How can one make money blogging from Blogspot

After taking the leap and starting your blog (congrats!), getting the hang of it (nice work!), and starting to see some traffic (high five!), most bloggers consider ways to produce an income from their blog.

There are many ways to potentially make money from your blog. And I encourage you to look at possible revenue opportunities before going ahead. Any monetization you do will require work to make it worth your while. You don't want to be spread too thin with your time, you've got lots of blogging to do!

Let's cover the basics of affiliate marketing for bloggers and some tips for getting started if you think it'll work on your blog.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is how vendors (think: Amazon, eBay, etc) compensate website owners, bloggers, content creators and influencers for referring sales to them online. Traffic sent by the affiliate is tracked by cookies and if sales are made within a specific time frame, the affiliate is paid a commission. Being paid by performance, there is only compensation when an action occurs. This action is usually a sale, but could be a different action like a signup or click.

Many of the programs offered are managed by a few big affiliate networks. These companies manage the entire affiliate process - links, creative, tracking and commission payouts.

The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

As someone who has worked on both sides, there is an obvious benefit here for both the affiliate and the vendor selling the product. Here's my top 3 benefits for affiliates and vendors.

Affiliate Program Benefits for Vendors

1) ADDED EXPOSURE & SEO

The golden rule of relevant and qualified back linking is the key to SEO. Including product placement sweetens the opportunity. By having reviews of your store or products on many other websites, your reputation and page rank will improve. In the world we live in that is dominated by reviews, incentivizing honest reviews makes a lot of sense.

2) PAYING FOR PERFORMANCE

It makes sense to only pay for what you need, right? Affiliate marketing means you are only paying for actual sales. Other marketing has you paying for people to see your offering (display and traditional) or per click (PPC / SEM) that only gets someone to your product page.

By only paying for completed sales, affiliate programs can free up a lot of working cash that is needed for other things in the business; employees, inventory or development.

3) ACCESS TO AUDIENCE & FEEDBACK

Having access to an audience is the most valuable for me, personally. This is also why influencer marketing is growing and providing a very good return on investment.