Why Affiliate Links? What are they?

If you’ve landed on this page you may be curious about why some of the links to the resources I’m discussing on my blogs are affiliate links.  Affiliate links are links which you can get from someone who sells a product so that when someone clicks on the link, you earn a commission which is taken out of the sellers side. There is no additional cost to the buyer.  It’s a pretty cool setup for everyone involved.

For the product seller it’s a way to get bloggers like me to promote their products.  For the blogger it’s a way that I can earn a little bit of income in exchange for all the time I spend blogging. For the buyer (you) it’s great because they learn about a product they may want to buy and get an opportunity to help out the blog they found it on without paying any extra!  I see it as a win win for everyone.  The only area where things could get a little iffy is that this could motivate bloggers to hype up products that they don’t actually like and use.

I hope that as you go through my site and it’s content you’ll be able to tell that I am actually spending a lot of time using the products that I am an affiliate for.  My major goal is to become a trusted advisor for my readership over the long term. If I promote a product that my readers buy and they discover it stinks then I’ve damaged my most valuable asset: my readers trust.

Many sites, including giant ones like Amazon, have affiliate programs.  The cool thing about Amazon’s is that the affiliate link is active for 24 hours after you go through, so that if you click through and buy an inexpensive book that I’ve talked about on my site and then 12 hours later buy a refrigerator, I earn a commission!  The crappy thing about it is that the commission is really low (4-6% depending on how much you sell).  As you can see I am not going to be getting rich off this any time soon, but hopefully I can use this to pay off my hosting fees and other costs associated with this blog.  Honestly, I’m new to all this stuff and still trying to figure it out. We’ll see how it goes!

That being said if you’ve been reading this blog and enjoyed it and would like to give me a little tip or free donation you can click through any of my amazon links before buying whatever it is you were going to normally buy on Amazon (a diamond ring! a washing machine!) and I’ll get a little commission that you don’t have to pay for. Just saying!

I hope that this answers any questions you have about this but if not feel free to leave a comment on this page and I’ll be happy to reply and explain further.