I don’t read webmaster forums as much as I use to, but I occasionally go back and take a peak at what people are talking about. I had a look at the affiliate marketing section of Webmasterworld the other day and not surprisingly people were bagging CJ.
I have never had much luck with Commission Junction. Linkshare and Shareasale are a little better. What I much prefer to do is to find an e-commerce site with an affiliate program in my niche. I give them a try and if I can make some sales and get paid I starting thinking of new ways I could use to promote their products.
I also try to make contact with their affiliate manager. I don’t bother them much, but if you have a question or a problem it is much better to be able email a particular person rather than a generic support email address.
Smaller e-commerce sites probably don’t have as much to spend on big advertising campaigns so they are more reliant on getting affiliates to promote their products. Having to go through a big third party who represents another big company just doesn’t work well.
I also don’t do any PPC campaigns so I am not competing with the original company in this area.
It does take some time to find products that convert well on your site, but once you find a couple of things that work, it is an easy way to build your passive income.
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The forums are probably only really useful for about a month. Beyond that your reading the same stuff over again and just wasting time.
One of the posters on that forum mentioned eBay. A lot of people making money on CJ use a BANS style site to drive visitors to eBay products from what I can tell. I see the same sort of threads over at Digital Point.
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What is a BANS style site?
Oops, BANS is Build A Niche Store. I said BANS style because it isn’t all that hard to make one on your own using WordPress.
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CJ does have a large variety of offers though. Some of the other ad networks that have better tracking and service tend to not have many finance related offers.