CREATE FREE BLOG |
BLOGGING AFFILIATE PROGRAMS |
Bloggers are always coming up with unique ways of publishing their opinions, and many bloggers are handy with HTML and JavaScript. The following project is best undertaken if you have a basic knowledge of HTML and a familiarity with JavaScript. But even if you don't, it's worth tinkering with because you're bound to learn something or develop an interest in the effort!
The Recommends program at Amazon is great because it delivers fresh, dynamic content and saves you a lot of time. If your needs are more specific, however, you can use JavaScript to rotate affiliate-linked product images and text inside a custom-built module. In this way, you can dynamically present exactly the products you want to recommend to your visitors. Alternatively, you can make some of the products in your wishlist more visible by building them into this module.
This exercise shows you how to build a module that displays a different snippet of HTML each time a user views your page. In this case, the snippets are products at Amazon.com. The number of snippets you use is up to you.
Your content array is the HTML you want to rotate. The HTML contains descriptions and links to the products you are displaying. This array contains links to other books about blogging (books you don't need, of course, because you've got this one). Make sure that your links include the affiliate code necessary for generating your referral fee.
The blog community has a big appetite for media products like books, music, and movies. You might also have good luck if your blog is topical and you can find an affiliate program that matches up with your interests. Commission Junction is the place to go for this.
Commission Junction provides bloggers the opportunity to earn revenue from their audience on a pay-forperformance basis. You can partner with thousands of advertisers and access millions of ads from a single webbased interface. They track and report on every ad in the network, send you a monthly payment, and provide a suite of online tools to help optimize affiliate performance.
Payouts vary according to advertiser. One example is Overture. Formerly GoTo.com, Overture is a pay-for performance search provider. One of the affiliate options they offer through Commission Junction is a search box. You copy the code and paste it into your blog template. Then, they pay you $.02 each search. If you have 50 searches performed each day, that's $30 a month— which should cover your hosting fees, at least. Not too shabby.
So, let's say you like to blog about traveling and you chronicle all your adventures. You could search for travel at Commission Junction and choose from participating affiliate programs . Put one of them on your blog and you'll be offering your readers something they can use and making a little profit in the process.