After a long break, it’s time to get back to the small series on the many and varied ways to make money with your blog. This instalment covers affiliate marketing.

I know I’ve already covered the workings of Clickbank in an earlier article, but what I didn’t cover is the actual nuts and bolts of using affiliate marketing directly on your blog to make money. Now it’s time.

Often, you’ll have a real good selection of affiliate products that fit nicely with the theme of your blog and now you want to display them to show them all off in their best light. So where do you put them?

Well, I’ve found that it is counter productive to put a whole long list of affiliate products right on the front page (or homepage) of your blog or website, as your visitors will most likely be overwhelmed with an advertising blitz that could turn them off your site. Better to display a small selection of your better selling products on your main page and have the rest well displayed in a sub-page.

You’ll see that in practice right here on this site.

The blog is the main page and where 99% of visitors will land first - it being the page first displayed when you type in the top level domain name in your browser (or link from a search engine or whatever). On the navigation bar below the header banner of the site is a navigation bar with sub-pages such as an article page and, most importantly from this post’s point of view, a “resources” page.

This “resources” page is where all the affiliate products that I promote on this site are located along with a graphic of the ebook (or product) and a brief review of the product with a link to the sales page. That link contains my affiliate code so that (assuming they haven’t got cookie disabling software running on their computer) the potential buyer will alert Clickbank to the fact that my affiliate link has generated the sale and I will be credited with the commission.

That’s pretty much how it works from a blog like this one which is professionally hosted so I have more control over what I put where. But you can still do it on a free blog by creating separate “pages” and using them to list your affiliate products and make money from them.

I love blogging, don’t you?

Terry Didcott
MAKE MONEY