Lots of online stores have a link at the bottom of their pages about “affiliate programs”, but what exactly does that mean, and why should you care?

We touched on this briefly in How To Monetize Your Blog, but it seemed worthy of being brought up again.

Essentially you sign up for the program of the site you choose to work with, accept their terms, and then you can begin inserting the links or banner ads on your site.  While you earn no money for people just viewing the ads, you do earn money if they click on the ad and then make a purchase from the site.

Due to the need for two actions to take place for you to earn money (the reader clicks the ad, the reader makes a purchase from the site), it can be difficult to trule make a lot of money from this system if you only work at it casually.  For affiliate programs to truly start generating a lot of money for a blogger, you need to make a niche site that will mean the visitors to your site are going to be more inclined to click on targeted ads to begin with.  (Say you start a blog about wine, it might not make sense to join the affiliate program for car parts, but it would make perfect sense to join one for a site that sells wines)

While you can hunt for sites that offer such programs, a good share of large companies are now using third party companies to run their affiliate programs. You may want to start by looking at companies such as LinkShare.com or CommissionJunction (yes, we belong to LinkShare, but not CJ) that offer you chance to sign up for multiple programs at once, or pick and choose from just a few.

As with any ads you may run on your blog, make sure your blog host allows advertising before you begin inserting any!