Second, go back and read any e-mail feedback you have received from your visitors. If you pay careful attention you may see hints as to what these people like to do and what is important to them. If you run a visitor forum on your site, then you can sift through the postings there and uncover some gold dust information about your visitors.

If you are still entirely in the dark as to what your loyal clickers may be willing to shell out time and money for, then consider putting a poll on your site, or maybe even a fully fledged survey. Maybe offer a prize drawing for all those who enter their information on the survey, if the results help you better understand your demographic, you will quickly make back the cost of the prize when you start hosting the correct targeted ads.

When you've gone through all these steps, make yourself a checklist. You should have an age range, gender breakdown, and special interests list for sure, and if you are lucky you might have marital status, income bracket and other more specific information. Make sure you have all these demographics clear in your head when you choose your affiliate programs, and you should be able to start making earnings right from the start instead of burning up your ad space with no returns.

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2. Discern your best ad approach.
The ad world can be a confusing place for a newbie with no experience of terminology, but a little bit of reading and some perseverance and you will soon be talking the lingo like a pro!

There are a number of different ad models in the online advertising world, as well as different ad methods, and it is vitally important that you choose the correct combination of methods and models to maximize the profitability of your website ad space. Let's take a look at the methods first:

Banners
Everyone knows what a banner looks like, in fact many of us are so used to them now that we are able to just ignore them. Their standard sizes are 468X60, 150X150, and 88X31, although there are lots of strange variations these days. If you have a graphical site with lots of images acting as links, then this might be the correct option for you. Your users are used to clicking on images, and many merchants will supply you with the code to continuously switch the banners automatically so that your visitors always see new ads. The down side is that many banners look ugly on your site, and lots of users are now ignoring them. However, if you choose the right casino and find a quality banner, you can still reap the benefits!

Newsletter Plugs
If you send out regular e-mail updates to your visitors, then these are probably your best bet for making a god amount of cash. Whether you send in raw text format or in HTML, you will find lots of programs who supply newsletter links. Just stick them in between different sections of the e-mail, make sure you specify that they are ads, and your targeted users should soon be clicking you all the way to early retirement! One word of warning: The people who write these links are trying to make them as generic as possible so that many people can use them, so it is often a good idea to customize the text to better fit with your tone, style and subject matter. Remember that users have probably seen the generic text supplied by the advertiser on another site, and they might ignore it for that reason.

Text Ads
These are a relatively new phenomenon, but are becoming more popular because of the decline in effectiveness of traditional banner ads. They are normally only a few words long, and they rotate through different advertisers, just like banners. They are much less intrusive than image ads, and they can fit right into your design, making your users respect their presence and be more likely to see the links as recommended sites rather than cheap ads. The down side, of course, is that they are less noticeable than banners and contain less information than newsletter plugs and reviews, so they had better be very targeted and extremely well written!

Reviews
These are a great idea if you find a good casino/sportsbook with a good reputation and you are willing to spend some time on promoting it. Generally though, you should play at the casino first to ensure that they are as good as they seem, otherwise your visitors will be very angry with your endorsement if something goes wrong! Basically, write a full page article about why the casino is so good and what your experience with them was like. Like I said earlier, if your visitors are like you then they will probably be very interested in the same games and the same issues, and your high opinion of the casino might well be all the enticement they need to click on one of the special affiliate links you have scattered throughout your article. If you do this well, it can be a goldmine, especially if you run a special interest site and you find a program with just the right feature for your visitors.

So now that you have figured out the best method(s) to display your ads, it's time to choose the best payment model to fit your profile:

Pay per lead (CPA - Cost per acquisition)
This model is still widely available, especially with Poker Rooms and some programs who are a stable for more than one casino. They will often offer CPA as an alternative to percentage based, rather than allowing you to be paid on both for different campaigns, although some will allow a hybrid. CPA works well for Poker Rooms because poker players are often more savvy than say slots players, so they win more often. CPA is therefore a good way of hedging your bets if you know that you can always send purchasing players and you want to get paid whether they win or lose. On an untestested casino, however, it is very dangerous to choose CPA because there is nothing worse than watching your first 10 players lose thousands of dollars and only receiving something like $150 for each because you chose the CPA deal! Knowing that you could have made over $1,000 for those same players is a tough pill to swallow!

Net Revenue (percentage based)
If you can find the right casinos for your visitors, this is most certainly the lucrative way to go! A couple of loyal players at a casino which is paying 35% could mean a very very healthy residual income for you. Of course, the downside is that if they are constantly winning, you get nothing, no matter how much money they are actually wagering. Generally, 25% is the absolute lowest net profit share you should accept from a casino. Currently, my top sponsor is paying me 55%, so there is a wide range for different casinos and they will often up the amount based on your performance. One notable exception to the 25% rule is those who pay you based on purchases rather than profit. 15% of net purchases by players can be much much higher than 35% of net profit because it doesn't take a player's win/loss ratio into account. I recommend the percentage based model over the CPA model in most cases, unless you can cut a very good CPA deal with a program!

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3. Find a reliable program to match your site.
If you've done your homework in steps 1 and 2 above, then all you really have to do here is read the small print on the affilaite program's pages, as well as conducting a little bit of research into the experiences of other affiliates with specific programs. Before you put a casino's links on your website, make sure you know everything you can possibly know about the company. If, for example, your website appeals almost entirely to people in Canada, there is absolutely no point in advertising a casino who doesn't accept wagers in Canada! Not only will this mean zero profits for you, it will also upset any of your visitors who click on the links and waste their time! So, please please please, find out all you can about the casino you are considering using, and ensure that they are a good match for your visitors.

Secondly, find out if any other affiliates are having problems with a casino. Their site might look perfect, but what if they are witholding payments from players, or their customer support is rude, or if they decide not to pay their affiliates at all!? For the latter, keep an eye on the forums over at GPWA.net as they have an active community of webmasters who hold the programs very accountable.

Thirdly, ensure that they will pay you on a schedule that suits you and using a method that is acceptable to you. Most programs these days will offer NETeller, Bank Wire, and check along with a whole host of more proprietary solutions, and they will also pay either weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. Again, read the small print to find out when they will pay you and what the minimum you have to make is before they will send your money. Also remember that, for example, if they will only pay with NETeller and you aren't eligible for a NETeller account then you will likely never see your money. Also factor into your buget charges for bank wires and the 3-4 weeks it might take to get a check delivered to your door.

For a comprehensive listing of affiliate programs broken down by category and rated, please take a look at our home page.

4. Test the program and reevaluate.
Just because you followed steps 1 thru 3 to the letter doesn't guarantee you success! I wish we could offer you that warranty, but if it were that easy, I would be on a beach in the south pacific instead of making this website! Being an affiliate is hard work, and you shouldn't just make your choices and then leave them on your site indefinitely. After the first two weeks, check your stats and see how well you are doing. Maybe you are doing great and you should stick with your strategy, or maybe you were way off in left field when you made your demographic choices. Either way, keep reevaluating and changing things until you have a solid basis to build further revenue on.

5. Add more affiliates and experiment.
When you have a stable stream of new players, it is time to begin tweaking your money making machine to maximize your profits. All sorts of things influence the choices of your visitors, and there is no definitive book on the subject, as every website is different. Simple things like moving your links to a different area of your page or changing the text content or color can have amazing repercussions on your ability to generate money. Good affiliates check their stats every day and continually add merchants, take merchants out of rotation, change banners, change text - anything they can think of to help boost sales. Make sure you always remain alert to new opportunities, and don't let your ads get stale.