How to Make More Money with Affiliate Programs and your Blog

There are tons of affiliate programs for bloggers available and here is a few tips that should help bloggers get the best results out of any affiliate program that they choose to run with.

Your Blog Readers Are Kings

Put yourself in your readers' shoes and consider what they might be looking for as they read your blog. Are they looking for specific products? Might they be looking for related products or services? What would trigger them to purchase? Start with your reader in mind rather than the product. If you take this approach, you could end up doing your reader a favor as well as making some dollars on the side.

Unique Personal Texts about Products you sell Always Work Best

There are hundreds of thousands of products and services for you to choose from to recommend to your blog’s readers, but making money from them is not as simple as adding affiliate links to them from your blog. Your blog’s readers come back to your blog day after day because they have some level of trust and respect for you and perhaps the quickest way to destroy this trust is to recommend to buy something without your personal good attitude to this product. People want to know what they are buying and they will buy product if they like your attitude to it.

Sell Quality Products

Readers of blogs want to buy the best products money can buy and are more likely to make a purchase if you have found the best product for them. Find out products and companies with good reputations and quality sales pages. There is nothing worse than giving a glowing review of a product only to send your reader to a page that looks cheap and nasty.

Texts with Links to Products Work Best

If you think that all you have to do is to put an Amazon banner ad at the top of your blog to make some affiliate money, you should know that nothing could have been further from reality.

The secret of contextual ads like Adsense is that a reader is reading a post on a particular topic on your blog and when they see an advertisement for that same product they are more likely to click it than if they saw an ad for something else. The same is true for affiliate programs. A banner or text link to a general page on every page on your site won’t be anywhere near as effective as multiple links throughout your blog that advertiser products that are relevant for readers reading specific parts of your blog.

So if you’re writing a blog about TV tuners and have a review for a particular product - the most effectively affiliate program that you could link to from within the content of that page would be one that links directly to a page selling that specific model of TV tuner. It is more work than contextual advertising because you are not just putting one code into a template, but rather need to place different links on many pages - but it has been worth the effort.

More Affiliate/Blog Hacks

It's good idea to position affiliate links in the hotspots on pages, like the top of a left hand side bar - or inside content - or at the end of posts above comments, to make affiliate advertising as effective as possible. Also, consider how you might direct traffic on your blog toward pages where they are more likely to see your affiliate links.

Do not put all your affiliate efforts into one basket. There are plenty of products out there to link to so there is no need to just work on one. At the same time, you should not mess your blog up with too many affiliate links.

Affiliate programs are compatible with advertising programs. Affiliate links will not take the focus off your Adsense ads, there is real potential for both to work hand in hand as different readers will click on different ads. You should think about the impact that your affiliate links have on other revenue streams, but do not let one stop the other.

Track your Affiliate Sales

Most affiliate programs have at least some type of statistics that will allow you to watch which affiliate links are effective. Tracking your results can help you plan future affiliate efforts. Keep track of what positions for links work well, which products sell, what wording around links works well and use the information that you collect as you work plan future affiliate strategies.