Affiliate marketing is all over the internet.  Sign onto Twitter or do a few Google searches, and it's almost impossible to not be exposed to an affiliate link.

It works like this: a regular guy or gal signs up with an advertiser, gets a special tracking link or some code for an ad, then publishes it somewhere on the web.  On a blog, on a Twitter feed, or even as a Google text ad that shows up for certain searches.  When someone else sees the link, clicks through, and makes a purchase, regular guy or gal gets a commission.

It's a powerful model, but it's usually not used correctly.  Spammers set up Twitter accounts for the sole purpose of tweeting affiliate links, for example, and follow as many people as possible.  They go for the brute force approach.

But the new marketing, according to Seth Godin and others, is not about brute force.  It's about trust.  Building a following of people who are eager to listen to what you have to say, even when it's a product recommendation.  Lead them astray, and you'll lose a reader or follower.  But turn them onto a new product that they end up loving, and you'll strengthen your relationship while earning a little money at the same time.

When it's done right, everyone wins.

Effective Affiliate Advertising

Sidebar affiliate ads can be effective if they're relevant to your blog's content, which is why I run them in the sidebar of this blog.  But that's not the best way to do it.  Even if your blog is growing, your readership isn't changing that quickly, so mostly the same people are seeing the same ads over and over.  You might get a few sales in the first week, but after that it will slow down.

Better is to write the same posts you'd normally write, but when an opportunity comes up to recommend a product that you can affiliate with, do it!  People do this all the time with Amazon.com's affiliate program, since they have such a wide range of products.

So for example, if I were raving about Seth Godin's book Tribes, a link like this one would take readers to a regular Amazon page, but I'd earn 5-10% of the sales price if they were to buy anything on that visit.  (I picked Tribes, by the way, because I actually do love it.  I don't affiliate link to every book I mention, because I don't recommend every book I mention.  Get it?)

Another way is to write an honest product review, and if it's favorable, provide an affiliate link so people can buy the product.  The problem here, of course, is the conflict of interest.  If you're going to do this, you'd better have a lot of trust from your readers.  And you had better not betray that trust by writing rave reviews about something you don't like that much, just to sell the product.

More often, what I do is write product reviews without affiliate links at first.  After a few days, when most of the traffic to the post now comes from search engines rather than my regular readers, I'll put up an affiliate link or ad, because then there's no danger of turning off my regular readers with the ads.

This idea of combining affiliate advertising with search engine optimization has been extremely useful for me.  If you're doing search optimization well, you'll notice certain posts getting dozens or hundreds of search visits per day.  These posts are the the only ones I'll ever go out of my way to place ads on.  When 85 new people every day are landing on a certain post about running shoes, for example, a banner ad for Zappos.com or other shoe seller could go a long way towards buying my next pair.  I love this approach, because I don't want to bother my everyday readers with many ads, and this way, I avoid that.

How to Get Started

• Amazon's affilate program is simple to sign up and get started with right away.
• LinkShare provides text and graphic ads for many companies and products, including iTunes, one that I've had a lot of success with.  This link is an affiliate link itself!  (Don't worry, signup is free.)
• Commission Junction also provides ads for many companies.  Just like LinkShare, you can browse advertisers and ads to find someone to affiliate with.  My Sequel Naturals affiliation (Thrive and Vega products) is through Commission Junction.

Get out there an start making some money!  But don't forget to tell your readers about your affiliate links, either with a disclaimer, sponsor list, or right there in the content.  It's all about trust!  See Allison's post on honest blogging for more.

One more note: If you use Foodbuzz, decide for yourself whether affiliate marketing violates their exclusivity policy.  I certainly don't think text links do; graphic links seem more like gray area to me.  I see lots of highly-visible blogs running both Foodbuzz and graphic affiliate ads.  So I just run affiliate ads sparingly (and not on the front page) on No Meat Athlete.