Blogger Mistakes: Are You a Free Affiliate?
Posted by Kyle Eslick on Sep 10, 2008 in Blogging Tips • 16 commentsThe world of affiliate marketing has been around for close to a decade now, but only recently have bloggers started to discover the power and possibilities of monetize their blogs with affiliate marketing. Are you being a free affiliate?
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Make Money Blogging with Affiliate Marketing
Over the course of writing a blog post, you'll often find yourself talking about and linking to various websites, products, and sometimes even services. Have you ever considered checking for affiliate programs with that company prior to publishing your post? After all, you are linking to them anyway, why not have a chance to earn some extra income? When a company offers a free affiliate program but you don't use it, you are being a free affiliate for that company.
Here is an example of what I mean by a free affiliate. I recently released a popular WordPress eBook and was fortunate to get a number of great reviews from all over the blogosphere. What surprised me, though, is that even though I offer an affiliate program with a huge payout of 33% of each sale, many people didn't take the time to sign up and generate an affiliate link for their post!
Depending on that bloggers reach and the quality of the review, there could have been 100's of dollars in extra income missed out on because the blogger did not taking a minute or two to sign up and get that affiliate link. What I found myself doing was emailing these authors and urging them to sign up so they could get paid for their work or to recuperate some of the money they spent buying the ebook themselves. A few people thanked me for drawing their attention to the affiliate program, while the rest I never heard back from.
Now, this is of course just one example and your blog may not find you reviewing an ebook, but you'd be surprised just how many affiliate programs are out there. Pretty much every major internet company has them now. Probably my favorite example is Amazon Associates. It would be difficult to NOT find at least one thing on Amazon to promote on your blog and you get paid for EVERYTHING that person buys when they use your affiliate link for a set period of time.
What I encourage people to do is to look through every post they do before the publish it and do a Google search for anyone you are linking to with the word affiliate after it. If you mention an airline flight, search for "airline affiliate program" and sign up somewhere. It requires a little extra work, but can help you make enough money to cover your blog costs and hopefully even make some profit!
Very good advice here, Kyle! I made this mistake very often when I started blogging.
great advice man! thanks!
Very good advice. I will put it into action.
I’m a great fan of Amazon Associates. OK, the commissions are not that high, but as you say, you can earn commission on stuff you haven’t even promoted! Also, because Amazon does a lot of upselling, that one product you mentioned could easily turn into two or three sales per customer!
Great post.
I was talking with a good friend just yesterday about affiliate marketing. He had put together a report and was going to sell it on eBay, without any links at all. I had talked to him about affiliate marketing some time ago but he had forgotten over the months. I am just glad he called me before listing it on eBay or any other place.
He is now taking the time to look for a few affiliates related to his topic.
pretty good advice here. i was surprised that you took the time to contact these people, to tell them about the opportunity they missed. that was very kind of you. well done.
Thanks for the great advise. I think i need to check my affiliates once again after reading this post.
Affiliate marketing are no doubt one of the most common ways to make money online. However, many are not doing it because they have very bad experience with affiliate marketing.
Bloggers are looking for short term gains instead of long term. They expect to see immediate income after they posted a review of a certain product. But when they failed to achieve this, they simply give up affiliate marketing and turn to some other sources. This would probably one of the channel that we should educate bloggers on.
Totally true. If you don’t take advantage of affiliate marketing, it will take advantage of you. Make these advertisers pay for your part in their marketing.
this is very good and important advice which i’ll keep in mind currently i am out of affiliates concentrating on link building.
Thanks for drawing my attention to this fact. I will be cross checking my promos now onwards.
Thanks for the advice here..