I spent this afternoon finding and joining UK affiliate programs and I never want to fill in another form as long as I live. I thought it might be useful to some of you UK based people if I listed all the programs I found.

• Advertising.com - I attempted to register with them but got a server error. I tried another couple of times and go the same thing but then I got an email saying that they will revie wmy application within 5 business days.
• Affiliate Future - I’ve been with them for about a year and have made a few sales here and there. They’ve got a pretty good selection of products but their interface and reporting could be better.
• Affiliate Window - I’d heard good things about them but never joined because they charge you £5. Even though that is refunded along with your first payout, I figured there were so many free options so why bother paying. Well I bit the bullet and joined so am curious to see what they have on offer.
• Affilinet - I applied but they take a couple days to review my site and confirm membership.
• Afform - I applied but haven’t heard back from them yet.
• Buy.at - I applied and was accepted straight away.
• Clixgalore - I’ve been using them for over a year but have only ever sold one product. They seem to have a lot of Australian products for sale as well. 
• Commission Junction - I have had an account for ages but it got suspended because I never used it. It reactivated once I logged back in. I think I’m registered with the US version of the site though because I don’t see many UK products.
• Netklix - These guys seem to be overhauling their site but there’s a button to ‘Register for Updates’.
• Ocean Affiliates - The only websites I found seemed to be affiliate sites for affiliates and I couldn’t actually find the Ocean Affiliates main site.
• Offers Quest - I didn’t bother applying to them because I need to use an email address that uses my domain name. I can easily create one but couldn’t be bothered at the time.
• Online Media Group - I filled in their application (at least I think I did, I started to lose track at this point!) and haven’t heard anything back from them.
• Paid On Results - I applied and was accepted straight away.
• R.O.Eye - I tried to register and it told me my user name was taken. So I tried to log in with my usual user name and password and it logged me into the Tradedoubler website. Strange.
• Silver Tap - I filled in the form only to see that a VAT number (a tax thing in the UK) is required to complete the process. I don’t have one so sent an email to see if there’s a way around this.
• Smart Quotes - This one deals mainly with financial services stuff. I applied but haven’t heard back yet.
• Tradedoubler - I’ve been using them for a year and think have made a grand total of about £20. I find that I can’t always log into their site. No idea why but it’s frustrating.
• Web Gains - I was accepted straight away.
• Zanox - I was accepted staight away with this one too but they seem to deal mainly with German products.

By the time I was finished applying to them all, I was sick of thinking about affiliate programs so I haven’t done much exploring to see what sorts of products are on offer. Sifting through the products on offer and finding ones that apply to my sites will be a days worth of mind numbing work in itself. It’s frsutrating that most of the affiliate sites don’t allow you to see their client list before you sign up so you have to go through the process before getting to take a look. I’ll spend some time this week looking through the products on offer and will be able to let you know which affiliate sites seem to be the best for product selection, interface, reporting etc.

If anyone knows of other programs, post a link in the comments section and I’ll check it out.

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Google Adsense is good as the steady, consistent earner but that’s boring! I want the thrill of the big sale… a dollar a day isn’t going to cut it anymore and that’s is where affiliate programs come in.

If you can find programs to match your target audience then these babies can pay off big time. Yesterday I sold a travel insurance policy through one of my sites that earned me nearly $90 in one go. That’s a lot of Adsense clicks let me tell you.

While the potential for huge earnings is there, finding the right programs and setting them up takes a lot longer than slapping some Adsense code on a few pages. Unfortunately I let my laziness get the better of me and put off exploring affliate programs properly until early 2007. Up to that point my only affiliate was through Hostelworld and I was lucky if I earned $5/month from bookings. Actually, most of the bookings from my site were my own!

Spurred on my other people’s remarkable stories of affiliate success, I decided to put more effort into this area. It’s a bit of a half-assed effort with only a handful of affiliates, but it’s a start. Here are the companies I use:

• Trade Doubler
• Clixgalore
• Affiliate Future

There are more out there like Commission Junction plus programs through individual companies, but other things like writing and designing new websites always seem to get my time ahead of scouring the net for products to sell.

Affiliate Sales Earnings

Affiliate sales earned me just over $500 last month but most of that came from one company. If I could spread the risk around a bit by getting some other programs up to speed then I’d feel a bit more confident. I really should put more time and effort into developing this area so it’s something I’ll be working on.

Finding good affiliate programs takes time, like I mentioned, and can involved sifting through a lot of unrelated affiliates on each of the networks (Trade Doubler, Clix Galore etc.) until you find a few that are good matches to your content and target market. Once you find one that pays off though it’s worth it.

I like to cheat sometimes and head over to my competition’s websites to see which programs they’re using. Sometimes you can’t tell they’re using an affiliate program because they use tricks to hide the affiliate links that show up in the bottom left hand corner of your browser (I’ll show you how to do this in a later post) but viewing the source code will reveal all. Sneaky, yes, but a huge time saver too.

I’m still learning by trial and error and really need to set more time aside for finding affiliates… damn this laziness of mine! I’ll keep you posted on my progress though once I get off my arse and get to work.

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