Today’s first post is all about how to use affiliate marketing on your blog.  I took a class on affiliate marketing while at Snap! Conference and I feel like I learned so much that I need to put into practice.  Of course, I didn’t write this post since I haven’t really been all that great with my affiliate marketing techniques.  Thankfully, I was able to reach out to someone who was far more knowledgeable than I am!

Malika Bowling is an Author, Writer and Marketing consultant based in Atlanta, GA Malika is also the Presdient of the Association of the Food Bloggers, a national member organization whose purpose is help bloggers become better writers and navigating the blogosphere. She also helps brands and bloggers work together.  

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So you’ve laid a good foundation for your blog – site design, content writing, branding, social media networking and now you are ready to monetize your site. Now it is time to focus your attention on making some money for all your efforts. There are several different ways you can go about monetizing your blog, but one of the most lucrative is affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is when a company pays someone for selling their product. Usually this is an electronic product. E-books and plugins and different tools can be sold like this through affiliate marketing.

One thing you’ll always want to keep in mind is that content should come first and advertising second. Advertising should blend into the fantastic content that you are providing your readers with. If you are talking about a great blender that you used in a recipe, that is the perfect time to include a link to sell it. This is what is called an affiliate link.  

A very common example of affiliate marketing is Amazon.com.

With the Amazon model, you get a small percentage of the sale whenever someone buys a product that you have listed for sale. Amazon does do a great job of giving you lots of images, banners, text ads and widgets to install to make it as easy as possible to integrate the products into your blog posts.

You can even have your own Amazon store setup. This would be your Amazon page with all the products you recommend that others buy. You can simply link to this page from you blog or put it in a post. Again, the percentage per sale is rather small – think ($0.50) on a $15 product.  

The good thing with affiliate marketing, is you serve as a pass through. Once the person buys the product on another site they handle all the billing and collection of funds. Even if there is a refund, they handle that as well. All you are doing is helping to sell the product.  

Besides Amazon, there are other companies to work with. Of course, you want to make sure you choose a reputable company to do business with. One of the ones that has been around the longest and is well trusted is Click Bank. They are a marketplace for affiliate products and sell all types of these products.

Another thing that is nice about these products is that the revenue share is high. Instead of say, 1 percent of the sale or something pithy like Amazon, Clickbank products offer about 50 percent or more. If an ebook is $50 and you sell it, making 50 percent, that’s $25 bucks!

However, there is more work involved in selling these products than say a product on Amazon. With Amazon, many of the products they are selling may be products that your reader has seen before or knows about and perhaps just needs a nudge to buy it. 

With Clickbank, you are likely trying to sell them a product that they weren’t aware of before. You have to do a little more work than just listing a product image or text link on your blog. Reviews of products work well for affiliate marketing. So, you will need to test the product out and make sure it works well if you are doing that.  

And if you can do a review with a video that shows you using the product, that works even better. Another tip is to keep an archive on your site or blog with your listing of product reviews, so readers can easily find and access them.  

Besides Clickbank you can try:
CJ Affiliate by Conversant {used to be Commission Junction}
Pay Dot Com 

Here’s what is important to remember with selling affiliate products: you need to have a general understanding of the problem that the product solves. If you simply slap up a quick review that is nothing more than a sales pitch, your readers won’t believe you have used the product and won’t be inclined to buy it. Sadly, that is what most bloggers do and then are surprised when they don’t make any sales.

Even if you sell a product that makes $25 a sale, getting an arsenal of 100 of these could add up to a decent four figure income each month.

So here is my take on Affiliate marketing:  It seems super scary at first because there is a lot of work involved to go out and grab links for products to put into posts.  For my blog {and probably most of yours} the product based links is where most of your money would come from.  But, think about this:  you can actually make money when people buy things that you aren’t linking too because of the cookie window.  For example:  I linked to a product on Amazon the other day and a person clicked the link.  They didn’t buy that product BUT within 24 hours of clicking that link {the cookie window for Amazon}, they bought something else and so I got a % of that sale.

Now, lots of stores have way longer cookie windows than Amazon…some as long as 30 days!  Awesome, right?!

Another thing to consider…how many of your readers are frequently asking you about the specific supplies that you used in a project?  That is a great place to put affiliate links!

Just be sure to diversify where you are getting your links.  Here are some of the places I work with:
– CJ (brands like CardStore, Carters, World Market, Gap)
– LinkShare (brands like Best Buy, Macys, Melissa & Doug, Walmart)
– PepperJam (Target, Mattel, Le Creuset)
– Share a Sale (Gymboree, Blurb, One Kings Lane, Zulily)