You Do Affiliate Marketing on Your Blog

In the last 24 hours I’ve been interviewed 3 times and on each occassion I was questioned about affiliate marketing and how to make money from it.

Here are 5 lessons that I found myself touching on in each interview.


1. Relevancy between Audience, Product and Content

One key to high conversion when promoting affiliate products is to align as much as possible the needs of your audience, with the product that you are promoting and the content being produced on your blog.

For example if my readers are all beginner digital photographers, I’m producing a blog with content that teaches basic principles of photography and I was to promote to them a book or course on beginner to intermediate photography tips - I’d have a pretty good chance of generating some sales and therefore commissions.

However if I was to promote the same course here on ProBlogger the campaign would fall on it’s face and I’d probably do my reputation more harm than good.
2. Trust is Crucial

I find that affiliate promotions tend to work best on a blog that has been around for a while where the readership has been journeying with the blogger for a while.

When you read someone’s solid advice on a daily basis over a couple of years you’re much more likely to buy something that they recommend than buying something off a complete stranger. It’s all about establishing credibility and trust.
3. Traffic is Key

There’s no getting around this one - you increase the chances of a conversion with the number of people who see your invitation to purchase a product.

Of course it partly depends upon the audience - not all traffic is equal.

For example I could hit the front page of Digg with my post promoting a product and get 100 times the traffic that a normal post would have and the conversions would not be 100 times higher (simply because Digg readers don’t tend to take much note of affiliate products and because I have no established relationship with them).

However as your loyal readership grows in numbers you do tend to increase conversion possibilities.
4. Reinforcing the Message

I wrote about this in my ProBlogger Newsletter a few weeks back - but I find that rather than just posting once about a product that you’re promoting - it can be much more effective to find ways to reinforce a message over time. You might start off with an announcement post that tells your readers about what you’re promoting, you might follow up a few days later with a review of it, then follow up a week later with a reader testamonial, then follow up with an interview of someone behind the product….

The key is to find useful ways to talk about the product without annoying your readership (not always easy). In doing this you remind and reinforce the ‘pitch’ for you reader to buy.
5. Positioning

Affiliate promotions tend not to work very well if all they are is a banner ad in your sidebar. They will still convert - but nowhere near as well as if you position your promotion inside a post itself as the topic of the post.

Write about the product you’re talking about, talk about how you’ve used it and make it personal.

Choose Affiliate Programs for Your Blog

Another task that is worth doing in order to prepare your blogs for the end of the year is fine tuning your affiliate programs.

Affiliate programs are quite a different way of monetizing your blog than advertising and while there are some similar principles that come into play when optimizing them they also take a different mindset to fully realize their potential.

The beauty of affiliate programs is that they have the potential to pay a lot more than most advertising programs (if you choose the right product) - the challenge is that you only earn money from them IF your reader actually takes an action (usually when they buy the product).

Choosing Affiliate Programs

There are literally hundreds of thousands of products and services that you can promote with affiliate programs on your blog. When you consider the array of products that Amazon has available (just one of many affiliate programs you can use) it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the choice. How do you make the decision what to promote? Here’s a few things to look out for:

Contextual Affiliate Products - one of the lessons you can learn by the major success of contextual advertising programs like AdSense is that it is much easier to get people to take action when the ad/link for the product relates strongly to the context/content around it.

As a result - when choosing which affiliate product and program to use on your blog the first think you need to think about is the topic that you’re writing about. Ask yourself some questions like”

* What is my topic?
* What do people come to my blog looking for?
* What is the intent of my readers when they are on my blog?
* What types of products would my readers naturally be interested in buying?

As you begin to answer these questions you should get a feel for the type of opportunities that there are for affiliate programs.

Keep in mind that not all topics work well with affiliate programs and that it might be that they just are not right for your blog. Don’t fall into the temptation of running them just for the sake of it - it might be that you’d get a better conversion by dedicating the space on your blog to advertising programs rather than affiliate programs.

Quality - the affiliate space is one that is unfortunately full not only of legitimate and quality programs and products - but also quite a lot of rubbish.

One question to ask yourself when looking at options is:

‘what impact will promoting this product have upon my blog’s reputation?’

Whether you like it or not - the things that you promote on your blog say something to your readers about who you are. If you link to and promote low grade rubbish this can have an impact upon you.

This applies on a number of fronts:

* the products you link to (are they quality?)
* the quality of the site you link to (are they cheap and nasty sites?)
* how you link to them (ie the words you use in your link and whether you actually recommend it or not)
* the programs behind the products (ie I use Amazon on a lot of my sites because they have a good brand that is trusted by many readers)

Reader Location - one factor to keep in mind when choosing an affiliate program is the locality of your readers. This is an issue particularly if you have a site with a lot of traffic from a particular location.

For example - one of the downsides of Amazon is that they do not ship electronics internationally. This is a problem if you have a gadget site with a large readership from Australia for instance and it might be worth looking for a more localized affiliate program.

Tangible Products - if you’re thinking of optimizing your blog for Christmas you’ll have much more success in promoting actual physical products than some other types of affiliate products (such as e-books). While e-books can be quite good programs to promote - they are not really Christmassy.

Affiliate Programs

I’ve written on a few affiliate programs that you might want to check out at:

* Amazon
* Clickbank
* Commission Junction
* Linkshare

Why I AM An Amazon Affiliate

John Chow today posted a post outlining why he’s not an Amazon Affiliate. It’s a good post in that it gives an insight into his approach to affiliate marketing. The best point John alludes to is that Amazon doesn’t ‘fit’ with his blog. He makes more from other better targeted affiliate programs than Amazon.

However the Amazon Associates Program is well worth considering for some bloggers. I use it and this month it’ll earn me over $2500 USD - not my biggest income stream, but not the ‘pennies and dimes’ that some say it has the potential to earn.

To bring a little balance to the debate over the Amazon Affiliate program I thought I’d give a few reasons that I am an Amazon Affiliate:

1. Amazon is a trusted Brand - I surveyed some of my readers a year back and asked them to give me a list of online stores that they had made purchases from in the last 12 months. Amazon came up number 1 as the most popular shopping destination mentioned. Readers know Amazon and are familiar with it - they trust it and do spend significant money there.

2. Commissions - John writes that he’s not satisfied with a 4% commission. He’s right in some ways, 4% isn’t that much when you’re selling a $10 book - however when you’re selling a Get a Price on the $5000 Camera or a $25,000 Tractor (I know someone who does quite well out of ride on mowers and tractors) it certainly adds up. Not only that, the 4% rate that John talks about is the base rate. Unfortunately it is as high as it goes on consumer electronics - however on most other products there is a sliding scale where the more you sell the higher your commission goes to. Sell more than 6 items in a month and your commission goes to 6% - sell over 630 and you’re up to 8% (the rate I’m on). The 4-Hour work Week that John uses as an example earned me around $1 a book. Still not a lot - but I did sell 100 or so of them (after my interview with it’s author) which not only earned me $100 but also helped push the numbers of sales up for the month, moving me into the next earning bracket.

3. People Buy More than One Item - the great thing about Amazon is that you don’t just earn a commission on the product that you people to, but anything that they buy once they’re at Amazon. I did an experiment earlier in the year where I published a review of a digital photography book on my blog and placed a tracking code in the link to see how much the review earned me specifically. What I found was that the product in the review did quite well - but the sales of other products that people made once they got to Amazon was actually much greater than the sales of the actual book. People went on to buy all manner of products (other books, electronics, cosmetics etc) - I earned a commission on each one of them - now that’s passive income. You earn a commission on anything that a person buys within 24 hours of you sending them to Amazon.

4. Easily Integrated - There are more and more plugins and tools that have Amazon Affiliate integration built into them to help you easily place links in your blog posts. I use ecto for Mac which has a tool that searches for products and links them in in just a couple of clicks. WP has plugins also. The affiliate links already mentioned in this post took seconds to integrate in.

5. Payment Options - Amazon pays their affiliates in a number of ways. One of the things that I like is that they give you the option to be paid in products instead of cash. I don’t do this every month (I couldn’t spend that $20,000+ a year at Amazon… well maybe I could) but occasionally do and use it as prizes for blog readers. I recently offered DPS readers $500 of Amazon products in a forum signup competition. The prize is paid for out of my affiliate earnings.

6. Small Payments Add Up - In my early days of making money from blogs I didn’t have the luxury of picking and choosing my income streams as much as I (and other full time bloggers) now do. I needed to earn money somewhere and even the small amounts that Amazon brought in were better than nothing. Over time these payments began to add up. In the early days I didn’t even earn enough for a minimum payment amount and had to wait a few months before they’d pay me - but those pay outs were milestones that I celebrated. If I’d not gone with Amazon because they didn’t earn me a lot I might not have gone with any ad networks or affiliate programs - sometimes you have to take what you can get.

7. It’s an Investment that Matures Over Time - My approach with Amazon is to treat it a little like a savings account or an investment that you put a little into each week and which matures in it’s earnings over time. What do I mean by this? I add links to Amazon over time and find that in doing so I’m creating more and more doorways into the Amazon store. Each time I do I increase the chances of sending someone to Amazon and seeing returns on those visits.

8. The Holidays are Boom Time - While I’m really happy with the way my Amazon Affiliate income is growing ($2500 a month is so far beyond what I’d ever expected from it in the early days) it’s worth noting that things really fire up in the lead up to Christmas and the holiday season. Over the last few years I’ve noticed significant jumps in Amazon earnings in December (as much as 100%). The key is to plan ahead (make sure your links are all up to date a couple of months out) and run a few Christmas specific posts in the lead up to the Holiday rush (start to prepare as early as October/November).

9. Wide Array of Products
What initially attracted me to using Amazon’s Affiliate program was the breadth of products that they had in their system. This is a great thing if you’re niche is narrow or quite obscure as many bloggers find it difficult to find affiliate programs to match their blog’s focus. Blogs like John’s and mine here at ProBlogger do have an array of options for affiliate programs (which is why I don’t use it a lot on this blog and make most of my earnings from Amazon from product related blogs) but many bloggers don’t have the luxury of being able to choose high paying affiliate programs because they simply don’t relate to our topics. Amazon then becomes one of the more attractive options.
So is the Amazon Affiliate Program for you?

I can’t answer that question for everyone - I won’t pretend that it works brilliantly on every blog but I know quite a few bloggers making significant earnings each month from the program. Blogs with a strong product focus can do quite well through the program if links to Amazon are well integrated into posts (see some of the links below for tips). I would advise moderation in using the program - don’t place them in every post you write unless they are relevant. Links placed in genuinely helpful reviews do better than links and banners in sidebars.

The best way to see if it converts is to give it a go.

How to Make Money from Amazon Affiliate Program

I’ve written numerous tips on how to optimize a blog for earning money from the Amazon Associates Program.