Here are some cool affiliate marketing tips for you bloggers – When it comes to making money online, affiliate marketing is definitely in my list of top three blog monetization methods. My other two favorite monetization methods, just in case you’re wondering, are Google AdSense and in-text advertising i.e. Infolinks, although I know it’s not everybody’s cup of tea.
Today I want to talk to you about promoting affiliate products on your blog, or more appropriately, I want to share with you 5 essential tips that will help you to promote affiliate products on your blog more effectively, and as a result, help you to make more money online through affiliate marketing. So grab yourself a cup of tea or coffee and we’ll begin…
Affiliate Marketing Tips for Bloggers: 1 – First, look at your current blog theme aka design…
Ok so the first thing we’re going to look at is the theme of your blog… Regardless of what blog publishing software you’re using, take a step back and look at your current theme… If you’re using WordPress, ask yourself, is your theme effectively optimized the best it can be for promoting your affiliate links, ads and products?
If the answer is no, then find one that is…
One of the best optimized theme’s I’ve found to be very powerful is the News Child theme from StudioPress, which runs on Genesis, which is also the theme this blog is currently using. If your theme isn’t up to scratch for ensuring that you have as much success as possible of promoting your affiliate products, then consider changing it to a more suitable one.
Affiliate Marketing Tips for Bloggers: 2 – Don’t use too many affiliate programs all in one hit…
One of the easiest mistakes you can do when promoting affiliate products on your blog is thinking that you’ve got to promote everything and anything. This is an absolute no, no… I’d personally recommend that you choose your affiliate programs very carefully. If you’re just starting out, take a look at the main biggies such as ClickBank, Amazon Associates, the eBay Partner Program and Commission Junction.
You can always add a few more other low profile ones as you start to make some income from the ones above.
Affiliate Marketing Tips for Bloggers: 3 – Avoid promoting products you haven’t tried out yourself
I’ve said this many times before, especially if you’re using Amazon or ClickBank to promote products on your blog, give an honest account of the products yourself, and the best way to do this is to try it out yourself before reviewing it.
Avoid trying to promote shady products which you haven’t tried and tested yourself, it’s the best way to loose trust and confidence from your readers…
Affiliate Marketing Tips for Bloggers: 4 – Make all your affiliate links nofollow
Avoid having tons of dofollow affiliate links on your blog, in fact avoid having any completely. You don’t want to appear as if you’re selling tons of outbound self-beneficial links from your blog, you’ll only end up ringing alarm bells in the search engines and you don’t really want that.
For example, if you have 300 posts on your blog and each one of them has two Amazon affiliate links, you’ll make money eventually for sure… but that’s a lot of outbound link juice! So unless you DO want to lose search engine rankings, which I highly doubt that you do, then ensure you make your affiliate links ‘nofollow’.
To make a link nofollow in WordPress editor, just add your affiliate links as normal, then hit view HTML and find the URL code and enter the short code rel=”nofollow” into the tag. Here’s an example where you can see the nofollow tag in the URL tag:
If you’re promoting Amazon products on your blog then you’ve got to check out the EasyAzon plugin for WordPress users. It makes the whole process of finding and placing Amazon affiliate links and products to your blog a complete joy. You can even check out our review here:
Affiliate Marketing Tips for Bloggers: 5 – Don’t steal or rip off content from other sites…
Yep I know what you’re thinking, this is a pretty obvious one right? But needless to say there are still lots of people doing this… If you’re going to create a great product review or write about promoting an affiliate product on your blog in any way, ensure that the content is 100% unique and exclusive for your blog; from the copy, to the title, to the permalink to the Meta description… unique, unique, unique…
Don’t copy and paste someone else’s review into your blog and change the affiliate links, just because it’s the easiest thing to do; not only is it pure plagiarism, but you’ll only hugely increase the chances of your site being ‘arse kicked’ by the search engines, and also who’s to say that the content you’ve just ripped off hasn’t already been ripped off someone else’s site?
Well that’s my 5 affiliate marketing tips for today folks, let me know your thoughts and reactions, perhaps you have some of your own tips you might want to add and share with us, as always I’d love to hear them so please add your comments below.
