How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing by Placing Ads only becomes useful when it moves beyond income talk and looks at the work behind the result. This post looks at traffic cost, landing page intent, tracking, compliance, and when paid clicks do not make commercial sense so the topic has a clear purpose instead of repeating another broad monetisation pitch.
I often share ways to make money with affiliate marketing on this channel, but placing ads on well-known websites has to be one of the most effective ways to earn commissions. Every time someone clicks on one of these ads and makes a purchase, your earnings per click can really start to take off. By reading this article to the end, I'll show you, step by step, exactly how to set up this useful affiliate marketing strategy. But before I show you how to do this, all I ask is that you smash that like button and subscribe to the channel. My name's Justin, let's get into it.
Step 1: Find a High-Paying, Trending Affiliate Product
The first step is to find a high-paying, highly popular affiliate product that we can start earning commissions with, such as an under-desk walking treadmill. This is an extremely popular product that has been trending on Google search since around 2022 and shows no signs of stopping. I actually have one of these myself and walk on it for four to five hours every day to get work done while staying fit. There are many affiliate marketing networks where you can find links for these types of products, including Amazon. If you sign up for the Amazon Associates programme, you can easily get a link for a product like this and earn a commission every time someone buys it through your link. In this article, I'll show you how to sign up for the Impact affiliate programme. You can sign up for free at app.impact.com to start earning money with a huge selection of affiliate products. Once you're signed in, you'll get access to the Impact affiliate marketplace, with thousands of products to promote. For this article, I'll show you how to promote that under-desk walking pad, which falls under the sports and exercise equipment category. This method works for any product you choose; this is just an example. Let's say you want to promote the brand Fitness Mentors, which I believe is an educational fitness product. If I click "Apply," I'll get access to an affiliate link, which I can promote with this strategy. Anytime someone clicks that link and makes a purchase, I get a 20% commission. When you choose a product, simply click "Apply" to sign up for its affiliate programme. Once you're approved, the brand will appear in the "My Brands" category. You can get the affiliate link in a few ways. One way is to go to the brand's website (e.g., wellfittread.com), copy the URL, go back to Impact, click the three dots, and select "Edit Link." Paste the URL into the landing page text box, click "Create," and there's your link. Alternatively, you can click on "Assets" and use any of the images the vendor provides. I'll download an image of someone walking on a treadmill to use for our ad. I'll show you how to set up that ad to maximise clicks and conversions, but first, once you've downloaded your image, go back to "Tracking Link" to get the link that goes with it.
Step 2: Create Your Ad on a Platform Like Realised
The tool we'll use to launch our ad and drive clicks is the Realised platform. Once you're logged in, you'll be taken to the campaign dashboard, where you can see clicks, impressions (views), and conversions. To get started, click "New" in the top-right corner, then select "Campaigns."
- Name Your Campaign: Give your campaign a name for your own reference, like "Affiliate Marketing - Under Desk Walking Pad."
- Brand Name: The brand name will appear on your ad, so it needs to match the product you're promoting.
- Marketing Objective: Select "Online Purchases" for the conversion goal to maximise affiliate commissions.
- Ad Schedule: Set your ad to run 24/7 as soon as it's approved to maximise reach.
Step 3: Target Your Audience
This is where you tell the Realised platform exactly who you want your ad to be displayed to.
- Location: First, check where the affiliate product ships. For our example, Wellfit Treadmill ships only within the United States, but not to Alaska or Hawaii. We'll set our campaign to include the United States and exclude those two states.
- Platform: It's best practice to run each ad campaign per device type. We'll select "Desktop" for this example.
- Contextual and Audience Targeting: This is the most important part.
Contextual Targeting: Go to the "Contextual" dropdown and select "Health" > "Health and Fitness." This places your ad on over 341,000 relevant articles. Audience Targeting: This feature uses first- and third-party data to target people who work from home and are interested in home gym equipment. Using the search bar, we'll select the audience "Work from home" and then use the "AND" feature to also include the audience "Home workouts." This is the suitable combination for our product.
Step 4: Set Your Bidding Strategy
This part is crucial for profitability. Your goal is to have your earnings per click (EPC) be higher than your cost per click (CPC). Your EPC is how much you earn on average for each click, while your CPC is what you pay for each click. The Realised platform lets you select "Maximise Conversions CPA." This strategy allows the platform to adjust your CPC based on ad engagement to help ensure your EPC is greater than your CPC, leading to a profit. You don't pay for a click until it's already happened. For the budget, let's say we set a monthly budget of $50. If your CPC is $1 and your EPC is $5, you'll earn $4 profit for every click. This is how you make a profit. Keep "Ad Optimisation" selected to allow the platform to test different ad designs and increase your EPC.
Step 5: Create Your Ad
Now it's time to create and launch the ad.
- Ad Format: Select "Standard" for this method.
- Media: Upload the images you downloaded from Impact's assets section. It's best to upload 2-10 images so Realised can test them and show the winning ones to your audience. The recommended size is 1200 x 674 pixels.
- Headlines and Description: Realised has a built-in AI writer. Click "Help me write" and enter your product, target audience, and unique selling proposition. The AI will generate headlines and descriptions for you.
- Landing Page URL: Instead of pasting your raw affiliate link, create a landing page with a hero image, headline, and email form. This lets you capture leads and redirect them to the product page. You keep the commission and also build your email list for future offers.
Once you have your landing page link, paste it into the URL box on Realised. You can now preview and launch your ad to start driving traffic with this useful affiliate marketing strategy.
Paid traffic checks that change the decision
The useful part of How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing by Placing Ads is not that paid clicks can bring visitors; it is whether those clicks can be tracked, converted, and justified. PPC advice should separate campaign setup from commercial fit, because a technically correct advert can still lose money if the landing page or offer is weak.
- Before spending: define the action being paid for and check that the landing page answers the searcher's intent.
- During testing: separate broad traffic from qualified enquiries, sign-ups, sales, or repeat visitors.
- When to pause: if tracking is unclear, compliance is uncertain, or the cost per useful action cannot support the offer.
Why this page should stay separate
This article overlaps with pay-per-click, affiliate-marketing-for-beginners, how-to-make-affiliate-business-work. It earns its place when it answers a narrower reader problem: traffic cost, landing page intent, tracking, compliance, and when paid clicks do not make commercial sense. If future edits cannot keep that distinction clear, it should be considered for manual merging.
