Credit: 7rains

In the past few months, I have seen many folks who share affiliate links blatantly on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. All publishers go through rough times. We all want to make more money and live more comfortable lives. Sharing affiliate links with your friends, followers, and those who have circled you may bring you some much needed cash. At the same time, it could set your business back overtime.

While it is true that some people don’t care about their contacts sharing affiliate links with them, many folks do. You may be able to pull it off but you want to be careful not to go overboard. Besides, you should take time to get yourself familiar with things you need to do to stay compliant with the law when sharing affiliate links online. Here are a few reasons why you want to share as few affiliate links as possible on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+:

• affiliate links could turn people off: if you are just getting started and don’t have a large following online, the last thing you want to do is turn people off. Sharing affiliate links time and time again with your contacts can do that. I have seen popular figures share affiliate links for  hot gadgets such as Kindle and iPad in their streams. Not everyone can pull that off though without losing followers. 
• paid links could damage your credibility: many of us leverage our social outposts to enhance our brands. Sharing affiliate links and spamming your followers will reflect poorly upon your brand. Besides, it is hard not to judge someone’s credibility when they are sharing paid links all the time.
• you could get in trouble: every country has its own set of laws as far as online marketing is concerned. If you live in the U.S., you need to disclose your paid links to your followers. It is so easy to get in trouble in this country if you are not too careful. Some people prefer disclosing their affiliate links. I prefer sharing regular links in my stream and not deal with the disclosure part. The choice is yours.
• paid links can get you banned: this should go without saying. Not all communities are friendly towards affiliate marketers. Even Google is not too fond of them. Sharing too many spammy affiliate links could get you banned.

At the end of the day, the decision to share affiliate links in the communities you are involved in is up to you. Only you can make the decision that is right for your business. You should always ask yourself whether what you are planning to do will be worth it in the long run.

Keyword Spy: one of the most powerful keyword research tools on the market. It not only lets you keep track of your competitors’ keywords, it also helps you discover products and offers to promote on your blog.

CB Trends: a trend tracker search engine for ClickBank products. It keeps you up to date with the new ClickBank products as well as the ones that are highly popular.

CB Engine: a premium product that keeps you updated on new, relisted, removed, and recurring products. Recurring products are especially interesting as they can lead to recurring commissions for your business.

ClickBank Tracker: very similar to the above tools but has a very easy to use interface. Just use the sliders to filter through ClickBank products and find the ones that may work the best for your blog.

There are plenty of affiliates who make a ton of money on ClickBank. I may not be a fan of ClickBank and the majority of its products but testing ClickBank banners against Adsense and other affiliate ads can be quite beneficial.

Credit: evagor@sxc.hu

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money blogging. As long as you are writing about a niche that a few people care about, there is a good chance you can find affiliate programs that can help you promote products to your readers and get compensated when they buy using your links. There is no magic number of dollars that you can make with affiliate marketing. Many bloggers assume that there is no ceiling to how much money you can earn from affiliate products. While that may be true, since you are only getting a small percentage of what you are selling on your blog, there is so much money you can earn. But there is a floor. That’s when you don’t sell any products. So affiliate marketing is quite risky for publishers especially if you have CPM deals lined up for your blog.

I have been fond of affiliate marketing for years now. It’s what allowed me to start my business and fund it when I didn’t have enough resources to hire people or purchase equipment and services for my business. So affiliate marketing will always have a special place in my heart. But there are reasons I am not focusing my efforts on affiliate marketing anymore. The business has changed dramatically in the past few years, and while the industry is not dead, it is being pressured from all sides. Here are just a few reasons why I don’t consider affiliate marketing to be right for my business:

1. Control: when you start your own business, you’d hope that you can have control on what’s going on with your business, and what you can do to increase your revenue. In reality, affiliate marketers are not in control of their destiny. In many cases, affiliate programs are too uptight with all their rules and policies. Some affiliate programs don’t pay you if you blog about their products. Others will right off your affiliate commissions if you refer people to them through the search engines. Worst of all, your affiliate program could ask you to make major changes to your website in order to continue your relationship with them. Don’t get me wrong. I have worked in the corporate environment, and I am aware of the challenges of working with partner companies in the past. But I have found many affiliate programs to be too demanding and uptight.
2. Unfavorable Landscape: affiliate programs have shown that they really don’t care about their affiliates. When companies cut their affiliates off the minute Internet tax is imposed in a certain state, you know you are not a priority for your affiliate partner. I guess it’s only fair as affiliates are there to generate leads for their merchants. So expecting merchants to care too much about affiliates may be wishful thinking. Many merchants are struggling these days and affiliate marketers are getting the boot as a result. Fair?
3. Risky: affiliate marketing may look not so risky to publishers at first. But if you think about it, it does put pressure on publishers to perform and generate sales. It doesn’t help that some affiliate programs ask their affiliates to generate a certain amount of revenue each month or else. Unlike advertising and sponsorships, with affiliate marketing you are not entitled to a minimum monthly check. If you don’t sell anything, you don’t get paid. It’s always wise to diversify just in case.
4. Limitations: as an affiliate, you are very limited to what you can do to promote affiliate products. Many merchants don’t allow you to access their conversion data or even install your analytics code on their landing page. So you are going to be limited as far as ways you can improve your campaigns. The payments are another issue. I can’t tell you how many times we have delivered sales for companies only to find out they never intended to pay us for our troubles in the first places. Yes. That’s fraud. But it happens all the time. As a startup, we can’t afford to go after all these companies. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that affiliate programs practice such an approach from time to time. Popular affiliate programs may not take such an approach but by leaving their terms and conditions vauge, they leave the door wide open for affiliate abuse.
5. Competition: I love competition. That’s why I got in the business world. If you can’t take competition, you may want to quit blogging and look for a job that doesn’t require you to compete with others on a daily basis. Unfortunately, not all competitors play fair in the affiliate marketing world. There are some who engage in black hat tactics to steal sales from others. Some spam your blog or launch hack attacks against it. Of course, there are some affiliates who have no clue what they are doing and end up destroying everyone else’s credibility in their niche. Many online marketers create and sell products that target newbie affiliates. Unfortunately, most of these marketers are not good teachers.

I am not suggesting that you can’t make money from affiliate marketing. On the contrary, if you play your cards right, there is no reason you can’t make a decent amount of revenue from your blog on a monthly basis. However, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. You should always work towards creating and selling your own products. It’s much more lucrative, and you’ll have more control. Hate to be cynical, but whatever you do, don’t put all your hopes in affiliate products.

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money on your blog. You put a lot of time to research and write your blog posts, so the last thing you want to do is look for a job to supplement your income just because you are not monetizing your blog. Affiliate programs provide you with a great opportunity to provide value to your readers and make some money on your blog as well [the key here being providing value to your audience]. Just like anything in life, where there is an opportunity, there are pitfalls. You can’t just expect to post affiliate links to your blog and expect people to use them to earn your money. Your audience is not interested in how much money you are going to make. Your visitors are more concerned with what you have to say and what value you can provide them with. It’s not about you. It’s about them!

Affiliate Marketing Mistakes for Bloggers

It’s so easy to get carried away when you are making money from affiliate marketing. Maybe you are just struggling to make your monthly income goals. Maybe you need money to start that new project. It’s so easy to be tempted to push products that maybe are not that great but earn you nice commission checks. And your audience will certainly realize that you mean no harm, right? Wrong! Promoting products on your blog without testing them first is one of the biggest mistakes you can ever make in your blogging career. You may get lucky once in a while but if you promote a disastrous product, you are going to lose all your credibility with your audience. And don’t start promoting products that don’t provide any value to your readers. Your audience will see through you and leave you in a blink of an eye.

Sometimes you have the best interest of your audience in mind but you just make a bad move with good intentions. Whatever the case, it’s better to be honest with your audience and let them know what you are up to. Your audience will appreciate your honesty, and you may even earn more trust. What you don’t want to do is make these 5 mistakes:

• Promote useless products: you should always consider what your audience may deem useful and try to promote those products. You should never promote a product just because you are out of blogging ideas or want to make some quick cash.
• Promote untested products: don’t ever promote a product that you have not tested. Some top marketers have had to apologize just days after promoting a product they hadn’t tested. You won’t look good if you have to apologize for such a big mistake.
• Try to keep manufacturers happy at all costs: sometimes a manufacturer may send you a product to test. You may even get to keep the product for yourself. That doesn’t mean you should go easy on them. Your audience is not stupid. It will figure out what you are up to if you keep writing rosy reviews for all kinds of products on your blog. If a product is terrible, don’t hesitate to talk about its flaws.
• Be Sneaky: don’t be sneaky. I have seen marketers who promote affiliate products and get a lot of clicks by telling their readers that their lives will be over unless they click. I personally rather put all the facts on the table and let my readers decide whether they want to take advantage.
• Promote too many products: you want to make some money. Who doesn’t? But if you have too many affiliate products on your site, you are essentially not doing your blog justice. Don’t forget that variety is what keeps your readers interested in coming back for more. Besides, you don’t want to give you audience the indication that you are in it for the wrong reasons.

Ultimately, you should be more concerned about providing value than making quick cash when it comes to blogging. Once you build your traffic up by providing solid content on a consistent basis, you are going to make money one way or another. Don’t sacrifice your credibility and earned trust by getting greedy.

Blogging about your passion is fun thing to do. There is no doubt about it. But at some point you need to find a way to monetize your blog. You can always use Adsense, but I personally find it to be unprofessional. In fact, most top bloggers do not use Adsense on their authority sites. It just looks cheap and brings down your blog a notch lower. I have personally had a lot of success with affiliate marketing, and I know a lot of other folks in the industry are using the same channel to raise funds for their businesses.

Affiliate marketing is very lucrative to bloggers as it requires no inventory, and you can earn commissions on the items that are being sold in your niche and beyond. If you are in the blogging niche, you can sell blogging books, blogging tools, premium blog subscriptions, and even blogging conferences. In addition, you can go beyond this by selling things that are somewhat related to your niche but are not specifically made for the folks that are interested in your niche.

Choose the right offer to promote

If you get to promote the right offer on your blog, you can achieve immense success and make a lot of money in the process. I personally go after items that are a necessity for the folks who are visiting my blog. In addition, I avoid promoting products that cost a fortune on my blog (you should leave that to your list). This is a volume-based strategy. You can also take a commission-based strategy and promote super-expensive products. Both of these strategies work, but it takes work to make them work.

It is all about conversion

you should always test multiple offers on your blog to find out which one works the best. That’s why we have split testing folks. You are working hard on your blog, and you deserve to get paid for your efforts. But if you promote a product that comes with a sales-page that scares your leads away, then you probably should not promote that product. It does not matter how much conversion an affiliate program pays per sale or how related the product is to your niche. If you can’t convert, you don’t get paid.

Where to look for affiliate offers

You can always look for affiliate programs on sites such as LinkShare, CJ, or ClickBank. But there is a sneaky way to find out what offers are working for other affiliates in your niche. You can check sites such as Squidoo and E-zinearticles to see if anyone is writing reviews about products in your niche. If someone is going through the effort of putting up a review on these sites, the chances are the product is worth a look. If your niche is broad enough, the chances are you are not going to have a whole lot of trouble finding a product to promote.

At the end of the day, your focus should be conversion and not commission. You should test everything that you can (headers, content, links, colors,…). It is tough work. But once you start converting, you are going to find that extra energy to go for more. Now that’s the beauty of running a business on the Internet.