Tackle the Problems with Affiliate Marketing on Your Blog
You’ve been blogging for a while and are starting to get a solid readership. A friend says you can turn your blog into a money-making machine if you use affiliate marketing strategies. You’re all ears.
Your friend even emails you a copy of his last affiliate check, and you believe an extra $500 a week would be much better than adding a swing shift at a coffee shop. But after you start promoting some affiliate links, you don’t seem to get the sales your friend says he generates on his blog. What’s the problem?
The down side to affiliate marketing on your blog
Even if you take the time to engage tracking software and monitor every time an affiliate link has been clicked on your site, that doesn’t give you relevant affiliate information. In other words, a visitor might click through an affiliate link on your blog site and buy something, and you might never know you made a sale, or how much the buyer spent after clicking your affiliate link.
The reality of the situation is that there is often no way to confirm, with any degree of accuracy, how much money you’ve lost due to unethical underreporting by an affiliate program. You may be blogging away, and spending hours of your valuable time promoting other company’s products, but not being properly compensated for real sales that your blog generated.
This is a hotly debated issue among affiliate marketers. One way to assess whether this may be happening is if you earned a number of affiliate commissions for a few months and then suddenly you’re earning nothing.
This is fairly suspicious, because if sales slow down, the typical pattern is for commissions to taper off over time, not fall to zero instantly. If you suspect an affiliate program is not reporting correctly, you should remove that link from your blog immediately.
In blogging, cutting the fat is an essential part of the game. Keep only those affiliate programs that tend to perform and pay you well. You should not be blogging for free.
Retracted commissions
Another trick affiliate programs play on hard-working bloggers is to report they made commissions, then retract the commissions at the last moment. Though this practice should be illegal, affiliate programs get by with it all the time, thus cheating bloggers out of hundreds or even thousands of legitimately reported commissions each month.
These programs often do not explain why the commissions were retracted. This is another time when cutting the fat is advisable. There’s no sense in rewarding such an affiliate program, if all it is does is jerk you around.
Cheap commissions are not worth it
It’s insulting when an affiliate program offers commissions of less than 15%. This can translate to pennies per hour of blogging, if that much.
Remember: The reason companies start up affiliate programs is so that they do not have to pay a regular employee an hourly wage to promote their products or services. You are doing these companies an enormously big favor by generating traffic to their website.
If an affiliate program won’t offer you at least 15%, it’s probably not worth wasting your time to promote it on your blog. Opt for affiliate programs that provide bloggers with higher commission pay-outs.
Face it, affiliates that pay out larger commissions produce a greater potential for larger income, so why would you want to short-change yourself after doing so much hard work blogging? To boost your own traffic, make sure you do all you can to optimize local SEO and strengthen the brand of your blog.
