Blogging for Dollars - Affiliate Marketing Tips for Bloggers

[Linda Buquet]

Many bloggers shy away from affiliate marketing thinking it's too complicated or afraid it will turn off their readers. Affiliate marketing, done right, can be a bloggers best friend. Let's look at how a couple top rated blogs are optimizing their online revenue with affiliate programs.

The TechZone sells over $200,000 of products each month through various affiliate offers and John Chow stresses they don't do it with banners, banners don't work, they use text links. He also stresses how important the pre-sell is and shares some of the pre-sell blog entries he has written as well as some of his results. It's a good read.

The Proper Way To Do Affiliate Marketing « John Chow dot Com "It is really too bad that bloggers don’t look at affiliate marketing because when done correctly, affiliate marketing can be one of your biggest moneymaker. Many people point to Shoemoney’s $140,000 AdSense check but what many don’t know is he makes more from affiliate marketing than Google. How do you properly do affiliate marketing?

Affiliate Marketing Is All About The Presell

Most people think they can stick a Dell or Office Depot affiliate banner on their blog and watch the sales comes in. When they get no sales, they view it as proof that affiliate marketing doesn’t work and quit. Affiliate marketing is nothing like normal Internet advertising - it is all about the presell."

Today Darren over at ProBlogger who generates a 6 figure income from blogging shares his top earners and explains how he monetizes his blogs with affiliate programs and other options. Check out: How I Make Money from Blogs - My Top Earners

On an older post Darren also offers a few tips that should help bloggers get the best results out of any affiliate program that they choose to run with. 10 Tips for Using Affiliate Programs on your Blog

[Franck S]

Thank you, it's a well written post. I like your blog, it gives you a lot of information on the affiliate marketing world.

[Darthfather]

Darren Rowse uncovers the truth about affiliating programs. The eleventh one would be: Do not expect to become millionaire too soon. You have to learn from the fisher’s patience.

[funkier]

I am not fond of joining affiliate and other kinds of affiliating programs. Perhaps it is because some of the programs require fees upon joining them.

[Larwee]

It sounds like you are talking about Multi Level Marketing (MLM) programs rather than affiliate marketing programs. True affiliate marketing programs do not charge a fee to become an affiliate.

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks Larry.

That bears repeating...

"True affiliate marketing programs do not charge a fee to become an affiliate."

Never! Ever!

[Teli]

It bears repeating a third time:
True affiliate programs do not require a fee to join them.

If you're asked to pay for something, buy something, or recruit others, chances are it's MLM (Multi-Level Marketing) or a scam, so do your homework first.

~ Teli

[RedHat39]

Very good thread about blogging. Also some good links to blogs to read as well. I especially like the quote from John Chow's pdf "Make Money Online With John Chow dot Com" concerning blogs, link count and SEO:

Too many bloggers are caught up with SEO and link count. They only want high ranking blogs linking too them and won't link to low ranking blogs. I've link to hundred[s] of brand new zero ranked blogs and who knows how many zero ranked blogs have linked to me. My blog is a PageRank 6. Some SEO guy told me if I would have been more careful about linking, I could have gotten a PageRank 7. My answer to that is, "People first, Google second."

Blogs are a very useful tool to the affiliate and search engines love them. I think the biggest reason why people, (web surfers), like them so much is the fact that they are so interactive and sociable.

It seems today's Internet surfers are tired of the static HTML websites and favor the more interactive sites that have either active forums, blogs, or both.

Add to that with all of the plugins available for WordPress blogs a blog can look just like a website thats strictly static HTML based but be interactive and the surfer doesn't even realize they are on a blog website.

[Ginene]

Thanks for the information! I do know you can make alot of money from affiliates. I think I am too lazy to venture out and figure out what's best for me. I really blog for fun anyway but I do need to step my game up since everyone else is getting the moola why shouldn't I.