As many/most of you may be aware, many online commerce sites allow you to become an affiliate and host their links on your site in return for commission. This could be anything frfom a simple clickthrough link to their home page, to a specific product advertised on your site. Has anyone trtied this as a method to try and get more income for the society?

I experimented with this on the CMP site last year but with little success (trialed for about a month). I think the problem was (a) not enough visitors to the site and ( not specificly related enough advert links.

Just wondered if anyone else had tried this with any more success.

At the South London Theatre we've tried this with the Internet Theatre Bookshop, ie. if someone clicks through to the bookshop from our site and buys something, we get commission.

I can't honestly say it's earning us a fortune - it's been available for a year or so and we've yet to make it to the ?50 required for us to receive a cheque!

Having said that, it costs us nothing, so anything it does bring is an added bonus.

Helen

I made a vow to never join the banner exchange at Stageplays.com because it is pathetic and unfair.

I have trialled the amazon scripts and have received a fair amount of revenue for the society.

I am currently trialing some schemes from TradeDoubler.

I will let you know if anything comes of them in time!

I know this is an old thread, but as a newbie I thought I'd have a read through the archives, and this one interestes me.

I'm the Marketing Director for an Internet Marketing company, so I'm interested to hear about peoples experiences with search engines etc. We sell banners, Skyscrapers, PPC, etc, and have a very close relationship with Google, Espotting, MSN, etc, etc. We also run a couple of affiliate programs on behalf of clients (we also run armed-forces-reunited.com if you're interested in seeing some of our work). In my experience affiliate programs CAN work, but you have to pick them carefully. A colleague of mine runs about 20 afffiliate websites and makes about ?50-100 per day from them.

The best part of my job is I'll never get sacked for looking at the Internet!!! (that's partly because I'm the boss, though!)

I always said I'd never have banner on my site...
I've had loads of emails asking if I want to join this,
that or the next thing but I can't be bothered.

I put anyone's details on my site but it's first come first served.

HATE pop ups and won't go to sites with them.

I read in a Mag this week about the top 10 "cons" in advertising, popup obxes that look like system alerts etc...

I think that Web Advertising is or has even a worse image than Estate Agents and Car Salesmen.... (Including Spam emails with this).

My website's my hobby... If I started making money out of it it woudn't be.. *wink* (yes an other wink)

We don't do pop-ups. Those fake system alerts should be banned. SOme of them you can't even get rid of.

There are a lot of charlatans in this industry, but there's no escaping it. Internet marketing is growing at an incredible rate, and Online sales were up 79% last month on the same period of the previous year.

If you went to the marketing director of BMW and said to them, "I'm going to place an advert in the Sunday Time Colour Supplement, but I'm not going to charge you for the circulation, I'm only going to charge you for the people who seek out and then read the advert" that would be a powerful sales pitch. That's exactly what we do.

If you want to be at the top of all the search engines, I can get you there! Tel your friends!

For those of you annoyed about Popups - vist www.popupstop.com - they have all sorts of useful things to prevent them. it works too.

First offence... Slap on the fingers and a snog round the bike sheds with Maureen..

It would be interesting to know though how normal Am Dram groups could make money out of a website. I doubt any really could make that much.

Kenny has links on this but didn't make much out of it.

It has to be like quite direct, going to a Company and saying "We can do this".

These TradeDoubler ones seem too much like hard work for what it is.

I don't want images on my site which they can change and mess up formatting and stuff.

Can we please stick to the topic please!

I've been exchanging emails with jane on this topic just recently although she's firmly in the I hate banners camp and I can't blame her.

I definately hate banners!!!!!! There will be no banners on amdram

Jane

I've started to pull in a decent amount of commission through my reviews site at www.jawaddington.co.uk/uktheatrereviews/index.htm. Sorry for the shameless plug!

I write the theatre reviews for my local BBC site (free stalls tickets and interval drinks but no pay), and post them to my own site in order to get extra exposure. For each play I review, I add links to relevant scripts, books, CDs, DVDs and videos. Everything I link to has a direct relvance to the play I'm reviewing.

I use the Amazon UK affiliate scheme mainly (for scripts, books, CDs, DVDs and videos), plus also Commission Junction for eBay UK (you can 'deep link' so it searches for something like 'Joseph Musical' when someone clicks). I've tried Lastminute.com for West End tickets and a few others, but not made a bean. People trust Amazon, and love the idea of eBay. The rest they're not sure about, and generally won't spend money with them.

Basically, you need good content to make any money. Don't just expect to slam up some banners and watch the money to start rolling in. It's hard work making any money at all, although you don't necessarily need thousands of visitors if you're catering to a specialist audience (such as theatre lovers).

If your society or group has a good site that's updated regularly, and contains detailed information about past and future productions, you could do something similar to what I do.

TIPS: Get registered with Google. Most of my traffic comes from people searching for productions - especially the musicals 'JOSEPH' AND 'FAME'. I find Joseph merchandise is extremely popular - every month people use my links to order DVDs and soundtracks through Amazon. Try to find related books to link to - if someone clicks and buys a book immediately you get 15% commission from Amazon.

If you're lucky, you could maybe maybe ?100 a year for your society, but it will involve lots of extra work for you, The Webmaster. I've been running UK Theatre Reviews since May last year and until Christmas was barely making ?20 a quarter from Amazon. Of course, as the number of reviews increases, so should my revenue. But I don't expect to get rich off it.

If anyone wants any further advice, feel free to email me.

Alex Waddington (wadsterboy@hotmail.com)

The Arcadia Players
http://www.communigate.co.uk/brad/arcadiaplayers

I wouldn't say the members of CMP were alcoholics, but I keep getting referrals from Google on searches for Crooked Billet Bracknell (bizarrely enough given it's in Wokingham) and we're No.3 in the search results!!

Do you have a stats package on your sites guys? If not, I can recommend some. For example I can yell you that sinca Jan 1st I've had 110 visitors (55 unique), who viewed 602 pages, total 12337 hits. I've had 1 visitor from Pakistan and another from the Seychelles. Of the Robots and Spiders, Googlebot has been out to my site 25 times so far, and Jeeves has been out 20 times. I can also see which browsers and operating systems people use, links from other sites, and which phrases people are using to find the site!

Ok so the best way to start getting commission through sites (though it won't be much) would be to :-

1. Get high ranking of search engines. (Google esp - I get most of my hits from google)

2. Get in a Amazon UK affiliate scheme or something like it.

Should we start a new thread for How to get up in the Search engines?

For now I'll tell you how I do it.

I'm lucky, WebFusion, my server provider, has a button on it's control pannel which I just click and it send info about my site to 8 major search engines.

I also look at the hits on my site (certain pages have a marker) and check out what people are searching for. Not sure if I should do this but if you look at this page you'll see what people search on to get to my site. Not sure if Jane has got the same.

http://www.amadrama.co.uk/hits.html

When you see what people search for (and some can be pretty weird) then you can adapt your keywords, and search bits and pieces...

You also got to get a "gimmic" for people to look at your site. A typical Am Dram site isn't going to draw in the crowds as such. Jane uses information about Am Dram for the whole of the UK, excellent... I use my Digital Photographs.. hard work but it works... I get 100 hits a day or there abouts... Mostly for Auditions though.

(Dash, perhaps I should go for the Amazon UK affiliate scheme *wink*)

Not sure what other groups could do...

One question you might want to ask..

For (example) 100 a year, is it worth the hassle?

I can get anything between 10 and 100 hits a day at Adlington Music and Arts but...

The aim of this topic is to turn these hits into some form of income to support the costs of hosting your site.

We have retrieved the cost of our site through careful consideration of affiliate schemes etc.

I have tried others and there seems to be a terrible banner exchange hosted by stageplays that is completely totally and utterly ****

Amazon is good, if you put a link on your first page then you can asky your friends and colleagues to get their books through your site even if they have no interest in amdram.

I don't think banners are that much of a problem unless they are popups etc, if you have a site that is receiving serious hits then you would be silly not to use them. If they are discreet and tucked in the corner they do no harm.

Good point actually... In general Amazon do supply a good service and quite often cheaper, so if it were to make money you'd need to get freind and members of the group to buy things through your site to get money back on it.

Has anyone got any BAD points about this, pitfalls and things to watch out?