One question that I often ask myself is: Must we use each of the affiliate programs we promote on our blogs and/or websites or is it okay to sometimes promote programs that we have not tested ourselves? First off, I normally make it a habit to have at least tried each affiliate program you see on this blog (as well as on my other websites) prior to offering it to my visitors, but I can think of certain instances where it may not be feasible to try every program.

For example, suppose you have a blog that spans many diverse topics.  Ideally, you may want to get general advertisers to this type of site, but until your traffic reaches a certain level, that just might not be possible.  An alternative would be to promote many different affiliate programs and try to integrate each different program with the different topics of your diverse posts.  For example, you have a post about health and fitness, you find an affiliate program or programs related to that topic and you mention them within that specific post.  You have another post about your pets and you offer pet-related products through an affiliate program in that post. You get the idea. 

The key, as I mentioned previously in my post, Affiliate Marketing for Beginning Bloggers is to promote affiliate programs that are related to the subject of your website (or in this case each indivdual post since the post topics are so diverse) and integrate these into your content. In this scenario, I do not think it would be feasible to try every different affiliate program prior to adding the program’s links to your site because there are just too many different topics covered and, as a result, you will be using many different affiliate programs throughout your site.

In the case of a site that is a little more focused, like this blog for example, where many of the post topics focus on building profitable WordPress sites, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Affiliate Marketing it is a little easier to narrow down the range of affiliate advertisers being promoted to simply the best ones that I have found related to each of the specific categories on which this site is focused.

You should be able to see from the 125×125 banner ads to the above right, as well as from my other posts, that I am currently promoting HostGator Web Hosting, Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, GoDaddy Domain Registration and Revolution WordPress Themes.  Each of these programs complements the main focus of this site, integrates extremely well with the posts I have written thus far, and should be extremely beneficial to any of my visitors.  But the question remains: Have I tried each of the products and/or services being offered by the affiliate programs I am currently promoting on KillerIncome.net?

I am currently hosting this blog using HostGator Web Hosting and I host each of my other websites (except for WebPersonalsOnline.com) with HostGator, as well.  They are reliable, affordable and have excellent customer service. I use and fully endorse them.

I am also a big fan of Aaron Wall and his SEO Book. I think this book is one of the most valuable resources for learning Search Engine Optimization and Aaron really practices what he preaches.  I am using many of his techniques on this blog, as well as my other websites.

In addition to website marketing, I also am an avid collector of domain names. While I use several different Registrars, GoDaddy is one that I particularly like because you can find some excellent domain name registration bargains there and their website and domain management area is very user-friendly. As you can see, this program also fits in well with my site content, as well. After all, the first step to starting any online business is registering a domain name. Some of you may know that GoDaddy also offers web hosting, in addition to domain name registering. I do not use GoDaddy web hosting and am not at all familiar with the quality of their web hosting solutions so I do not endorse GoDaddy’s hosting services on this site.

Finally, you may have noticed that I am not currently using a Revolution Custom WordPress Theme on this site and yet I am promoting them. I think that their themes are some of the most attractive around and I would eventually like to use one of their themes on this site.  As a new WordPress blogger, I was not comfortable paying a couple hundred dollars for an upscale theme until I was comfortable changing my default WordPress theme to a custome theme and became more familiar with running a WordPress site.  It is my intention to upgrade my theme eventually and Revolution is where I will purchase my new theme.  My goal is to first earn the money from this blog prior to ‘treating’ myself to a high-end custom theme for this blog.

So, what do you think? Is it necessary to test each affiliate program’s product or service before adding their links to our sites? Is it wrong to advertise the products of a program that we are not currently using? Can you think of examples like the one mentioned above where it just may not be feasible to test each affiliate program? Anyway, this was just something that was on my mind and I wanted to present it in a post.  Thanks for reading.