Adding Affiliate Ads Into Your Blog
Adding Affiliate Ads Into Your Blog
I’ve mentioned several times in previous articles that I’ve always had my best results from affiliate ads. Since that’s the subject of this article, let me clarify that a bit. The last thing I want to do is leave you with a false impression that PPC ads aren’t valuable. Quite the opposite.
PPC ads have one distinct advantage over most other forms of online advertising – they start making money immediately. That’s important whenever you start a new web site in an attempt to add to your online income. We’re all prone to discouragement. If we put in a lot of work and get our blog going, then nothing happens, our first reaction is to abandon the effort and write it off as a failure.
The truth is, making money online usually isn’t as “instant” as most would have you believe. While many people do make large amounts of online income, and many of them rather quickly; most make it more slowly. PPC ads give us that instant encouragement that something really is happening and we really are making money online – even if it’s just a small trickle at first.
Affiliate ads will make larger amounts of money in the long run – at least they do for me. I have friends in the internet marketing business that make an impressive living off nothing but PPC web sites, but I have more friends who, like me, take a more balanced approach. I look at like I look at my investment portfolio – diversify!
If you’ve been following this entire series, then you’ve already set up one or more affiliate relationships, either directly with the vendors you plan to use, or with affiliate clearing sites like ShareASale or Commission Junction. Placing the ads into your blog is the next step.
I use a 2-stage approach. First, I have a sidebar panel that I put a group of ads in that are related to my blog. Second, I place appropriate affiliate ads in some of my blog entries. If you’re reading this entry on WorkFromYourRV.com, you can see the ad panel to the right. These are all affiliate ads that have relevance to my blog’s subject and, when clicked, take you to the vendor’s website where you might possibly purchase their product. If you do, I get a small commission. Same with the ads in the blog entries. These are usually more focused and are relevant to the specific blog entry in which they appear. This type of sales is as old as sales itself. My Father-in-law spent most of his early career as a shoe salesman in the days when his entire income was commission from each pair of shoes he sold. This is no different, just adapted to the Internet.
One note of caution here. If you’re in this for the long term, choose your affiliations wisely. Nothing will kill a blog, or even an entire online business faster than recommending disreputable companies. Your readers are YOUR customers – always remember that. They took your advice when deciding to purchase a product, and will likely blame you if the experience goes bad. Personally, I BUY EVERYTHING I RECOMMEND. I realize that can get expensive, and may be out of your budget, but it is the only way I know of to insure the product is legitimate and has value. All of my friends in this business that are successful have the same attitude. You can’t please everybody, but you certainly can make your best effort to get close.
To put affiliate ads in the sidebar of your blog, look for plugins or widgets on Wordpress.org and follow their instructions. Most are reasonably simple and will present your ads in a clear way on your site. For example, if you signed up as an affiliate for Amazon, you can take a look at the AmazonSimpleAdmin widget. It allows you to embed Amazon ads almost anywhere in your blog. If it’s appropriate to display related eBay ads in your blog, then you may want to check out the WP Tag Ads widget or the eBay Sales Lister widget. These scan your blog tags or content and select appropriate eBay ads to display. If you are interested in a Zazzle store, there’s even a widget (Zazzle Store Gallery) that will display products from your Zazzle store.
To embed other affiliate ads into your post you can simply ad an image to your post, or you can use a plugin. I personally like to just insert the images using the Wordpress post editor while I’m writing the post. That way I get full control over where in the text the affiliate ad appears. Just insert the image, then replace the image code generated by Wordpress with the code given to you by your affiliate. If you don’t want to go to that much trouble, try a plugin like the WP-Affiliate plugin and see if that matches your needs better.
In the next few articles we’ll cover more about the layout of your blog and how to start driving traffic to your blog. After all, if you don’t have readers, you can’t have customers. Watch for new videos as well.
