Author: Tiara Rea

I absolutely love affiliate marketing. I guess I have to, considering I work with over 50,000 Lunarpages affiliates every day. But I really think there is amazing potential in every webmaster to offer some kind of affiliate marketing strategy on their website. If done correctly, you can make a lot of money and feel good about doing it.

Affiliate marketing has this bad rap because a lot of people truly abuse it. But there is a purpose for it. First and foremost, affiliate marketing should be used to offer a recommendation towards something you have enjoyed yourself. It’s just like if you buy a car from a specific dealership and enjoyed their customer sales and product so much that you choose to display their license plate holder on your plates (or, if you’re from Missouri, like me, they brand it automatically on your car). You’re offering the car dealership free advertising because 1) you enjoyed what they had to offer and 2) you feel good about telling the rest of the world to buy from them as well.

The only difference with affiliate marketing (and the very reason it gets its bad reputation) is that you get paid for offering your opinion or advertising to others. And this is actually the second most important purpose for affiliate marketing – you make money! I mean, whoaboy, who doesn’t love money? Personally, I like to swim in mine, Scrooge McDuck style.

When you place an affiliate banner or link on your website, you are anxious to make money, but if you are utilizing the original purpose by offering your honest opinion, the money you earn is extremely valuable. A lot of webmasters take this approach to the next level by sharing the affiliate earnings with their community. You can offer this kind of thing by donating a portion or the full amount earned into website upgrades, new software, new features for your customers or audience, or even by splitting up the earnings between yourself and these customers. Or you can cash it out into pennies, hoard it in your basement, and invite me over for a swim.

Plus, the thought always comes to mind, “If you’re going through all the trouble of telling people about a product, shouldn’t you consider that worthy of getting paid?” If you’re writing about Lunarpages on your website or recommending our reliable web hosting to friends and family, clients or even strangers, our motto is: You should get paid for that work! In fact, I am always out and about seeking out new affiliates because they help us and we in turn help them. Some of our affiliates make their living through affiliate marketing.

And in all honesty, anyone can do it. If you’ve got a website, you’ve got the potential.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 9:36 am and is filed under Featured Articles, Issue 9 - April 2008, Newsletter Archives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed . You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.