage that their ads generate over five times the return of competitor products. Cons: General assumption that Google has better optimization than smaller search engines like Kanoodle; therefore they may not be as good in targeting the correct ads to viewers which could result in a lower CPM.
NameDrive Summary: NameDrive has a simple interface and an affiliate program you can use to sign up other users. Pros: Monthly payouts, affiliate program to earn extra revenue over just domain parking, and domain stat tracking. You can also list your site for sale in the marketplace. Cons: The web site does not divulge the exact revenue split you get for parking your domain name, which makes you wonder how much you’re really earning.
CashParking Summary: CashParking is from GoDaddy. They are the ONLY domain parking services that CHARGES to use it. We wouldn’t recommend it. Pros: Supposedly, this service can earn you higher CPMs as GoDaddy is out selling some direct ads for you and other sites in your genre. Cons: This costs $3.99 a month. That ruins the whole “$0.60 a month will make your domain profitable” thing we talked about earlier. If you have a good reason to pay for domain parking through GoDaddy email us.
I currently have about 50 domains registered waiting to be developed. In the meantime, I have them listed on Sedo.com and they earn their keep! Good luck with your domain parking and let us know about your successes.
Selling a website is something that is always on the mind of Internet entrepreneurs (and is what causes some to launch websites). This post will go into a few of the easier ways to sell a website, above and beyond letting your users know that the site is for sale. It is primarily intended for websites whose estimated value is under $100,000. (to check the value of our website try out our website value calculator).
There are several strategies to buying websites (and domain names), for this post we will just be focusing on selling websites; future posts will discuss what to look for when buying websites.
Here is a simple grid that provides a high level overview of some of the services that we are aware of, feel free to contact us if we left any great sites off or if you would like assistance with selling your site:
eBay
Summary: You can find anything on eBay, why not websites? Ebay has a category for Internet Business and Websites for sale.
Description of Users: Everyone! eBay is one of the top 20 websites on the Internet.
Pros: Essentially open up your website listing to Ebay’s traffic base. Established feedback system that could add confidence that you will receive payment. Good buyer seller question opportunity.
Cons: Lots of junk websites, targeting the unsophisticated buyer. Real value may be missed as the business/technology crowd may not be checking eBay for listings.
Summary: One of the original places to park domains (a way to make money off of programs like Adsense), Sedo has become a hub for domain resales and sale of websites.
Description of Users: Good crowd, domain buyers, domain parkers etc.
Pros: Sedo requires that sellers put a piece of code on to their site that acts as third party verification for traffic statistics. Offers negotiation services for buyers.
Cons: Poor communication system between bidders and sellers that require bidders to make a bid before asking buyer questions. Web 1.0 look / feel. The 10% fee can also be quite steep!
Fees: 10% of sales price.
SitePoint
Summary: Originally designed as a web developer resource, has seen growth in the amount of listings. Simple forum style listings, easy to navigate.
Description of Users: Hard Core Technologists. SitePoint is focused around a Web Developer community.
Pros: Inexpensive option for selling your website. Sophisticated audience that has most likely had experience with websites or web development. Easy listing process, comment system, and auction set up.
Cons: None, let us know your thoughts.
Fees: $20 per listing ($40 for premium listings) with several add-ons like colored listings for additional fees.
DNForum
Summary: A giant forum with 45,000 members who list domains and sites for sale constantly. Some parts of the site are only accessible to paying members.
Description of Users: Similar to SitePoint, DNForum has experienced domainers, web entrepreneurs, developers, traffickers, etc.
Pros: Once you become a member, there are no other fees for listing or posting. You can learn a lot from this site and even get help just valuing your web properties.
Cons: No formal auction set up. Must be a member to post in sales areas of the site. This is necessary to offer a web site for sale or post comments of interest.
Welcome to CWire.org. My name is Sam, and with a few internet gurus, we recently took over writing for this site and wanted to tell the readers what to expect from the new CWire! We are going to expand this site’s scope to beyond just making money through blogging. We will be discussing both ways to make money via blogging and simple web site ideas where individuals can make money on the internet on a wide variety of web sites. These methods include ideas like selling virtual goods, creating websites based around affiliate programs, direct sales, internet advertising, and more. Some posts to look forward to include:
Top Paying Industries
Basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Domain Parking
Free Web Development Tools
Affiliate Programs for Bloggers
And much more!
In addition to new posts, we will be building on the classic posts from cwire.org including:
Sorry for the inconvenience of not having the website value calculator operational over the past few days. I was Dugg on September 20, and the calculator tool received over 46,000 valuation requests in a number of hours. This caused a number of timeout issues on that day, which I tried to fix on the spot in the code. Unfortunately I have been quite busy with my work for the past two days, and did not notice that I had made a few spelling mistakes in my PHP — as reporting errors was disabled to avoid users seeing nasty PHP timeout errors, I didn’t spot the issue until now.
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