How should you choose an affiliate program? My advice not to choose courses that match the payment scheme, but according to the type of person who will likely visit your website. For example, if you are targeting parents on your site, links to affiliates with educational software, books and the like may generate more revenue than banners that link to the web hosting company. The most important rule of choosing an affiliate program is to know your target audience.
Another thing to consider is whether you really want to join every single affiliate program that comes your way. Some studies indicate that the site that makes the most money from affiliate programs are affiliates of only a small handful of programs. Furthermore, concentrating your advertisements from one network may allow you to get paid faster. If you advertise hundreds of different affiliate networks on your site, you may end up earning only (say) a few dollars per month from each network. If your advertiser's minimum payment amount is higher than what you can earn each month, it may take a long time before you grow enough to pay.
On the other hand, the formula does not always apply to every site (or any page on your site, in this case). For example, if your site has a specific theme, and affiliate networks support only one or two suitable advertisers, you may want to sign up to some affiliate networks so as to get more relevant advertisers. After all, the ads that are relevant to your audience is more likely to be taken from general advertising. (What good is putting a banner from an affiliate only if there is no will click on them?)
Automatic Context-Sensitive Advertising
One of the latest trends in website sponsorship is to sign up with ad networks like Google's AdSense ad network that automatically checks your web pages and determine which ads are most relevant to the page. As a result, without much extra effort from you, you get targeted ads on your visitors' interests. As mentioned earlier, targeted ads tend to produce better performance and return.
Start
Advertising revenue is one of the easiest ways to get money from your site. You just have to put the banner there and wait for money to roll in. (Okay, not quite you still need to have some visitors first before you can make anything.)
Why wait? If you already have a website, let it get even while you sleep (literally). Every day you let your site "idle" without advertising is a day of lost opportunity.
