Affiliate Marketing: Generating Additional Income

What is Affiliate Marketing Affiliate marketing is a way to generate income by promoting products that provide value to your readers. If your business involves training horses, for example, it is safe to assume that you target market will be interested in products that have to do with horse care.

When you write an article, you can then promote those items. You might become an affiliate of Amazon.com and promote the books that relate directly to the particular subject of each article, for example a book about horsey health care! Or you might be recommending saddles or how to show horses – the list is endless.

I am an Amazon affiliate, so the links I’m about to show have my id number with Amazon embedded in them. There are different ways to use the links.

You can embed the link in your content body by inserting shop at amazon now using good keyword anchor text.

The anchor text is made up of the words your reader clicks on to arrive at the link destination. You want to create anchor text that mirrors what someone is likely to type in when they are doing a search. To link to an affiliate offering horse care products, anchor text might be "horse care" or "horse hoof care" or "horse health." Insert this link into your text in a natural way: "A well stocked stable will include basic horse care items."

Embed your link by first typing < no space, a, space and href=

Next, copy your affiliate URL, paste it in immediately after the href= and enclose it in quotation marks. Leave no spaces between the = sign and the " Then type >horse care At the end, add < / a > with no spaces between the characters.

If more text shows up in the link than you intended it is probably because you forgot the last bracketed /a which is the signal to close the link.

It is awkward trying to show you this html, since if I write it out without the spaces, the symbols I'm trying to show you will disappear and a link will be created!

1. Go to the main website you are interested in. Look for the button that says “Affiliates” or “Associates” or some similar term.

2. Click on the link and fill out the information to sign up as an affiliate.

3. Go to your email account to get your confirmation email which will either include your affiliate id or will give you a link to obtain it.

4. Log in to your new account. There are plenty of free programs, so unless its really special, don't sign up for something you have to pay to join -- unless it is a product you wish to own, of course. Look for the specific item you are wishing to promote. There will usually be text links which include your id already embedded or banner adds. Choose which type you want to use on your site.

5. To copy the code, right click on the code and choose “select all”

6. Then right click again on the selected code and choose “copy” 7. Go to your site and right click at the spot you wish your link to appear.

To insert a graphic image is even easier. In the list of products, there will be a graphic on your product of choice. For this example on horses, I went to the link page and did a search for the products. In this case, I searched books on horse care.

When I found the books I wanted, I highlighted the code underneath the picture. Then I put my cursor on the highlighted code, right clicked on my mouse and chose "copy." Back to the page I'm writing, I put my cursor at the place I wanted to insert the graphic, right clicked, and chose "paste."

Still, you certainly are free to choose your affiliates individually and I hope this information is helpful. For a great example of how someone used affiliate marketing to monetize an article she wrote, visit her Squidoo lens.