Another popular way to monetize a website is with affiliate links.
An affiliate link is simply a link on your site that contains a specific tracking code that points to a third party product or service. Each time a reader clicks on your link and goes on to sign up for a certain product or service, you receive a comission.
Some examples of affiliate links can be found at the bottom of each of my posts on Four Pillar Freedom:
The links shown in purple are affiliate links for the following products:
- Personal Capital
- M1 Finance
- Trim
- Acorns
Each of those links has a tracking code in it that is unique to my website. So, I receive a commission each time someone clicks on one of those links and proceeds to sign up for the corresponding product.
The commission that I receive varies by product from around $5 for Trim and Acorns up to $100 for Personal Capital and M1 Finance.
How to Get Affiliate Links for your Site
There are two ways to get affiliate links for your site:
1. Sign up to be a member of an affiliate marketing network.
An affiliate marketing network is similar to an ad management network, but for affiliate links.
It’s a site where you can sign up to be a member and gain access to affiliate links from thousands of different companies for their products or services, which you can then place on your website and start earning commissions from.
Some of the more reputable affiliate marketing networks include:
- FlexOffers
- Impact Radius
- Shareasale
- Clickbank
- CJ Affiliate
- Rakuten
I personally use FlexOffers and Impact Radius.
Once you sign up for one or more of these networks, you’ll be presented with a list of companies that offer affiliate links for their products or services.
For example, here’s what those lists look like for FlexOffers:
Depending on which niche your website is in, some of these affiliate links will make more sense than others.
For example, it wouldn’t make sense to place an affiliate link for luxury watches on a personal finance website but it would make sense to use affiliate links for financial products and services.
Once you see an affiliate link for a product or service that makes sense for your niche, you can following a simple process to get the affiliate link placed on your site:
1. Apply for an affiliate link. The affiliate network will first confirm that your domain is in the right niche for the particular affiliate link you’re interested in.
2. Get the code for the affiliate link. Once you’re approved (typically takes less than 24 hours for most affiliate links; sometimes you can be approved instantly) you will be given a specific code to use for the affiliate link.
3. Place the affiliate link on your site. Once you have the code for the affiliate link, simply place it on your site in a place that makes sense.
Once you have some affiliate links on your site, you can track the number of clicks each affiliate link receives along with your total commissions on your own dashboard within the affiliate marketing network.
For example, here’s what my dashboard looks like on FlexOffers:
2. Sign up to be a member for an individual company’s affiliate program.
Along with signing up for affiliate marketing networks, you could also sign up for an individual company’s affiliate program.
For example, I’m an affiliate for Perfect Keto – a company that sells keto-friendly foods and supplements. I place affiliate links to their products within my food site easyketodishes.com and each time someone uses my link to purchase something from Perfect Keto I earn a small commission.
You can easily find individual companies that offer affiliate programs for your niche by simply searching the following in Google:
“affiliate programs for [YOUR NICHE]”
For example, suppose I ran a website that focused on reviewing hiking gear. By searching:
“affiliate programs for hiking gear”
I can see that the following individual companies all offer affiliate programs:
And many others.
If I ran a site about hiking gear, I could simply sign up for each of these individual affiliate programs and start adding affiliate links to various articles on my site.
This basic strategy can be used to add affiliate links to your site no matter which niche you’re in.
Full Disclosure: Nothing on this site should ever be considered to be advice, research or an invitation to buy or sell any securities, please see my Terms & Conditions page for a full disclaimer.
