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A great income bucket for bloggers is affiliate income. You would be surprised at how many affiliate programs are out there. Of course, there are several ways you can get paid as a blogger.
Affiliate marketing is not easy to break into and does take time. If you’re new to affiliate marketing, be sure to read our definitive guide on how to make money with affiliate marketing. You need a sufficient amount of traffic and you need decent rankings in the search engines to make consistent income with affiliate marketing. For traffic ideas, see our post on the five types of blog traffic.
Still, I would encourage you to get started today with affiliate marketing. It is one of those things that builds up over time. One of the great joys of blogging is to get an email that you just made an affiliate commission from a blog post that you wrote over two years ago.
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The Responsibility That Comes With Affiliate Marketing
Do you have a short-term or long-term perspective on your blog? Those who over-hype and over-recommend products that they have never even tried have a short-term view. They are only focused on making a “quick buck” and not in gaining a lifetime customer. When reviewing a product on your blog, be sure to tell them the good, bad and the ugly.
Get Started With the Amazon Affiliate Program
If you are just getting started with affiliate marketing, then a great place to start is with Amazon. Sure, you may not earn the “big bucks” within the first 12 months, but think about how it can build over the long term.
The more hooks you have in the water, the more chances you have of catching more fish. Amazon has thousands and thousands of products to sell.
What I love about the Amazon affiliate program is that they credit you as the affiliate for any and every sale that is made. If a visitor clicks a link and lands on a book recommendation and then ends up buying a guitar instead, you get credit for the guitar sale.
Keeping Yourself Organized
Another important aspect of being a successful affiliate marketer is staying organized. I have a Google spreadsheet that I use to store all of my affiliate links. For more blog business organization ideas, see our blog post on blogging tools I use daily.
What Method Works Best?
This might surprise you. In our experience, text links work better than graphic buttons or widgets. Most people jump right to adding picture/graphic buttons on their site in their sidebar and at the bottom of the post. We have found that text links embedded inside the text of the post work best.
In the video below, I show you exactly how I set up affiliate links in my blog posts. If you cannot see the video below, watch Get Started With the Amazon Affiliate Program directly on YouTube.
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Good post Jonathon. I have signed up and approved by amazon. The problem I am having is because I am self hosted in wordpress Amazon says I cannot post them on my site because of an agreement with wordpress. If I want to use Amazon I have to figure out how to put it on my site. So far I have not been able to get it to work. Any suggestions?
TerryO
Hi Terry,
Do you mean because you are not self hosted with wordpress?
Jonathan
Jonathon,
You and Bob helped set up my blog. If I am self hosted or wther I am not the message I got was they have an agreement that they will not be able to help me and I have to go to the forums for answers. That is the answer I got from Amazon when I contacted them for help. It sounds crazy to me.. I told God I would continue to write and when He is ready for me to add afilliate He will give me the knowledge.
I am not aware of anything that would be holding you back from using Amazon’s affiliate program except for some state laws that are in effect, but even those are beginning to change. We all use self-hosted WordPress sites and use Amazon.
As far as how to be an affiliate. The video I shared is the simplest way to get started. Hope that helps!
Jonathan
Jonathon, Thanks to your help Amazon is now working on my site. I just linked my first book from my site. I appreciate all the help you and Bod give.
Thank you,
TerryO
Thanks Terry. You are more than welcome.
Wish we could join the Amazon aAFFLIATES program… Colorado has banned its use. 🙁 Hopefully other states don’t follow the same mistake that Colorado made.
Oh Yeah Im gonna to start with them if they approved me
any way thanks for this !
Hi Maria.
You are welcome! Thanks for stopping by.
Jonathan
What I don’t like is that the Canadian program doesn’t intertwine with Amazon US. So if you have american visitors it doesn’t work as nice.
Getting yourself approved as amazon affiliate is easy. Getting yourself a self hosted wordpress blog is even easier…the problem lies when you want to get visitors to your site and read your post.
I agree. That takes keyword research, content, and time.
Hi Jonathan thank you for sharing this wonderful information. I have the a wordpress account but do not have a purchased domain name will Amazon allow be to promote there product? If so once submit the Join Amazon Affiliates information how long does it take for approval
You may have your answer by now, but I think if you have a legitimate wordpress site, you should be approved.