Many affiliate marketers, especially work at home professionals, assume that affiliate marketing is a scam and quit. Unfortunately, affiliate marketing through Google or Yahoo is not a scam. It is the marketer's ignorance that is costing them money.

No matter what type of internet business a person operates, most will include affiliate marketing to a greater or lesser degree. Many businesses consider affiliate income as passive income, but they remain frustrated by the lack of success.

How Earnings are Calculated

Many factors are involved when calculating the affiliate's earnings. Page rank, hits, inbound links, and Page Rank are all important. However, the search engines also track how many people click and compare it to how many people remain at the site for more than 30 seconds.

Ad Appearance

The effectiveness of an ad depends on its appearance. Adds that mimic a link bar on a webpage will do better than ones that appear to be advertisements.

This is why Google allows web publishers a wide variety of layouts and color combinations.

Many affiliate marketers tell small business owners to post three, four, or even five bars of Affiliate links. This rarely works. Instead, it can make the visitor feel like they've hit a MFA (Made For AdSense) spam site. In most cases, visitors just leave.

Content

You've all heard it – Content is King. Many people mistake this to mean that content attracts search engines – not true.

Content, and meta tags, determine what ads appear on a site. A web page that is not doing well can be improved, dramatically, by altering the keywords to attract sites which have good products to sell at an affordable price.

The keywords in an article rarely effects search engine rank in today's SEO world. However, they are 100% effective in controlling the ads that appear on a web page.

Know the Ads

NEVER click an ad on your website. However, you can read the URL and go visit the site. What are they selling? Is it a good product? Do you know how to write an article that can ‘pre sell' the product? Can your article ad value to the product? All of these questions will play a vital roll in the difference between the number of the ‘click through' from your site and the number of ‘decisions to buy.'

There is nothing wrong with manipulating the ads that appear on your web page. If too many of those ads lead to ‘Hard Sell' pages then change the keywords and topic of the page to attract something more ‘user friendly.'

AdSense Analytics

All business owners need to familiarize themselves with web analytics. AdSense has its own analytics program. Keep an eye on the pages, which ones work, which ones don't, and which ads pay best. When you target an ad that earns a high affiliate payout then create more pages that attract that ad.

It is easy to track hits and traffic by creating ‘channels' in the AdSense program.

Reversed AdSense

Don't forget to improve your PPC campaigns success by using this advice in reverse. One thing that many small businesses often overlook in their Pay Per Click programs is the websites where their ads appear. If the ad appears on too many Made For AdSense pages, or the Return On Investment is low. Take a look at the sites where you want the ads to appear.

Use your browser's ‘view' button and look at the page's ‘source code.' The meta information may give a few insights to how the ads are placed. Sometimes a PPC campaigns success can be increased simply by changing one keyword, or a single word in the ad.