The Basics of Affiliate Marketing

Recently, I received my first cheque from affiliate marketing for a new blog about cycling. It was only a £100, but, it is good to open up income streams other than Google adsense.

I have experimented with several affiliate schemes and these are some of the things I have learnt.

Amazon.

Amazon offers one of the most attractive affiliate schemes becaise it sells such an extensive range of products.   I have an account at both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. It has been a little slow, but, slowly the accounts are building up. The only downside of AMazon is that it has one of the lower commission rates, reflecting its popularity.

Text Links vs Banners.

People often have a blindness to banners. Text links often offer the best click through rate. If the text link is relevant to the blog post, then you have a much better chance of getting customers to click through than a banner. I think that using text links and linking to specific products is the secret of successful affiliate marketing. This does take a little more effort, but is worth it in the long run.

• For example, look at this post at Gardening tips. It is a post about plants for Kids. The links go direct to the relevant page. This makes it more successful than just a banner.

Don’t Be Discouraged By Low Click Through

If you start off with a blog, you are likely to face a lot of frustration as initially, affiliate links offer a poor return and low click through rate. However, as you accumulate more pages and more affiliate links, you gradually build up a cumulative effect of greater sales.

Keep Experimenting.

The hardest thing is finding the most suitable affiliate program. It has been surprisingly difficult to find a good affiliate scheme for my mortgage blog. Yet, for the cycling blog, I have found two good schemes.

Focus On Traffic First.

If you are a new blogger, I would suggest focusing your efforts on building up a loyal readership and increasing traffic. If you spend all your energies on finding best affiliate schemes when you are a new blogger, you will be wasting valuable time. When you have a substantial amount of traffic, then turn your attention to finding best affiliates.

Blog Posts Based on Affiliate Links.

Sometimes you can create a blog post specifically, intended to help affiliate sales. For example, this post - The Meaning of Words, sold a few books via, Amazon. I hope the blog was also of interest / humour to the readers. However, it is important to get a balance between promoting affiliate sales and  Promoting good quality posts.

Not All Traffic is Equal.

I have one high traffic site about people. But, it is not easy to relate to affiliate sales. However, when I blog about cycling products, there is a clear link to my affiliate program with cycling shops selling the products. If you really want to get into affiliate marketing, think carefully about the topic of the blog. Blogging about products will be much more beneficial than blogging about random things.

Separate Sections

On my cycling site, I have two blogs. One about products, focusing on reviews of products, the other blog is focused on building up RSS subscribers. Initially I tried to do both on one blog, but, I felt it was compromising the interests of the readers. Splitting them into two blogs enabled me to target two objectives. Increasing RSS readership and increasing affiliate sales.