How to Use Affiliate Marketing

Disclosure. Integration. Progress from beer money to mortgage. You always drill down to the nitty gritty – thanks!

I do my best. Trying to be a smart chocolate chip and earn my way up. : )

I tried my best to set this up to be clear and realistic. People really get sold a bill of goods all the time. I’m doing my best to pop some of the magnifying bubbles out there and get us focused on what we COULD do.

Oh, and we start somewhere. My first few months doing affiliate stuff, I made vending machine money. : )

Grarg…I don’t know. This whole facet of the business is something I struggle with. That’s not at all a hit at you or anyone else who does this in an equally transparent and well-meaning way. I see the reasoning for it. And hey, I like money! I would like more of it!

Somewhere along the way, and I don’t really know how, I became a blog purist. Now, your Man on the Go has a different format and seems un-bloglike (new adjective, please), so it doesn’t rub me the wrong way. But when I visit blogs that I count on for content, I admit, even though it might not make any sense, that the affiliate thing rubs me the wrong way. It rubs me the wrong way when people use blogs to ask for votes for SXSW. It rubs me the wrong way when people use blog posts to blatantly say “Heyyyyy do business with me.”

I guess for me, blogs that I visit for content are like library books. I would not want or expect to see ads in a library book. I’m borrowing the book to learn about what that author has to say. If they think that I should use a product that they mention in the book, I’d expect to see that…somewhere else.

I say all of this at my own peril. As a person in business myself, I know that I need to get over this. It’s a big battle in my head and heart right now. The resistance is strong, but I’m not sure where it came from.

I guess I’ll have to wait for your e-book, non? :)

Funniest thought in the world coming from an advertiser. : )

All information costs something. Some of us share that cost right out front. Others tuck it in and try to obfuscate it. I find lots of people promoting things without disclosing that it’s a client or their own company.

In my case, I’m sharing products and services that I think are useful/valuable. When you don’t want the service, you simply don’t click the link and don’t buy.

You don’t turn your TV off just because it has commercials. You don’t stop watching a movie when you catch the product placement. You just discern which ones you care about and move past.

My site is free to read and has been for over 11 years (in various formats). If I shut that down and charged people what it was worth for me to create it every day, then I’d probably make a few bucks, but I’d lose tens of thousands of community members.

I think it’s a fair swap.

Affiliate marketing is great for business, its one up on business referrals and can often lead to more direct sales and brand awareness. However, there is a darkside whether it be scammy or spammy :-) not only can this be bad news for the consumer it can put a big dent in the credibility of any business.

I’m really happy to hear that working for beer money is a realistic goal to start with! I’ve been very discouraged with affiliate marketing, but also realize I need to develop more content and have more traffic. I honestly think I’ll have more potential with my own products, as for one thing, I’m much more passionate about them.

I guess too, it all comes down to the goals for your site and your business and where you are making the effort. Are you an affiliate marketer, product creator or service provider?

Chris, thanks for putting this into perspective, being honest about what you make, and taking the pressure off. The seductive trance that affiliate marketing gurus put us in make it sound like we can be a millionaire in 6 months.

I follow the same motto with affiliate links as I do in real life. How can I tell you that a restaurant has awesome food and service if I have not eaten there? Even if you are giving a 3rd party review or recommendation you should state that somewhere,somehow. Example I don’t use said hosting company but I have done work for people that had to give me access to their hosting account. Based on that fact and my 3rd party experience with that company I feel comfortable recommending them to others.

As long as people engage in disclosure I don’t really care whether they have an affiliate program or not. If people make money doing it I think it is great.

Chris,

I read through some of your comments (ok, I scanned most of them – Please Don’t Shoot!).

I think there’s a big misunderstanding about how much money can be earned from a blog. There seem to be people out there expecting to make a million dollars per year from affiliate marketing.

They’ve heard the tales of people doing just that, and entered the blogging scene hoping to make a decent living.

Unfortunately, I doubt there are many people make a million dollars per year off affilitate marketing and if there are, they’re probably using a different model then just running a blog.

If anybody can make a million dollars a year from affilate marketing, it would be you with your 300,000 unique visitors per month.

I’m good frineds with the webmaster and star celebrity from another big site (that gets your sort of traffic) and I can assure you’re they’re not making a million dollars from affiliate marketing.

John

Thanks Chris for this commentary. It helps to put the online business into perspective and makes me feel a bit better when millions of fans haven’t flocked to my site (yet)… or the “if I create it, they will come mentality.” Linking to an affiliate must be an extension of my genuine beliefs. I think that shows, don’t you?

I like this post, but I’d add to it. The money you can make from affiliate programs is related to niche as well as traffic.

We have a travel blog that’s very focused in a small niche, and it “only” gets around 70,000 visitors a month. But that earns mortgage money from a few, very well selected and very relevant (to the readers) affiliate programs. Like you, we started very slowly, but by carefully optimising the way each was promoted, we get a lot from relatively small traffic.

Affiliate marketing is not only important as an affiliate, it’s going to take a growing part of anyone’s business as more and more people will need to promote their own products and operate an affilate platform of some kind. This will enable for referrals and business relationships to be more structured around a clearly identified revenue stream for both parties.
William / InternetCoachingCircle.com

Although I have 2 blogs I have not considered affiliate marketing yet, as I think building the content should be first priority, then followed by the traffic. I am not in a hurry, I just want to get to a stage where the quality of the content pulls in enough traffic because the site is just compelling and trustworthy. Finally, I genuinely want visitors that come to the site to belief I want to help them come away from the blogs better informed and this is the most important thing to me. When I read this blog I see that Chris has a passion for people first, just like other leaders like Gary Vaynerchuk, Mitch Joel, Darren Rowse, Gideon Shalwick etc.

It would be good to hear from Chris Brogan, Daniel Decker, and Mike CJ on whether this is the right approach. I think many blogs are driven by the motive to make money and do not really show a passion to help people, in this case success can only be short lived.

Affiliate marketing gets such a bad rap, probably because (in most cases) it is misunderstood. I think people are naive to think that if they click a link on a popular site (such as Chrisbrogan.com) that the site owner isn’t compensated for that. Personally I like it. In general, I would rather trust someone else’s opinion (an influencer) of a product then a marketing message any day. I guess the question is when the line between influencer and salesperson gets crossed, then what happens?

Thanks Chris. I know that Affiliate Marketing offers a great income opportunity. As a new blogger, I am still striving to experiments on affiliate products. It’s true that we should promote products that we can vouched to protect our integrity and protect our community.

My view is that both strategies can work, Peter. If you have a product or an offering that solves a problem for people, then you can sell it online with a simple sales page (for example) and as long as you can get the right traffic to that page, and the pricing is right, it will sell. There’s no need in that scenario (although it isn’t my chosen route) for any passion to help people! Many very successful internet marketers do that, day in and day out.

My personal preference is to employ my passion to help people to make them, and in turn, me, more successful. That works too.

I think that’s a great way to do it. I’m focusing on a class of products: things for bloggers (on my site) and things for business travelers (on man on the go). Maybe 2 or 3 are good.

I like to push something when I first find it’s “awesome sauce”, the reason I use it. I find it best when I am excited about the product.

Hello, Chris. I REALLY liked this post (I subscribe to your RSS feed…thanks for all the info!). And I just bought your book from B&N…it’ll be here Thursday…can’t wait. BUT BACK TO THIS POST…I am interested in setting up an affiliate program for my photography business. How do I do that? Thanks so much!

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Thanks for the article.It helped to understand the use of affiliate marketing.