Affiliate Marketing Ads in Your Blog

Affiliate marketing is the term for a system where you refer visitors to products through website links. If they purchase the product, you make a commission. Here is a summary:

You join an affiliate program for a specific merchant.
You obtain link code for a specific product from the merchant and place it on your site. Generally, the product will be closely related to the content on your site.
A visitor to your site clicks on the link and is taken to the merchant site. Usually, a tracking cookie is set to insure that the merchant will compensate you.
If the visitor purchases the product on the merchant site, you are compensated with a commission. Furthermore, the tracking cookie may even credit you for the sale if the visitor buys the product at a later date. These days that the tracking cookie is valid are known as the “return days”.

You may join affiliate programs either through the merchant directly using their own tracking system (known as an in-house program) or you may join a merchant’s program through a network. The major networks include:

Shareasale.com

Commission Junction

Linkshare

Google Affiliate Network

These are perhaps some of the more commonly used networks but there are others. See Abestweb Affiliate Marketing Forum for a more comprehensive list.

Note: A legitimate affiliate marketing program will never charge you to promote their products. Never! If they do, it is probably a scam of some sorts.

Your first step is to build your blog (or site) so that it is complete with some useful content. Without a site, or a site under construction, you may get turned down by networks and/or merchants when you apply. So get busy on that blog or site!

After you have your blog ready and complete, apply to these networks or individual merchants. Once accepted, you may obtain affiliate code for products.

How To Place Affiliate Links in Your Blog Posts

First, you log into your network and select products that match your content. For example, in this page, I will obtain the tracking code for Hostgator, the hosting I use for this site (and all my sites). I log into Commission Junction and I go to a area listing my merchants, as shown below.

Then, I select a type of ad, as shown below. I will choose a banner ad.

Then, I choose a particular banner ad.

And, after clicking as shown above, I see a window prompting me again. I choose Get HTML.

This then gives me a screen where I choose settings and copy my code. See below.

Now, I paste this code right below this line. Always use HTML mode when posting in a blog!

Here is my ad!

Other Getting Started Resources include:

Shareasale Affiliate Interface Guide

LinkShare Publisher Help Center

Google Affiliate Network Overview

Posting Ads in Sidebars or at the Beginning of Posts or Pages

To post ads within sidebars, you use the procedure shown here for Google Sidebar Ads except the code you paste in is affiliate link code rather than AdSense code. In other words, obtain your affiliate link code and then skip to Step 2 of this procedure. You might want to post some small square 125×125 banner ads in these sidebars.

To post ads at the beginning or end of each and every post or page, use the procedure shown here for Automatic Ad Placement and use your affiliate code rather than AdSense code in Step 2. Step 1 will consist of obtain your affiliate code. Personally, I think you are better off choosing links specific to each post or page rather than using this option. These automatic ad placements would better be used for AdSense I think.

To place affiliate ads in sidebars of a Blogger blog, add a Text Gadget from your Layout interface, as shown below. Then paste the code into this text gadget and save.