Commission Junction | My Favorite Affiliate Company

Commission Junction is an affiliate company that can put in touch with literally thousands of other affiliate companies for free. The best part is sign up is free. Commission Junction, or CJ, is hands down m favorite affiliate marketing company out there and for the past 5 months I’ve been making good money with very little effort. Thanks to a great business partner and cool friend Alex Wrobel, who put me in touch with them in the first place and showed me the ropes of affiliate marketing, the past 5 months have been sweet.

Quick Example With GoDaddy

One of the most popular companies that CJ puts people in touch with is GoDaddy. A quick run down of the process will give you a greater understanding of how you can start making some good money in no time.

Step #1: Sign up for Commission Junction

Head over to http://cj.com and set up an account. Again this is free to do and takes no time at all.

At the home page you’ll see a number of options on the top tab bar. You can choose between Advertisers and Publishers. Choose the Publishers option as this will put you in touch with thousands of affiliate companies allowing you to post their advertisements on your blog/website and generate revenue. Follow the steps; choose you country, list your website URL, set up a profile, choose potential companies to partner with and you’re done.

You’re paid on a per click basis so essentially the more targeted traffic you can generate to your blog or website, the more money in your pocket.

Again for this example let’s assume your first partner company is GoDaddy.

Step #2) Set Up Ads on Your Blog

This can be tricky for your first time but it’s easily broken down. Essentially you’ll be advertising in a couple different ways on your website.

The first way is simply by placing ads for GoDaddy on your site. Slap them on your sidebar, header or below your post; what ever works best. If you scroll down a bit on my site and on the sidebar you’ll see some small ads for GoDaddy. This is a simple and effective way to make money however it relies heavily on the quantity and quality of your site’s traffic. You need a steady stream of targeted visitors to get sales.

A second, more effective way to get sales is by blogging about GoDaddy or Commission Junction (just like I’m doing right now). On my site I have a Resources section in which there is a subtopic called Go Daddy Hosting. If you check that out you’ll see I have a couple blogs ranging from “Coupon Codes for GoDaddy”, “How to Choose a Domain Name” to “How to Buy a Domain Name”. On each of these blogs I have a number of links grabbed form CJ that direct visitors to GoDaddy. The reason this is so effective obviously is because there is a high probability that someone viewing these blogs is interested in some GoDaddy hosting.

The latter of the two is more effective but of course you’ll want to use both techniques together. Again the key here is traffic and the type of traffic you’re getting.

You can grab the necessary links and banners when you log in to CJ and click on “Get Links”. You have a bunch of choices but I tend to stick with a few banner styles, after all a messy blog is as good as a dead blog.

Step #3) Monitor Your Progresst

This is what will make or break your success here. After a few weeks of advertising I’d highly recommend you run a progress report. This is easily done by clicking “run reports” and selecting a time frame. Here is an example of a report ran from Sept. 20 to Oct. 25.

I know it’s a bit small but these reports are very crucial. As you can see here in this report I had made a total of $327.38 with $234.47 paid out and $92.92 in pending commissions (for some odd reason the report total is off by 1 cent).

Anyways if you click on any of these sums on your report you can view the actual sale types, the link which was clicked and a whole wealth of other knowledge. If one ad isn’t doing so hot, change it up or focus your efforts on another section.

Good Money for Little Effort – Smart Effort that is…

It doesn’t take much to set up your blog with money making ads. If you view the report above again you’ll see I had some days with a couple dollars and others with over a hundred from a single sale. This is making money in your sleep and I make money constantly know with very little effort.

But this doesn’t mean you can’t just sign up, slap a few ads and sit back while the money rolls in. You need to spend some time and a small amount of effort setting up your ads and writing smart blog posts first in order to get anywhere. And of course the more effort you put in the more rewards you get. I could just sit back and collect money off the % of visitors to my site who click an ad and buy some GoDaddy products but if I continue to work at it and grow my efforts, my earnings grow as well.

There is no reason you can’t be out there making this kind of money right now. Commission Junction is honestly the best affiliate company out there that really deserves a look.

There are really only 2 things You need…

#1) You need a blog: This is essential. Choosing the publisher option means you will be advertising on a blog or website of your own. This means you can have a professionally custom built site, a self hosted Wordpress or Blogger blog, or even a simple html block site from Weebly.com. It doesn’t matter, so long as the site is yours and you can control the content that goes up.

[Here are some posts to help you out.]

If you need help at all setting up a site or blog you might want to check out How to Set Up Your First Self Hosted Wordpress Blog. If you aren’t sure if you should go with Wordpress or Blogger then check out my post called Wordpress vs Blogger. Maybe you already have a blog at BlogSpot and want to transfer it to Wordpress… in this case check out How to Transfer Your Blogger Blog to Wordpress. Lastly, I have another blog that can help you Install Wordpress on Your Blog.

#2) You need traffic: And we’re not talking the 10,000 visitors you can buy for $10. You need real, targeted and organic traffic for this to be worthwhile. I say organic traffic because we don’t want to rely on paid traffic in this case. If you can begin to develop organic channels of traffic this will become a much more rewarding ordeal than if you were to take the paid traffic route.

That’s it!

There is nothing stopping you from being well on your way to automated income from Commission Junction. With thousands of companies ranging form domain hosting to handbags to automotive products, there is no shortage to variety with what you want to market.

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