If you take the time to write articles for your web site, it can be well worth your time to setup affiliate accounts with places that offer items related to what you talk about.
What is an Affiliate Account?
An affiliate account lets you be the equivalent of a commission based salesman, getting a percentage of each sale which results from your forwarding people to the place you have an account with.
If you write an article talking about something you sell and make reference to related items which you do not sell, you can turn those references into affiliate links and, should someone follow them and buy the item in question, make a little extra cash by doing so.
Affiliate Accounts for Online Sellers
Of course, sending people to your competition is not typically the best way to increase sales, so you will want to be sure of a couple of things when creating an affiliate account and using affiliate links on your site:
- The people you create an affiliate account with should not be direct competition to you.
For example, if you sell jewelry, you would not want to create affiliate accounts with places that sell the types of jewelry you sell, especially if their prices are lower.
Instead, you might check about for affiliate accounts with jewelry cleaning services, people who make custom made jewelry, or any place else which offers items you talk about but does not compete with you directly. - When placing affiliate links you should make sure that they open in a new window
If you neglect to do so, people will tend to check out what you reference and then never find their way back to your site.
Be sure to add target="_blank" to your affiliate links so that your site stays open in their browser when they follow your links.
Amazon Affiliate Links
Amazon can be a good place to get an affiliate account with, though their initial percentages are quite low. The upside is that once you start making more than a few affiliate sales per month your percentage increases to a much more reasonable level.
As an Amazon affiliate, you have a lot of options for creating affiliate links, but I will focus on text links which can be wrapped around images or phrases in your articles.
An Amazon affiliate text link has two parts:
- The link itself, which contains your referral code
- A pixel image to track impressions ( page views )
You can use the text link just as you would any other link.
For the pixel image, I recommend creating a custom style that makes the image pretty much invisible and then placing pixels for each link on a page at the bottom of the page.
Pixel Image Styling
To prevent pixel images from showing up on your page in an odd manner, you can create a custom css class for them and add that class to each pixel image. For example:
.pixel-image {
border: none;
padding: none;
margin: none;
width: 1px;
height: 1px;
display: inline;
}
For users of my wordpress theme ( The Privateer ) or the Atahualpa Theme, you can add the above style to your HTML Footer Inserts.
Otherwise, you can add it either in a <style> block inside the header of the html page or a stylesheet file.
Once you do so, you can then put pixel images at the bottom of pages as follows:
<img class="pixel-image" src="…" />
You pixel images will then show up as a list of single pixels at the bottom of your page and most likely not distract viewers.
Affiliate Link Usage
In addition to using them on your own site, you can often use affiliate links anywhere that you can use a normal link.
Some common ways to use affiliate links:
- In an email footer
- In a forum footer
- On sites such as squidoo, hubpages, wetpaint, etc.
- On blog posts
Creating an Amazon affiliate text link
If you setup an affiliate account with Amazon, you can create affiliate links for specific items by doing the following:
Find the page on Amazon.com that has the item you want to link to.
For this example, I’ll use the book "Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way Using HTML & CSS".
While I have not read it, it gets excellent reviews, it is not terribly expensive, and it is could conceivably help people build nice looking sites.
Select the "Link to this page" button
The link looks like the displayed image and is at the top of the page on your affiliate bar when you are logged in.
If it is not there, then log into your affiliate account and make sure to turn on the bar.
Wait for the "Customize and Get HTML" page to load
It should look something like the following:
Select your Tracking ID and Link Type
In the above red outlined sections, be sure to select the tracking id for your site and choose "Text Link".
Once you do so, the page will change to look like the following:
Enter your text and get the html and pixel image
Specify the text you want to use for the link and then copy the html, which will contain both the text link and the pixel image.
If you are using the text link to wrap an image in, you can clear the text within the link without worry.
From there, place the link into your page where you want it, add the above referenced class="pixel-image" entry to the pixel image, and then place the pixel image somewhere on the page.
A completed example link:
Once finished, you can then create links out of various sections of text.
Perhaps you are writing an article on how to use html and css to create nice looking pages for a web site and mention the book Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way Using HTML & CSS to your readers.
Done properly, you can do both of the following at once:
- Provide excellent references for your readers.
- Show them where to get good deals and get paid to do so with no extra cost to them
BIG THANKS FOR WRITING THIS ARTICLE! I couldn’t find the answers I needed anywhere else.
I clikd you some m0ney as a thanks ;D