The time it takes buying ads and managing them must be considered as your time is money. If you look at these companies and deal with them they will make it appear easy to buy ads until you realize it’s easy if you pay a high price per click. They will claim that you can get a lot of quality traffic at a lower price “if” you write your ad a certain way and have a good landing page. Their claims are misleading at best or what some will call outright fraud. You will write ads which take a lot of time, you will change the ads and run “campaigns” and on and on learning to use their system. Later you may find like others have that you simply can not get quality traffic from them unless you pay and pay and pay, “bid” high for keywords you want. Then they may claim that the keywords you are bidding for aren’t relevant enough and give you a low score so your ads won’t run much and you won’t get much quality traffic. They may have recommended that you use those same keywords! when they list many keyword choices for you to pick from. They even have a pick all of the keywords they list which does you no good. You may need a full time expert to run the ads or pay an advertising company at great cost. Needless to say it’s not as simple as they claim and they can make it sound like it’s all your fault anyway for not getting the traffic for the keywords you bid for because you didn’t write the ads or bid the best way. If you are making some money buying ads it still may not make sense because of the time involved.

If you do make money and you at first consider it worth your time for the dollars you make it may still not be worth it. Some of the customers you get from the paid ads may have found you anyway but you paid for that customer you could have had for nothing. Another thing to consider is, are you able to handle the customers giving them all great service. The traffic you get paying for ads won’t be as profitable so if that extra business is making it harder to give all of your customers excellent service it may hurt your business in the long run.

After spending dozens of hours or more placing ads and writing the ads and learning their system and spending thousands of dollars they can ban you or stop the ads running because they don’t like something about your web site or some of your ads. You may get traffic for a while but they may lower your score or other factors can effect the amount of traffic you get for your bid price so the traffic you get may fall drastically or to none abruptly unless you raise your bids to unprofitable levels. These companies won’t care if your business is harmed or you start losing money. You may have hired people to handle the traffic you paid for or bought merchandise or supplies to handle the business only to see business fall literally over night. You may have to bid higher at a loss to get rid of some merchandise you stocked up on.

Unless you have a huge profit margin for what you sell on your web site it’s generally unwise, a waste of time and money buying ads in search engines and text or banner ads. Your time and money will often best be used giving your customers a good experience on your web site and good products or services at great prices.

Offering an affiliate program makes sense for advertisers because they offer a percentage commission for a sale and not have to worry about paying for ads that may never pay off. It is an improvement over straight banner ads because it eliminates the worry of web sites charging them to run ads where few quality leads result.

Web site owners can promote the best companies and their products even if they are new or yet have much traffic to their site. It gives all web site web masters and owners the chance to sign up for an affiliate and begin making money. The advertising networks often required many thousands of hits/visitors per day to allow a web site to join and run their ads. Many new web site owners would have a difficult time acquiring that much traffic so affiliates were an only option for them to make some money as their web site grows.

Affiliate sales for web site owners (publishers) is still a good way to gain some revenue for your site but it’s more difficult as competition grows. The internet keeps changing but affiliate marketing will continue because it makes sense for many. Web sites of most topics can include some affiliate deals that their visitors would likely be interested in.

A good way to use affiliate offers to make some revenue for your site is to look for products that are in your niche. If your web site niche is about cars an affiliate of jewelry may have something that is car related so the product may be interesting to your visitors. Your visitors may never have thought of purchasing a piece of jewelry with something connected to cars but seeing it they may purchase the product through your site earning you a commission. You can also find special deals or offers of products your visitors are likely to buy. Selective offers can result in sales and revenue for your web site.

Some of many affiliate networks where you can join affiliate programs are Commission Junction, Linkshare, Connect Commerce and Neverblue.

Using social media sites you can communicate with your customers providing important feedback about your products and services. It’s possible to change improve your offers using the feedback you receive or even create new or expanded services.  

The best way to use such social media sites is not as direct sales pitches but communication with customers and potential customers. Build a good fuzzy feeling with those you want to purchase your offers which often leads to recommendations to their family and friends.

Join the ad exchange. Promote your web site
 
http://www.internetmoneyforum.com/advertise.htm
 
High payout!
Get 100 ads for each click on an ad and 1 additional ad for 2 run on your site.