What is Affiliate Income?

Affiliate income is another term for referral fee, commission, or revenue sharing. It can be a supplementary or substantial stream of income, and once a link is installed, it can provide passive income for as long as it remains current. Affiliate marketing is the term used to describe promoting other people’s products through affiliate links.

Ethics in Affiliate Marketing

I have very specific standards for what I will and won’t share with my readers. If I haven’t used it or read it, I won’t promote it. And if I used it or read it and hated it, I won’t write about it all. In the world of marketing, anonymity can be the kiss of death, and even bad publicity can delay the demise of poor product. So if you read about something on my blog, know that it’s here because I believe it’s a good thing.

5 Tips for Affiliate Marketing

Be trustworthy: Create a website that offers high-value information to your readers, rather than a skimpy spam site populated with other people’s articles and a random selection of affiliate links. Know who your reader is, and what he or she is interested in, and write about it.

Be visible: To earn affiliate income, it’s usually best to have a well-trafficked website with a lot of good content on a specific topic, plus an active e-mail and/or social media contact list. Remember, people have to see your links before they will be interested in what you’re recommending.

Focus: Don’t recommend books, products, or services that are unrelated to the topic of your blog or website. For example, on Do What Matters, all my links relate to business, entrepreneurship, working from home, microbusiness, productivity, and other things that will help you do what matters and make it pay. You won’t find affiliate links to cookware or pet products, unless I’m showing how to start a microbusiness around those things.

Don’t be annoying: There’s nothing worse than an e-mailbox full of junk. If you send out a newsletter, make it interesting, useful, and related to your topic, rather than just a sales page for a product. In my opinion, once a week is about all your readers will want to hear from you, and every two weeks may even be safer. Many internet gurus disagree on this, but I base this on the fact that I instantly unsubscribe from any e-mail list that sends something more than once a week. I just don’t have time for it.

Be helpful: If your readers e-mail you with a question about something you’ve mentioned on your site, take the time to respond courteously and as completely as reasonably possible. If you’re focused on creating a business that will add value to others, as well as a stream of income for yourself, it’s important to provide solid information to those who need what you have to offer.

I’ll add a list of affilate programs to a later post, but for now, you can find some of the ones I use on the What I Use to Run My Business page.