How to make extra money blogging - Step 7 - Try Affiliate Marketing

Step 7 in my 10 part series, "How to Make Extra Money Blogging" - Affiliate Marketing:

You may have noticed on some blogs and websites, folks have more than just adsense ads up and running.

So do you want to know how to got hooked up with global brands like Adidas, TicketMaster, Busted Tees, and so on? Be ready to use some elbow grease folks, because this gets to be a bit like work.

First of all, the decision for these guys to let you list their ads is not automatic, so you really do have to have good content. But to get these ads set up, you may need to put down your pen for a while and roll up your sleeves.

It took me about three weeks to get all of the ad partners up and running on one of my sponsor's sites, Gruffgoat's Soccer Blog. With the benefit of this post, hopefully it won't take you quite that long.

We decided to try running ads as an affiliate marketer. Basically that means that the blog owner earn a commission off of anything a shopper buys, IF they click through to the shopping website from an ad on my site and IF that shopper ends up buying something! Those are two very big IFs!

There are some firms, such as Ticketmaster, who run their own affiliate program, but most farm it out to an affiliate clearinghouse to manage the sign-ups, the tracking, the links, and so on.

The two affiliate partners we picked for Gruffgoat's Soccer Blog are:

Affiliate Future

Commission Junction

You will have to spend some time in this process, but this is a big step to getting your site looking the way you want it, placing their ads in such a way as to not overwhelm your readers - I call that pimping it out - and then getting back to the fun part - writing.