The other day an Achieve-IT! reader sent me a good question…
I saw your post about making money with affiliate links. I have a relationship with a hosting company (they host my blog and several other sites that I maintain) and they have an affiliate program but I have never understood how to take advantage of the program or how to integrate it into my current site.
There are several ways to capitalize on affiliate programs – especially if you have your own blog and daily traffic.
The easiest way is to do affiliate selling is to ”convert” the readers you already have into affiliate sales for products you do like. If you love a product, it’s likely your readers will too. Join that products affiliate program if they have one. Tell your readers that it’s an affiliate but you love, love, LOVE it and wouldn’t recommend they get it if you didn’t really like it. Also beware of promoting products you’ve never tried. If you haven’t tried the latest make money from adwords book, don’t promote it.
Which leads to another item of importance. It takes knowledge of a product and (I’ll use a copywriting term) “salesmanship” to sell it. The more you love a product, the easier it is to talk about it’s benefits in a way that is appealing to your visitors. For instance, it’s not the focus of this blog but I’m a Sharepoint fanatic. I could talk all day about the benefits of collaboration to an organization, how it saves time, how it can make the workplace more efficient and (should I say it?) fun. If Microsoft had an affiliate setup and I ran a Sharepoint blog, we’d be rolling.
Choose a few products you love and talk about them on your site.
Focus is also important
If your site focuses on healthy eating, you don’t want to spend major time promoting affiliate products about Dog Training. This should make sense to everyone but some people don’t get it. You might think. “well I love this product and it pays $20 more than the program on vegetarian living so I’ll promote dog training”.
Although one pays out more than the other you are aiming for the wrong target. You can make much more with an inexpensive product that is highly targeted than an expensive one that is off the wall. Think of it this way. Imagine going to Microsoft’s site and seeing an ad for a 3 piece suit. Would you buy a suit from Microsoft? Neither would I.
Let your reputation speak
If you have daily readers you have a reputation. People trust you to provide something of importance, interest or entertainment for what you are blogging about.
What is it you provide?
If you were sitting right here with me and I asked you why do your visitors come to your blog day in and day out? How would you answer? This is a very important question for anyone who runs a site. There are some tools that can help you, like Survey Monkey and Hittail. But you may have a good idea by considering what your most popular posts are.
If you can meet the needs of your main audience with both content and high quality related affiliates, then you’ll start to see affiliate marketing isn’t so difficult.
Finally, if you have a self development blog you are taking advantage of the Achieve-IT! software affiliate program right? It pays out a whopping 75%!
