I just came across an old article that I wrote – it dates back to October 7, 1999. I wrote to encourage affiliates to try using GoTo (later Overture and now Yahoo! Search Marketing) to promote their affiliate links. Enjoy this walk down memory lane.
Do you feel like it takes too much work to earn a decent buck from affiliate programs? Well here’s an idea work trying… subcontract the clicks in pay-per-click affiliate programs.
For example, you join a pay-per-click program that provides ten cents for every click to a Web site that sells baseball cards. Sure, you could create a great page to entice people into clicking through to that site, or you could buy those clicks from GoTo.com for as little as one cent per click.
Just join up with some pay-per-click programs that have a defined demographic and apply for tons of relevant terms on GoTo. If you haven’t used GoTo, there’s a great tool on the site that breaks down the number of searches for any term (and related terms) to help you pick the keywords with the highest traffic.
Go to http://www.goto.com/d/about/advertisers/othertools.jhtml and click on “Search Term Suggestion List.” Then enter relevant keywords. When I tried “baseball cards”, I found out that nearly 3,700 people searched for “baseball cards” on GoTo last month, nearly 700 looked up “baseball price,” etc.
In all, there were nearly 100 words related to “baseball cards” that had been searched last month. Buy every one of those for a penny and you’re making money on every click. If nobody clicks, you pay nothing.
Sure, you’re not going to get rich doing this, but you’re certainly going to bring in more cash money that you would by just posting the links. It just makes cents.
One last thing… make sure that you are not violating the operating agreement of the affiliate programs before you go ahead and subcontract the work!