1. AdSense

AdSense  is the best pay per click affiliate program for sure. The best features are the huge announcement variety and the very effective contextualization mechanisms. Another strong point is his dynamism, which rewards the most authoritative web sites with a higher click remuneration and penalizes web sites with poor contents. This mechanism is called Smart Pricing and update the price for click each week.

• Ads type: text ads
• Ads selection: contextual
• Minimum traffic amount: no.
• Language: almost all
• Earnings type: Pay per Click
• Advantages: Reliability and optimal remuneration
• Disadvantages: Possibility of being banned due to events outside of your control
• Take care about: Smart Pricing. Adsense can provide a hug earning range: it can make you rich, or really sad.
• Payments: Check, wire transfer
• Subscription: http://www.google.com/adsense/

It’s one of the most popular links exchange and text ads advertising program. It displays announcement blocks like AdSense, but not in contextual way. It is possible to select network Ads or only direct links, which advertisers buy on the publisher web site. AdBrite recently introduced InLine advertising (links to the words of web page text).

• Ads type: text ads, InLine ads and Intertitial
• Ads selection: selected by categories
• Minimum traffic amount: no
• Language: almost all
• Earnings type: Pay Per Click and Pay Per Impression
• Advantages: it manages text ads and links selling in the same time
• Disadvantages: Lack of ads for non-english web sites.
• Take care about: Video ads are recently available
• Payments: check
• Subscription: https://www.adbrite.com/mb/commerce/register_form.php

It’s an affiliation program for contextual ads and inline ads. It has a good advertisers variety and the earning chance is not bad. Most common languages are available, but each language has its own web site with enrolment rules, tos etc.

• Ads type: annunci testuali e InLine
• Ads selection: contextual
• Minimum traffic amount: no
• Language: almost all but Portoghese (strange…)
• Earnings type: Pay Per Click
• Advantages: Nice interface for ads customisation. Good earnings.
• Disadvantages: No clicks number into the reports
• Take care about: Support seems slow
• Payments: Wire transfer
• Subscription: http://www.miva.com

It is one of the most popular contextual affiliate programs for InLine ads. Unfortunately he only accepts sites in English language. I am testing it from little and it seems to have a good performance, even if it’s not comparable with AdSense earnings. In any case it’s a good AdSense competitor. It allows to highlight the text on which contextualize and display Inline ads. It can be used together with AdSense like the others InLine programs (but it’s always better ask for confirmation to the AdSense support).

• Ads type:  Inline
• Ads selection: contextual
• Minimum traffic amount: no
• Language: English
• Earnings type: Pay Per Click
• Advantages: It allows to customize the underline colour
• Disadvantages: It accept English web sites only
• Take care about: it’s impossible to update your user data online
• Payments: check
• Subscription: http://www.kontera.com/mainform.aspx?type=1

It’s a Pay Per Performance affiliate program; it pays each time a user performs a specific action (lead, buy, contact etc). It has a huge list of publishers with a big number of banners, images and textual announcements to be manually inserted into web pages. You need to be authorized by each advertiser in order to promote their services. Imho it does not work on content web site.

• Ads type:  Images,  Flash movies and text
• Ads selection: manual
• Minimum traffic amount: no
• Language: Almost all
• Earnings type: It depends from advertiser (sell, lead or other. There’s few pay-per-click ads)
• Advantages: There’s a lot of publisher with terrific ads management tools
• Disadvantages: I don’t trust their stats.
• Take care about: When an advertiser does not pay Tradedoubler, the publisher (you) is not paid. It happens too much time in my opinion…
• Payments: wire transfer
• Subscription: http://www.tradedoubler.it/pan/login?action=register

Google has recently opened to Inline affiliate programs together with AdSense, but with the limitation of different layout and colours. If you want to take this chance you would in any case follow the rule number 1 of each AdSense publisher;

1. Ask for confirmation personally to the AdSense support
2. Print the positive answer
3. Keep it in a secure place, in case you’ll unfortunately need to use it

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They could, however, constitute a valuable alternative and create a second leg to stand on in order to avoid depending on one source only.

But, let’s speak clearly: banners and graphic ads can’t compete with contextual ads on blogs, unless…

… you find a system to hyperlinks relevant keywords in every post, instantaneously and on-the-fly.

Image Credit: cre8tiv88

Now things would become interesting because, with only one action, you can add a remarkable amount of links. Check out how to proceed in each one of the cases:

• On a CMS developed in PHP
• On WordPress
• On VBulletin (one of the most common forum platform)

Generating links on-the-fly with WordPress: the Cross-linker plugin

Cross Linker is a great plugin for WordPress that generates links to determined keywords when the post is visualized without changing the source code (download version 1.3.2 here). Besides specifying the keywords with relative URLs for the link, it allows you to:

• ignore keywords included in determined tags
• insert the nofollow option in the anchor text
• search for the keywords to be linked also on comments

and much more.

Geek Auto linker Lite 4.5.0 for vBullettin

It’s the analogous plugin for that popular forum platform. It’s much more simple than Cross-linker for WordPress, but is executes its job perfectly. To download it, you need to register in the forum.

Generating links dynamically in a generic CMS developed in PHP

If you don’t have WordPress or vBullettin, but you do have a CMS in PHP, there’s a source you can use as a base to be perfected and adapted to your demands:

$anchor_keys["anchor1"] = “http://www.site.com/path/to/affiliation1″;
$anchor_keys["anchor2"] = “http://www.site.com/path/to/affiliation2″;
$anchor_keys["anchor3"] = “http://www.site.com/path/to/affiliation3″;
while (list($anchor,$link) = each($anchor_keys)) {

$key_linked=”<a href=”$link” rel=”nofollow” style=” … “>”.$anchor.”</a>”;
$post = preg_replace(’{b’.$key.’b}’, $key_linked, $post,3);
$post = preg_replace(’{(<A[^<]*)’.$key_linked.’([^<]*>)}i’, ‘$1′.$key.’$2′, $post);
$post = preg_replace(’{(<A[^<]*)’.$key_linked.’([^<]*</A>)}i’, ‘$1′.$key.’$2′, $post);
}

This code performs the following task:

1. Before viewing the post, search in the text the words to be used as anchor texts indicated in the array $anchor_keys
2. Once you find them, link them to the corresponing URL
3. Check if they’re not a part of a link (as an anchor text or URL), if so, it removes the link that’s just been created
4. Preview the post

Cautions

You’d better not exaggerate on this possibility and avoid forcing links not relevant that send the user to unexpected places. If, for example, you spontaneously link Skype to your posts, you could, in some cases, do it through an affiliate program that recognizes a commission. The user will get to Skype.com anyway regardless it’s a direct link or not.

Furthermore, it’s advisable to use the nofollow option for affiliate links since, even they forward the user to a relevant content, they do so through an intermediate path that is not relevant, and they could play not very pleasant games from an SEO point of view.

In relation to the most popular affiliate programs, I suggest two among all:

• Commission Junction
  I’d dare to say it’s the number one affiliate program in the world
• Tradedoubler
  It has all kinds of advertisers

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