I have decided to take a break from my series of posts on Optimizing WordPress Blogs for Search Engines to say a few words about affiliate marketing.  This post is aimed mainly at beginning bloggers or to individuals who may also be new to affiliate marketing, in general.  Hopefully some of the ideas will be useful for all levels of WordPress blogger or website publisher.

One common mistake I see with many new blogs that contain otherwise good content is the lack of ability of the blog owner to promote affiliates related in some way to the blog’s topic or niche.  One of the keys to actually making an affiliate sale is the ability of the marketer (you) to provide offers that are related in some way to the topics your blog covers.  Although not mandatory, simply doing this will automatically condition your reader to be more inclined to take advantage of whatever affiliate offer you are currently promoting.  Let’s talk about how to do this and then I will show you some examples of how I do this right from this blog.

I will start with a story.  There is a small blog I read occasionally that talks about health, wellness, nutrition and personal well-being.  Some of the posts are pretty good.  This blog promotes smorty, pay-per-post, sponsored reviews and the like.  Well, yeah it’s a blog and other blogs promote these programs.  However, just because it’s a blog does not mean this blogger must promote the same programs she sees on all of the other blogs.  The blogs I see that successfully promote the aforementioned programs are larger blogs, many of which do sponsored reviews and are well known for doing these types of posts.  They are blogs that make these types of posts part of their niche.  Naturally they do well with these programs!

I suggested to this blogger that she find some affiliate programs from among all of the Linkshare or Commission Junction programs that are related to her niche (health, wellness and nutrition) and promote these programs instead.  Why would this be a better option?  Because the people reading her blog are interested in health and wellness and mainly find her blog by doing health and wellness related searches.  These visitors are already ‘pre-qualified’ or ‘conditioned’ as I mentioned above to take advantage of offers related to health and wellness.  Know your visitors and how they find you, then offer them something they might be interested in purchasing.  Definitely not rocket science.

A second and maybe even more costly mistake I see many beginning bloggers make is not integrating affiliate offers into their content - at all.  It is pretty much common knowledge by now that offers integrated into content have a much higher conversion rate than offers that are made available only through banners and buttons on a site.

So do the following

1) Find some affiliate offers that are related to your blog’s topic or niche.

2) Promote these offers in several different ways, but make sure to integrate these offers in your content.

So how am I doing this on KillerIncome.net? After about a weeks worth of posts, I simply looked at the direction they were taking.  The majority of my posts have been WordPress related and I discussed items such as custom WordPress themes.  I found a WordPress theme affiliate program called Revolution WordPress Themes and, as you can see, I just integrated them into my content and I have their 125×125 banner in my ‘Advertisers Area’ in my right sidebar.

As part of my series on optimizing your WordPress blogs for the search engines, I discussed WordPress setup and, naturally, hosting.  I said to myself, hey I really like my Web Host, they have a ton of features that facilitate WordPress setup such as Fantastico, let me see if they have an affiliate program.  Sure enough they did and I am now a proud HostGator affiliate, as well.  This is great because I host my blog with them so it is an easy program to endorse.

So what other programs am I planning on promoting? Since the majority of my posts thus far have been on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) it would only make sense that I find some SEO related programs to promote, as well. This will be my next order of business and by the time many of you find and read this post I will have probably started promoting at least one affiliate in the search engine optimization area.

It’s really as simple as finding programs related to your niche and integrating their offers and affiliate links directly into your content.  If you can also demonstrate how this particular program or offer can help your visitors in some way, you have all the ingredients of a successful affiliate promotion and will be well on your way to making your first affiliate sale.  Good luck!