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The importance of selling affiliate products on your blog

by Ruth Belena

The best reasons for selling affiliate products on your blog are that you do not have to keep hoping your blog visitors will respond to ads, or need to find business sponsors willing to pay you to review their products. The main importance of selling affiliate products is that you have more control over what you promote, and how you promote products on your own blog.

When you join an ad program, such as Google Adsense, or you use a widget to show ads from other bloggers, many of your blog visitors take no notice of the ads, and few of them click on links to see what is being advertised. Other bloggers have the same ads on their blogs, and visitors see the same ads on many websites.

When you build up a following on your blog, you should also build trust. You can lose trust when your blog is filled with sponsored posts and paid reviews.

Selling affiliate products on your blog is a far better option for making money with a blog. One affiliate sale can pay a higher amount of commission than the amount ad revenue your blog could earn over several months. Multiple affiliate sales can provide much bigger earnings than you get from writing sponsored blog posts.

Each affiliate sale from any of affiliate link on your blog will pay you a percentage of the selling price as commission. You could be selling a lot of low-cost items on your blog and be earning 50% on many sales, or sell one or two higher priced items for a bigger percentage.

[1] When you join an affiliate network or program you choose the products you are selling on your blog.

Affiliate products you select to promote on your blog should be ones that will appeal most to the visitors who find your blog from online searches, or from links on other blogs with a similar theme. The content of your blog should target visitors who are interested in buying products related to what your blog is about.

* Sell software to visitors who want to read software reviews of products you promote.

* Sell money making manuals and guides to business success, web promotion and online jobs.

* Sell health products on a blog where you write about health, fitness and medical issues.

* Sell books on a book reviewing blog.

* Sell DVDs and movies on a celebrity blog.

[2] There is no limit to the number of products you can sell from your blog.

Most affiliate schemes provide affiliates with free giveaways and sales material, in addition to banners, buttons and promotional emails.

- The biggest affiliate networks, such as ClickBank and Commission Junction, list hundreds of businesses with products available for you to promote with your own personal affiliate link.

- Smaller networks like Click2Sell and myHelpHub offer ranges of themed products for you to choose from.

- Individual affiliate programs include Amazon and eBay allow you to select particular titles or types of product, to feature on your blog with your own affiliate link.

[3] Original posts and product reviews bring more search engine traffic to your blog.

Your blog posts are unique to you, and each one is indexed by search engines, bringing new visitors to your blog. There is no better way to get sales than to share your personal experience of using a product, or to provide insight into how an affiliate product works.

The importance of selling affiliate products is on your blog is that you are not just adding banners or text links to your blog. You can focus more on the type of product you promote, and write original blog posts to highlight the benefits of those products. When you post your own reviews and recommendations of affiliate products on your blog, you get more traffic from search engines and make more money from selling those products.

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