Affilate

Affiliate Programs For Blogs

What is an Affiliate Program?

To oversimplify it – an affiliate program is a system that pays you a commission when people buy a product having found that product via your blog. Let me use an example. If you click on this link for Jeremy Wright’s upcoming book – Blog Marketing (something I’m genuinely interested in reading myself) you’ll be taken to Amazon.com’s page for that book. IF you purchase it I will get a small commission for sending you there (the commission is somewhere between 4 and 9% of the price at Amazon – depending upon how much you sell, what the product is and a number of other factors).

Affiliate programs come in a massive array of shapes and sizes and on thousands of different niche topics. Over the next few days I’m going to speak about a few Affiliate programs that you might wish to try out and then will give some tips as to how to use them most effectively.

Affiliate Programs – Amazon Associates

This post is part of a series on Affiliate Programs for Blogs

Amazon Associates Program

Amazon’s Associate Program is perhaps one of the most popular ones for bloggers because it is pretty simple to use and has such a wide range of products in their system ranging from books, to electronics, to jewelry, to CDs and DVDs etc. It’s also great because there are many tools that can be used to integrate it into your blog includingWordPress Plug ins. Some bloggers even integrate Amazon stores into their blogs (something I need to get set up).

Another beauty of the Amazon program is the variety of ways that they give you to link to their products. Even using just their basic tools on the Associates page you have the option to link to products using text links, pictures, buttons and a variety of keyword triggered techniques.

I personally use Amazon’s program quite a bit on some of my blogs and find it quite effective. While my earnings from Amazon are far less than my Adsense income it’s a nice bonus each quarter (they pay every three months). This quarter (just over half way) my total is just over $900 (USD).

Amazon’s affiliate program pays out in either gift vouchers (to be spent in the store), cheque (check) or direct deposit (if you’re in the US).

Amazon Associates Program Pros:

• massive array of products to choose from
• reliable payment system
• options for different payment types
• reasonably easy to use
• variety of linking tools
• Amazon are fairly well regarded and trusted by consumers

Amazon Associates Program Cons:

• only quarterly payments (many other programs are monthly)
• commissions can be lower than some other programs (although they have an incentive/bonus program that increases the % when you sell certain targets)
• incentive program can be a little complicated to understand
• some of their buttons and link methods are a little dated
• not great on some products internationally (ie while Amazon will send books and some products internationally some of the bigger ticket items will not be sent overseas. So if you have a non US readership you might have to also sign up for other Amazon affiliate programs (ie they also have a UK, Canadian, Japanese one etc this can get a little messy)).

I’ll share more tips to help maximise Amazon earnings later in this series – but in the mean time I’m sure others have a variety of experiences with Amazon and can shed some light on it as a program for us. Share your thoughts on the Amazon Affiliate program in comments below.

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Affiliate Programs – Clickbank

This post is part of a series on AffiliatePrograms for Blogs

Clickbank is another affiliate program that I know quite a few bloggers use. I’ve used it myself to promote a small selection of products with moderate success.

The product I’ve seen the most success with is Joel Comm’s What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense (affiliate link) which I reviewed here. I think I had some good results with this product because I’d personally read and used it and gave an honest appraisal with it for my readers. Personal recommendations are important with all affiliate sales – but especially with Clickbank as some of their products have a pretty average reputation.

Many of Clickbank’s products are e-books and software products – which are broken down into the categories of Business to Business, Computing & Internet, Fun & Entertainment, Health & Fitness, Money & Employment, Sports & Recreation, Home & Family, Marketing & Ads, Society & Culture.

As I note below – while the money can be good with Clickbank – you might pay for it with the ‘cheap and nasty’ feel that many of it’s products have. I would strongly recommend that you carefully consider which products you link to and suggest that you (or someone you trust) has personal experience of them before recommending them to readers.

Clickbank Pros

• it is pretty easy to use Clickbank. Once registered you just need to insert your affiliate name into a URL to be activated for the product

• commissions are very good. Some pay out up to 70% of the value of the product. I’ve made commissions of up to $50 on some sales and know of people who make quite good money from them.

Clickbank Cons

• many of Clickbank’s products are quite quite cheap (although expensive) and nasty. You get a lot of get rich quick programs, dodgy e-books etc. There are some quality products in the mix – but they don’t have the best reputation among many people.

• the Clickbank affiliate interface is pretty basic. In comparison to the stats you get from programs like Amazon and Adsense it’s not very helpful.

• there are no inbuilt options for creating links automatically as there are with many other affiliate programs. I’ve heard of a variety of clickbank tools that can help with this but if you just use their provided interface all you can really create is text links.

What experience have you had with Clickbank? Would/do you use it? Which products have you had success with? What works best in your Clickbank strategy?

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Affiliate Programs – Commission Junction

This post is part of a series on Affiliate Programs for Blogs

Commission Junction is another affiliate program mega store (like clickbank) that offers thousands of products from different industries for you to get commissions from.

In a sense CJ is a middleman between you the affiliate and companies who have products to sell.

I’ve used Commission Junction for a year or so now and have never really had much success with it – partly because I’ve not found many products in it that quite fit with the topics that I write on and partly because I have found other programs (like Amazon) to be easier to add to my blogs.

In fact I’ve used Commission Junction so little in the past few months that today when I logged onto it I found that my account has been deactivated (I’ve since reactivated it).

Once you’ve applied to join Commission Junction you then need to apply to join some of the many programs that run within it. Each advertisers in the system has their own program and if you wish to promote their products you apply to do so. Once your application is approved you are then able to use links provided to promote their products.

I understand why they use this system but it can make getting products up onto your blog to promote a longer process (and more frustrating if you’re rejected) than other systems like Amazon and Clickbank in which you are free to promote any product or service in their system. For example I’ve just now applied to become an affiliate of the Commission Junction program but was rejected for no reason.

As you can tell I’m not a major fan of CJ but I include it in this series because I know of website owners who use it very effectively and make good money from it.

Pros of Commission Junction

• wide variety of products/services/companies to promote
• better quality products than clickbank (no cheap and nasty e-books here). In fact they represent some very big companies.
• options given for different types of links (including text, buttons, banners etc)
• reasonable statistics information given

Cons of Commission Junction

• perhaps a downside of the variety of products on offer is the overwhelming nature of CJ
• slightly more complicated interface than a program like Amazon
• they deactivated my account!
• application to programs within the larger Commission Junction network can be frustrating and a long process

Share your experience with Commission Junction in comments below.

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Affiliate Programs – Linkshare

 

This post is part of a series on Affiliate Programs for Blogs

LinkShare (aff link) is another affiliate megamart like Clickbank whereby you sign up as an affiliate and then have access to hundreds of affiliate programs all via the one system. If you want to get into the affiliate programs of names like iTunes, Dell, Disney, Footlocker then LinkShare is your best bet.

I’ve used LinkShare for just a few months now and have had moderate success (averaging $150 per month). I’ve used it pretty selectively on just promoting a couple of products and know it’s something I should work on a little more as its got such a wide range of products and is reasonably easy to use.

Due to my lack of use of it I’m probably not qualified to really review it as an affiliate program by my initial impressions are more favorable than Clickbank but that it’s not quite as easy to use as Amazon. From the comments in the Clickbank review that I did earlier it seems that quite a few bloggers find LinkShare to be a better option and is therefore something well worth exploring if you want to increase your efforts into affiliate programs.

I could go on reviewing affiliate programs for weeks so I’ve decided to make this the last one. Other programs that you may wish to look into that I’ve personally used include – AllPosters (again I’ve had a little success with this one on a couple of my blogs and could do better if I had more suitable topics I’m sure), DGM (and Aussie program that I’ve not had heaps of luck with) and TradeDoubler(European Based affiliate program like Linkshare).

If you know of other programs that are worth looking into for bloggers please don’t hesitate to leave your suggestions below in comments. Also feel free to tell us about your experience with LinkShare.

The next post in this series will looks at some strategies for successfully using some of these affiliate programs in your blogging.