Affiliate Marketing: I'm done being bashful about it

This post and tomorrow’s “Use affiliate links, but please use them honestly” by Shelby Sapusek are part of our ongoing “She said, He said” series.

Hello, my name is Jim and I’m an affiliate marketer. There, step one is out of the way. Eleven more to go.

What is affiliate marketing?

First, in case you are not 100 percent sure what affiliate marketing is, let me define the business model as I implement it on this site. From time-to-time, I come across products or services that impress me. In almost every case, I buy these products with my own money, try them, like them and continue to use them in my day-to-day life.

As my network grows, there have been exceptions where I am offered charter membership in new communities. This means they don’t charge me in exchange for joining the community early and contributing to build the community. In these cases, I am still presenting an opportunity to you for a service of which I am an active user.

How the process looks

On the product side, let’s take a look at the htc EVO battery I recently recommended because I had purchased one for my own phone and doubled the battery life of my phone. How can it be a bad thing to share that information with you along with an affiliate link to Amazon.com where I purchased the battery myself? You’re either going to buy the battery or not and, either way, it costs you no more when Amazon rewards me with a small commission.

So, I’m grateful for the small commissions I earn from the likes of Scribe SEO (affiliate link), Thesis Theme (affiliate link) and Amazon’s affiliate program. It’s been about 12 months since I started looking at affiliate marketing as having potential to generate enough revenue for me to be interested. Now, a year into the experiment, I am making no more than a few hundred dollars a month from these commissions.

It’s not about the money

There are people who claim they make tens of thousands of dollars a month in affiliate revenue. After seeing the success of the aforementioned htc EVO battery life post, I believe it’s possible. That, however, is not my goal. I plan to simply consider sharing with you, my readers, the products and services I find useful. I share them regardless of an affiliate program.

Recently, I’ve written about both Kitchen Table Companies and Premise (affiliate link) landing page software. Neither of these products had affiliate programs when I wrote my initial articles. I shared them with you anyway. Sure, the money is nice and helps justify the time I spend on this blog. However, the money is not why I recommend the items.

Image Credit