If you’re looking for ways to make money from your blog, you should consider affiliate marketing. In a nutshell, affiliate marketing allows online publishers to earn commissions by referring customers to a merchant.

The way affiliate marketing works is that you get access to links or ads that you can add to your blog (or website, social networks, mobile apps, etc). By integrating these affiliate links alongside your content, you’re able to show your readers items that appeal to their interests. Each time one of your visitors clicks through one of your affiliate links and makes a purchase, you receive a commission.

If you’ve decided that you’d like to try affiliate marketing as a way to leverage your expertise to monetize your blog, you’re going to want to start by researching program options. There are many out there and you may choose to work with just one program, or with several. How do you determine which program will work best for you? Here are a few factors to consider.

1. Fit with your content

Making sure your blog content closely aligns with the items you’re promoting to your visitors is one of the most important components to consider when selecting an affiliate partner. For example, if your blog focuses on interior design, it would make the most sense to partner with a merchant that sells home renovation and decor products.

2. Product inventory

Another consideration that corresponds to the products you’ll be promoting is the depth of inventory. Does the merchant have a wide range of desirable items, and are they available at competitive prices? Will your visitors be enticed to buy? You’ll want to be able to provide your readers not only with the right product for their needs, but also at the right price for their wallet.

3. Reputation & trust

If a visitor clicks through your affiliate link and is met with an offer from an unknown retailer, what are the chances that they will feel comfortable enough to make a purchase? It will be easier for your visitors to make a purchase decision if they are already familiar with the site where you are sending them. Take a look at established programs like eBay Partner Network to get started.

4. Tools & creatives

Affiliate merchants and networks offer a variety of ways for you to promote their products. This could include premade creatives like web banners, or tools for you to create customizable widgets or generate text links, as well as access to product feeds or an API. Make sure you know what your prospective partner has to offer, and that the solution fits well with your goals and technical abilities.

5. Payment structure

Of course, commission rates are a very important factor to consider. Make sure you fully understand the compensation structure, such as if there are variable rates or tiers for your promotional efforts. For example, eBay’s affiliate program provides a bonus to affiliates who refer purchases from new or reactivated buyers. Also be sure to take a look at how often you’ll be paid, and how payments are delivered.

There are many more factors that go into choosing an affiliate program, but these five areas should provide you with a good start. By researching up front, you’ll be better prepared for long-term affiliate success.

The post How to Choose an Affiliate Network appeared first on Technical Blogging.

Sadness aside, what’s remarkable here is that their number of page views grew while revenue went down. That means that their RPM (Revenue Per Mille, so per thousand impressions) has gone down.

In fact, here is the motivation behind their decision:

Why would a well-known site, dearly loved by its readers and coming off a year of record page views, be sunset by its owner?

In one word, revenue. Four years ago, when I came to Dr. Dobb’s, we had healthy profits and revenue, almost all of it from advertising. Despite our excellent growth on the editorial side, our revenue declined such that today it’s barely 30% of what it was when I started. […] This is because in the last 18 months, there has been a marked shift in how vendors value website advertising. They’ve come to realize that website ads tend to be less effective than they once were. Given that I’ve never bought a single item by clicking on an ad on a website, this conclusion seems correct in the small.

What does this mean for much smaller online publications like bloggers? Ads have historically been the easiest way for bloggers to earn some income from their blogs. You’d embed some code obtained from a network like Google Adsense, and collect royalties at the end of the month. [1]

Google doesn’t allow disclosure of specific numbers about their program’s RPM so that’s not a conversation we can have. Nevertheless, if you Google it (boy have we come to depend on them) you’ll find that it’s not uncommon for blogs to sit somewhere between $1–4 per impression, depending on subject matter, ad position, ad network, etc. [2]

In general you’re allowed up to three ad placements on a page, so you could in theory have an RPM per page between $3 and $12. That means that a blog achieving 100,000 page views per month could be earning between $300-$1,200 solely from a single ad network.

Now, 100,000 page views per month are far from easy, but entirely possible after a while. And $300-$1,200 is a nice amount of extra pocket change for the occasional or even dedicated blogger. That’s not however the case if blogging is your day job or if you are a larger company with staff and writers to support.

Ads are not dead as far as bloggers are concerned, but those interested in maximizing their revenue must realize that advertising on the web has its limits. They are part of a healthy meal, but not the whole meal.

The reason for that was explained by the Dr. Dobb’s quote above. Advertisers have found web ads to not be as lucrative as other options. Ask anyone who’s tried their hand at Google Adwords and they will all tell you how easy it is to lose your shirt if you are not extremely careful, and how hard it is to make a profit.

People have learned to ignore ads. Banner blindness is as real as it ever was. For technical audiences, AdBlock plugins are also something to contend with. [3] The truth is that what’s good for advertisers is good for publishers, and ads have not been serving advertisers too well. [4]

Your blog revenue strategy shouldn’t count on ads alone. Sponsorship, directly negotiated with the right companies, are already more rewarding. However, I contend that affiliate marketing, done through genuine reviews, recommendations, and mentions is far superior both in terms of revenue and service offered to advertisers. Furthermore, if the recommendations are authentic and not done just for a quick buck, they serve your audience as well. It’s a win-win-win situation all around.

You’ll also want to consider being your own advertiser. Selling your own products and services through your blog can be extremely lucrative and doesn’t generally come across as disgraceful to your audience in the way that excessive advertisement can.

Finally, remember that a lot of value can be extracted from your blog in ways that are not directly translated into a dollar figure. As I stress in my book, blogging can open the door to new job opportunities, partnerships, the ability to promote your own projects or startup, increase your authority within your field, and many other indirect benefits.

The post Don’t Count on Ads appeared first on Technical Blogging.

It is natural for bloggers who start to gather a following to consider revenue opportunities to reward their time and effort.

Google AdSense is a popular option for its plug and play nature. Sadly, it tends to be a disappointing source of income for most bloggers. The average RPM (revenue per thousand impressions of an ad) is fairly low in most niches, so you won’t get much side income from AdSense unless you have a very large audience. For example, if you average $3 RPM, you need a thousand visitors per day to pay for your daily latte (or more if you frequent Starbucks).

Bloggers who look around and explore their options a little more in-depth, may find the lucrative world of affiliate marketing. It’s a simple idea really. Imagine that I create a product and then want you to help me sell as many of it as possible. You, the affiliate, will promote the product for me through your blog. When a sale is made thanks to you (we’ll track that through a special link and browser cookies), I’ll give a portion of that sale to you. The percentage varies but it can be very high, with 50% being the norm for digital products.

If you are unscrupulous you could promote all sort of junk to make a buck, whether you honestly think it’s worth recommending or not. You could even promote products that you down right know suck, and still get your cut. And it turns out people actually do just this. As a result, affiliate marketers have a very bad reputation, despite there being nothing inherently wrong with receiving money for providing a marketing service.

Amazon Associates was one of the earliest and, currently, largest affiliate programs around. The operating margins are much smaller for Amazon, so the percentage that you get for each sale is rather small compared to that of most products online. We’re talking about 4-8.50% for most items, instead of the 50-75% you’d get from other digital products you could be promoting. Furthermore, with Amazon you don’t generally receive recurring referral revenue like you do with other digital products that charge a monthly fee and not a one-off fee.

Amazon’s operating agreement also requires you to be above-board when it comes to the way you go about promoting their products. Other affiliate programs online may gladly close one eye on your techniques if you are moving sales and making them money.

To further make Amazon less appealing to some affiliates, the referral cookie only lasts 24 hours, versus 30 or 60 days, which is common for online sales of digital products. This means that if you refer someone to Amazon.com today, and they were to buy a product three days from now, you won’t be getting anything at all. With more common affiliate relationships, you’d be getting a cut even if the user were to make a purchasing decision a month and a half after the first visit you generated (assuming that they didn’t clear their cookies, that is).

As a result, Amazon Associates is often ignored or berated by large affiliates. In fact it’s even a much underrated revenue option among bloggers. Amazon, and not AdSense, should be the first go-to option for bloggers looking to earn some money from their blogs. Amazon Associates is, and has been for years now, my number one source of blogging income.

To make this case, below I list a series of reasons why I recommend giving Amazon Associates a serious shot, despite its shortcomings.

Reason #1: Amazon Associates is straightforward and dependable

Once you sign up and provide the details of how you’d like to be paid (cheque, direct deposit, or gift certificate) you’ll receive your payments once you’ve reached or crossed the pre-established threshold limit (e.g., $100, with a two month delay for the payment). If you move enough sales, after two months, you’ll be receiving a steady monthly paycheck from them.

Other affiliate programs can make you jump through hoops to sign up and get approved, or may require certain conditions to be met before issuing payments (e.g., ClickBank’s requirement for five different credit card purchases before releasing the funds, which progressively reduces the amount that you’re owed over time until you get those five separate credit card payments).

Reason #2: Amazon’s cookie has site-wide coverage, and is not just limited to a specific product

Yes, you only get a 24-hour window, but in that timeframe you’ll get a cut of anything a referred visitor buys, not just the product you pointed out to them. I’ve had visitors buy all sorts of expensive and odd items when they left my site to check out a $10 book on Amazon. And trust me, pink vibrators can add up quickly.

Reason #3: Amazon has a humongous inventory of extremely reputable products

You don’t have to promote “belly fat secrets” on your blog to make a buck. Their huge selection of high-quality books and other products, means that you can be selective and only recommend or point out items you truly believe are worth your readers’ time and investment. You can select books that are entirely relevant to your topic of expertise, and review products you have actually read/tried/consumed.

Reason #4: People trust Amazon

Being such a well established household name implies that most of your visitors won’t think twice about putting a purchase through on Amazon. Many will have accounts already, and perhaps even have their credit card stored on the site for quick checkouts. This in turn means that more people will buy instead of second guessing whether it’s safe to use the shopping cart.

Reason #5: Amazon is a master at converting visitors into customers

Amazon spends millions of dollars in research to optimize the amount of sales they squeeze out of new and existing customers. All you really need to do is send people to Amazon and they’ll do a good job themselves for the most part. Of course, if you are considered a trustworthy expert in your field and you send people to Amazon to check out a specific item, your conversion rate will be even higher.

Reason #6: The percentage of your cut raises in a given month, as you sell more items

The more products you sell, the greater the percentage of your total sales will be awarded to you. You start at a very low 4%, but can reach the 8% range in a relatively short amount of time (if your sales are good).

I strongly encourage you to give Amazon Associates a go.

Update: Several people wrote me asking for further details on how to make money with the Amazon Associates program. I’ll repeat here what I suggested privately via email:

1. In my book on technical blogging, I go in-depth about techniques that can help ensure that you get most out of this program (including statistics about my income, if you need further guidance to maximize your own earnings).
2. The Easy Azon plugin is super-handy and a time saver if you plan to feature Amazon links in your WordPress-based blog or site.

The post 6 Reasons Why the Amazon Associates Affiliate Program Is Highly Underrated appeared first on Technical Blogging.