Monetization Monday: Affiliate Programs for Bloggers

Tips for Making Money with Your Blog

I am back after a very long break and instead of boring you with the reason for my absence I am going to give you a gift: A List of Affiliate Programs that you can use to monetize your blog. Originally my intention was to share one affiliate program a week and explain how it worked, but I have decided to give you a list of affiliate programs and then answer any questions you have on them to the best of my knowledge. I want you to apply to the programs that match your site, so you can make more money blogging in 2013.

These affiliate programs are not limited to Americans. You can make money on your blog from just about any location. Why would you sign up for several different affiliate programs? Because although there is some overlap, the different programs cover different companies.

When you apply to the programs you apply as a publisher. As a blog owner you are a publisher, isn’t that exciting? Now go be a publisher that makes money!

My suggestion is to start with the companies that immediately provide you with access to the most companies and campaigns. Skimlinks is by far the best affiliate if you want immediate access to lots of companies. Escalate Network is the best if you are looking for the highest payout for sharing coupons and the easiest methods for sharing coupons.

Affiliate Programs for Bloggers:

Affiliate Programs where you apply once and are then approved for all campaigns:

Skimlinks – You put a piece of code in your footer and then any direct link to a product or store is turned into an affiliate link.

Escalate Network – They have the best coupon resources of any of the affiliate programs.

Logical Media – Has had higher payouts for some of the campaigns and has campaigns like the Mr. Food recipe books which are free to your readers. I like when I can make money offering my readers something for free.

Affiliate Programs where you apply to the program and then must apply to individual campaigns:

LinkShare  Referral  Prg

Link Share –  They have affiliate programs for many companies including Taste of Home, Plow and Hearth, and Walmart.

Google Affiliate Network – Target, Kitchen Aid Mixer, Williams Sonoma and many other companies. There is a Google Chrome extension that will allow you to grab a link for any product on any website that you have been approved for.

Impact Radius – Has the SavingStar coupons, Coupon Network, and many other companies.

Commission Junction – Has DiscountMags, which includes many cooking magazines.

There are more affiliate programs out there, but this list will get you off to a good start. If there is a company that you are interested in becoming an affiliate for,  Google “the company’s name and affiliate program” and you will usually find one of the above companies provide a program.

Related Posts on Monetization: 

How to Monetize Your Blog with Coupons

How to Make Money with the Amazon Affiliate Program

This post contains some affiliate links.

How to Make Money with the Amazon Associate Program

How to Monetize your blog using the amazon affiliate program

You can easily monetize your blog using the Amazon Associate Program. Amazon doesn’t pay a lot (4% – 10%) but it is easy to use and allows you to create money-making links for items you are already talking about in your posts. Additionally, you receive a percentage of the entire sale, not just the item you recommended.

Ways to Monetize Your Site with Amazon:

Use the site stripe tool bar to quickly create a specific link to a product that you mention in your posts. Every time you mention a specific product whether it is a cooking tool or a hard to find ingredient, you can add a text link to it on amazon. In my Chai Spiced Frosting Post, I linked to both my favorite chai tea and the decorator set I used to frost my cupcakes. If I didn’t link to those items, I would have received emails asking me which tea I used and how I decorated my cupcakes.

The amazon links answer readers’ questions and save me  time. So much so that I was linking to amazon to save time before I was an affiliate. Now I make a little money from doing so. I don’t do this for every single item. I choose to link to the items that I think my readers are most likely to want additional information on.

Share links to cookbooks when you review them.

Share links to free Kindle books. Most of the time you won’t make any money, but your readers will appreciate it. And since you make money on the entire sale, if they happen to add a couple of other books to their free book, you will make a little bit.

Share links to food items when they go on sale. Monitor the food sales and when there is a great sale, share it with your readers.

You can also create a static page with products you recommend and include links to those items on amazon. On your static page, you could also create links to posts you write reviewing those products and add to the page as you think of more products that you like enough to recommend.

Amazon has many options, including widgets, banners, and “stores”, so you can experiment to see what works best for your site.

Disclosure: Although I am talking about affiliate links, this post does not contain any. 

Monetization Monday: How to Monetize Your Blog with Coupons

Tips for Making Money with Your Blog

We all start blogging for different reasons, but even if we didn’t start blogging to make money we have heard the rumors that it is possible. But how do you make money when you are giving your recipes away for free? When you are a new blogger, businesses are not exactly pounding on your door asking to pay for a premium spot on your blog. And if you only have a couple hundred visitors each day, how can you convince businesses to take your cold calls (or cold emails) seriously?

The good news is you don’t have to worry about sending or receiving emails from businesses to make money. You can join an affiliate program.

Affiliate programs are a nice place to start with monetizing your blogs because they do all the work. They find the companies, they generate the buttons and the code. All you have to do is sign up, decide which advertising campaigns are a good match for your readers, grab the code, and place it on your blog.

Each Monday, I am going to talk about different ways to make money either on your blog or with your talents on a different platform.

How to Monetize Your Blog with Coupons

Coupons don’t make a lot of money per click, but lots of people use them and readers come back when new coupons are released. So they can be a regular source of income.

My favorite site to use to find coupons is Escalate Network. Escalate pays $0.42 per print session + $0.18 per “new user”. Escalate also makes it incredibly easy for you to include posts on your site. They have a Coupons.com Tool that allows you to check which coupons you want to use. After you have checked the coupons you like, you click Generate HTML (You have a choice of doing images or text). Copy the code and paste it into your post using the HTML Editor instead of the visual editor.

How to make money on your blog with coupons

How to Use Coupons on Your Blog:

You can create a post filled with a variety of coupons. You could have one post a week devoted to coupons.

You can write a short post focusing on just one coupon. Focused posts do just as well, sometimes better than lengthy coupon posts. They allow you to choose just the specific brands that you like and are mostly like to be brands or products that your readers will use. So I could write a post and include a link to the $1.00 off coupon for yeast and then include links to my posts that use yeast.

I could also do a search for all my posts that use yeast and then include a link to the yeast coupon on those posts. Anybody who comes to those posts through any source would then be exposed to that coupon. When I monetize old posts with coupons, I try to remember to remove the coupons after they expire, but since the image is hosted on Escalate Network and they change the image to say expired, I don’t feel too bad if I forget one.

You can add a Coupon widget in your sidebar with Escalate Network’s widget tool.

You can create a Coupon Page with Escalate Network’s iframe tool.

Disclosure and Monetization:

If you monetize your site, you need to let your readers know. Legally, you should have your disclosure policy in a high-profile spot somewhere on your blog. I like to have a Disclosure Page, You can find it at the top of my blog under the header (You can quickly create a disclosure for free at Disclosure Policy. Answer the questions with the best match and then edit the resulting document if necessary).  I also like to include a disclosure at the bottom of each monetized post.

Disclosure: This post contains an affiliate link.