A lot of people write blogs and place affiliate links on their sites, and we have a few suggestions to help make them work better. It’s easy enough to create a blog and toss some affiliate links into the blog’s site template.
Creating posts every day proves a tougher challenge, and the vast majority of blogs don’t last for very long. Non-writers who think writing is easy find out that one to three entries a day, every day, doesn’t just roll out of the brain and into the post comment’ field of a blog.
The potential to profit from an affiliate program like eBay’s can be realized with lessons learned from California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger: optimism, discipline, and focus.
People will find optimism the most difficult of the three to maintain consistently, and no wonder. Checking affiliate earnings on a continual basis, especially if they aren’t growing at the rate one wants to have, can be a real downer. Couple that with all the demands placed upon people by real life, and maintaining optimism gets a lot harder.
That impacts one’s blogging. Sentences become too terse, or grow to lengths that would have William Faulkner adding a period or two just to make them readable. Optimism comes from not just what one sees today in dollars and cents, but the continual work toward a goal.
Discipline is easier than optimism. That may seem strange, but people are creatures of habit. Most people tend to do certain tasks each day or week, whether they are at work or at home. Blogging’s additional challenge, consistently posting a minimum number of posts each day, even just one, can become part of one’s routine.
Not every blog post has to be 800 words long. There is something to be said for brevity, but the content has to be good enough at a hundred words to get a point across to a reader. Consider the quick reward, attention-distracted Internet audience of today. Sometimes less is more.
Now we come to focus, the most complex of the three, and we can tie this in to how blogs benefit affiliates. In an earlier story on affiliates and APIs, we revealed the product category developers hadn’t really hit with web applications: industrial and large equipment. Developers can focus their efforts on that or any other category.
For many affiliates, the goal isn’t to build a better way to integrate their sites with eBay, just to be enough of a focal point to garner the kind of traffic that would find the eBay affiliate link enticing enough to click through and begin bidding. Getting that traffic means the blog has to effectively inform visitors consistent with the blog’s focus.
The blog could be a standalone presence, or it could be in place to support a site. Either place can display the affiliate links; publishers probably want to have them on both if a blog complements an existing site. This is where focus helps.
Regular, disciplined blog posting in a way that focuses on the main topic of the blog helps build a perceived authority on the topic. A lot of big niches have received corresponding attention and investment; automobiles come to mind.
A focused site, like those created for tuner enthusiasts and oriented toward a specific vehicle, won’t have the big audience of an Autoblog.com. Written properly and consistently by someone who understands a particular vehicle well, someone who is willing to spend time researching what’s new and what’s being said about the vehicle, can build a compelling blog.
As the entries fill the blog, the blogger who wants to be a successful affiliate needs to spend time on other blogs and sites that accept comments on the particular niche, and add to their conversations. To see this in action, visit Memeorandum, navigate to some of the blogs appearing there, and observe how often bloggers reference and comment on one another’s sites.
That’s basic marketing, getting one’s name out there by providing a little extra benefit for that blog’s reader while linking back to one’s own site. Think of it as the legendary Gillette model of giving away razors and selling blades. Or think of it as a commercial, where the price equals free.
One has to give to receive an audience online. They have to give effort to their blogs, and give informative comments to attract readers beyond what a web search can deliver on a specific niche. Affiliates who want to profit from their affiliations can gain on the competition by choosing a good affiliate program and building trust with quality blogging.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
