Affiliate marketing is the main way that most bloggers utilize their site to generate revenue. The amount of revenue generated by a blog featuring affiliate marketing links will vary significantly depending on the amount of traffic the blog receives as well as the compensation offered for the affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing and Blogging
Affiliate marketing essentially entails creating a link on your blog post that takes the visitor to another company’s website and product page. if that visitor purchases the product they compensates the blog owner according to a previously agreed upon contract.
This compensation may be awarded in a number of different ways. The blog owner may be compensated each time the advertisement is served, each time a unique website visitor clicks through the advertisement or each time a blog visitor performs a desired action such as making a purchase or registering with the website.
This article will discuss some aspects of affiliate marketing which bloggers should understand including selecting opportunities carefully, maximizing the income potential for these opportunities and understanding the requirements associated with these affiliate marketing opportunities.
Selecting Affiliate Marketing Opportunities
There is a wide variety of affiliate marketing opportunities available.
Many different companies and websites offer affiliate marketing opportunities. In most cases the blog owner simply needs to submit the website address of his blog along with some other basic information for approval.
In most cases the company is not likely to reject the application unless the content of the website is deemed to be objectionable or otherwise in conflict of interest with the company’s goals.
However, although getting approved to display affiliate links on your website is a rather simple process, this does not mean blog owners should select these affiliate marketing opportunities without discretion.
It is a far better idea to carefully select affiliate marketing opportunities with companies who are of interest to the target audience of the blog.
Using AdSense to Generate Revenue
Using AdSense is one of the most popular ways for bloggers to generate revenue from their blog.
This method is so popular because it is also very simple.
AdSense is a program offered by Google where bloggers agree to have advertisements on their website and are compensated when users click on these advertisements.
Bloggers simply have to create a blog and submit the website address of the blog as well as some other information to apply for participation in AdSense. Once a blog is approved the owner is given code they can simply copy and paste to have advertisements displayed on their blog.
Google then serves appropriate advertisements each time the blog is accessed.
Whenever possible, the advertisements served on the blog are closely related to the content of the blog because Google crawls the website ahead of time to determine which advertisements are relevant to the content.
Blog owners do have some ability to place restrictions on the types of advertisements which may appear on the blog. For example the blog owner can specify adult advertisements are not to appear on the blog and Google will filter these out.
Steps For A Profitable Blog
- Create keyword rich content for your blog and publish regularly;
- Add short term and quick money making tools to your site, such as paid advertising and affiliate products. Doing this generates short term income while you are building your business and will not yet be your primary source of income;
- Build your blogging momentum by building a mailing list of customers and prospects to which you can promote your own products later;
- Advertise and market your blog in such a way that you become an authority in your niche market, a recognized expert in whatever it is that you do;
- Collect as many ideas as possible for a product that you can create and is appropriate to your market;
- Once you have established sufficient authority and expertise launch your own products by promoting them to your mailing list members and highlighting them on your site.
