If you’re like me, you must have dabbled in affiliate marketing even when your blog has served only as a reservoir for your thoughts. The idea to try being an “affiliate blogger” must have come to you after you studied your stats on google analytics and realized that your blog can attract search engine traffic. This means your hard work is paying off. You have something on your blog that gives value to people looking for good information on a particular niche.
This means a lot to you because you can earn more from your blog. Maybe you’ve had some luck putting up ad banners and invitations to advertise, but there are times when you simply wish you can create an active income stream without relying on passive means to earn.
The clear solution is Affiliate Marketing. And here are the steps you need to take before you can start earning off affiliate income and commissions.
1. Join a very good affiliate marketplace, particularly one with a stellar track record when it comes to giving affiliate commissions. Here are some examples:
- Shareasale and Neverblueads for getting commissions referring people to companies selling tangible goods and brand name consumer products
- Clickbank for digital products like self-help ebooks on every conceivable niche, and software.
2. Find a good way to redirect or cloak your affiliate links. There are several ways of doing this…
- Free methods include link shrinking sites like tinyurl and biturl. The resulting URL does not look professional, but it will do the trick. Here’s an example: this tiny’d URL redirects to my ninja link cloaker affiliate link
- Free but labor-intensive. Manually uploading an html file with your affiliate link. First you have to learn how to create an HTML file, then you have to make sure you upload it on your server via your cpanel files. Here’s an example, my SR affiliate link.
- Free wordpress plugins that can redirect your links. Just do a search on your add-plugin menu and look for link cloakers or redirect plugins. The problem with free plugins is that you don’t really know whether there’s a bug or not, and it’s pretty embarrassing to pester the plugin author with support questions considering you didn’t pay anything to use his plugin.
- Paid Wordpress affiliate link manager plugin, the Maxblogpress Ninja Affiliate Link Manager. Nothing to learn, just paste your affiliate codes and create your cloaked URLs on your admin panel. This is helpful if you have more than 3 blogs you use for affiliate marketing. The best thing about it is you can track the number of clickthroughs for each link, and you can bug the Maxblogpress customer support people if something isn’t right.
For hobby bloggers out there using self-hosted wordpress, learning affiliate marketing tricks like these will make sure that you have a source of income so you can pay for next year’s hosting fees.
