Affiliate Marketing for Your Website
One way to get a good income stream without doing anything that
looks very much like advertising is to add affiliate links to
your content. They're just links, they don't annoy anyone, and
you can choose where you do and don't want to put them. Sounds
ideal, doesn't it? Sometimes affiliate programs are also know as
associate or reseller programs. Read on...
How Does Affiliate Linking Work?
Step by step, it works like this:
1. You become an affiliate. This works by you going to various
online stores, looking at their product range and what benefits
they offer to affiliates, and then signing up as an affiliate
with the store that makes the most sense.
2. You write about products the affiliate carries. This might
take the form of a review, or just a casual mention in a related
article.
3. You link to the product at the store, using your affiliate
code in the link. This affiliate code lets the store track that
the customer came from your link.
4. For each customer you send their way who actually goes
through with it and buys the product, they pay you a percentage
of the product's price.
You can see the power that this model could have for a lot of
sites - if you have a hundred thousand visitors, it doesn't take
a very large percentage of your visitors to buy that product
before it starts to add up to quite a lot of money for you.
Amazon: the Web's Biggest Affiliate Store.
The most popular affiliate store at the moment is Amazon.com,
without a doubt. Why? Because it has such a huge range of
products, from books to DVDs to truly obscure things. In terms
of books especially, Amazon prides itself in having a listing
for everything that exists, and selling as much of it as it can.
That means that whatever you want to review, the chances are
that Amazon sells it - you're not as limited as you are with
other online stores, where you can only make affiliate links to
things they happen to be selling this week, and maybe they'll
stop selling them sometime after that.
What does this mean to you? Well, imagine you run a book review
site. Without being blatant about it, at the end of each article
you can put a link that says something like "read more reviews
of this book at Amazon". This link then goes to the product's
page on Amazon, where there are indeed customer reviews - not to
mention the option to buy the book. If it's a good book, this
approach means that many people will click the link to see the
reviews, and then buy it when they're favourable. I've
split-tested this, and "read more reviews" produced almost twice
as many conversions as "buy this book", making it a very good
strategy.
Hang on a sec, though. What about those of us who don't run book
review sites? Well, whatever your site covers, I'm sure someone,
somewhere writes books about it. Just introduce a regular 'book
review' feature, where you review the latest books in your area
of expertise, and then have the 'more reviews' affiliate link at
the end. Give books bad reviews occasionally, despite the lack
of affiliate income this produces, as it gives your reviews more
long-term credibility than if you seem to love everything.
Done right, a book review every week or so can be a good
supplementary source of income for your website. After a while,
entirely random search engine visitors will start finding your
book reviews in searches, and clicking through to Amazon from
your site. I have year-old reviews that regularly make a few
dollars per week - it might not seem like much, but over time it
can add up to a pretty significant amount.
Note: If you're worried about paying more for books than you
make back, remember that you don't even have to buy the books
yourself to review them - get them from a library!