Affiliate Marketing For Your Blog

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In our previous article how to make money on your blog, I mentioned about affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is simply selling some other people’s product. Once a sale is done, a commission will be credited immediately to the affiliate’s account.

An affiliate is simply the one selling the product of others for commissions.

To have a wider view on this, simply put this in this way, imagine yourself selling some products like Avon, or Amway, or Ganoderma etc. These products were products of others. We call this kind of monetization model in the offline world as networking. The rule is very simple, you apply for the company as a member of their sales force, and then you sell where you get commissions when a sale is done.


In the online world, it is more popular as “Affiliate Marketing”. But please do note that networking is still a little different from affiliate marketing when it comes to business profit plan. Networking somehow applies multi-level marketing.

But let us not make our lives complicated though. Just simply think that it is selling other people’s product for commission and that’s it.

Affiliate marketing has been a popular marketing strategy since the inception internet marketing strategies. It has a lesser hassle compared to selling your own product.

How Affiliate Products is Marketed

Affiliate products can be marketed in various ways. Here are some of the ways that you can do.

1. Place A Banner Ad – Most online merchants who accepts affiliates also provides free banner ads. All you have to do is you cut and paste the codes of the affiliate banners which contains your affiliate id. Anyone who clicks on it, and buy through that link, it will then automatically be recorded to the auto-affiliate management system of the online merchant.

For my own experience banner ads are just good to look at, it seems like a good part of the design of our blog. But it’s not really that effective as what the experts are saying.

2. Provide More Information About the Product – Ken Evoy always emphasize preselling. This is always the key to effective selling online. Your visitor will not just simply click the buy button without understanding and knowing what your are selling.

Tell your visitors more about your product that you are promoting. Tell them the big WHY of buying it. Over deliver the features. Meaning, if possible, try to list even those advantages that are not so essential.

3. Use Text Links – Some say that text links are more effective to implement than placing a banner link. It is because people are already allergic with the banners, yet see more importance with the text links.

Granted that you apply this, as much as possible, maintain the text links in blue color. That is the standard so make it one. Of course, you can still use other colors based on your theme, but blue is still the most recommendable color since it was already embedded in the minds of the people that the blue color texts are links.

4. Email it to Your Friends – Now this involves emailing marketing. Yes, affiliate marketing monetization model is just so flexible that you can also implement it through your email marketing program.

Just be sure that when you apply this, don’t make a sales pitch. This is where most internet marketers fall.

Try to avoid these following words in your email, “Buy Now”. There are two complications for this phrase. First, the email service provider that your list is using might consider your email to be a spam email. And you know where your spam emails go.

Secondly, this phrase is already a huge sales pitch. Expect that no one will try to click it. There might be some who will be tempted to click it, yet, your Conversion Rates (CR) will still remain low.

Additional Notes For Affiliate Marketers

If you want to implement affiliate marketing to your blog, just be sure that your blog service provider allows affiliate links. Blogger allows this monetization model while Wordpress.com doesn’t.

If in case that Blogger will prohibit it later, be sure that you immediately backup your file or export your blog to self-hosted one. Hosting your blog to independent host provider is always better than sticking with the free ones.