Posting Affiliate Site Reviews
Apparently, one of the most popular ways of making money with your blog is through affiliate accounts. An affiliate is when you get paid for bringing business to a certain site. It usually involves either the person clicking on one of your specially coded links that have a referral code on them, or a banner displayed on your site with the same referral code on it.
The question is, when do you review these affiliates? If you are in the same niche that I’m in, then there may be a wise time to review them. If I were to put up some reviews of the sites I wish to show you in hopes of you signing up, I wouldn’t want to do that as my first post. It would end up unnoticed. Not many people will search through your archives, especially if they aren’t easy to search through. There is a time and place for everything.
It is recommended that if you post it after you have about 200 RSS subscribers then you'll have about 200 people who will potentially read the post and maybe even sign up. Keep in mind a review should always be honest to your readers because there is no point in lying to the reader, they will only sign up and quit. Faking a post is the worst thing you can do. You will get nothing out of this and you will have wasted your reader's time. In some instances, you may lose readers.
You should only review them after you get a decent amount of daily traffic. This amount will vary depending upon your blog's niche. I would suggest somewhere in the neighborhood of 200+ daily different people who read your blog (Google Analytics will provide this information), or 200+ RSS subscribers. The longer you wait, the better your chances are for success.
If you happened to have posted these offers before, then why not throw links to yourself in the middle of an article? Point an article on the topic of the affiliate site to your review. People will usually click this link to another one of your posts if they have an interest in it.
Another rather common way of getting these links out there would be in a monthly earnings report. If you are eager to share with your readers how much you are making each month, then why not put some amounts that you've earned from each program. With links right next to your earnings, you can have your affiliate code in there. This way they will choose some of the more profitable sites and hopefully sign up; this method serves as a source of appeal.
Remember: the longer you wait to actually dedicate a post about them, the better you’ll do. If you have already reviewed them, don’t republish it. You can use many other techniques to display your affiliate codes somewhere else on your site. There's always more than one way to do something. In this case, I will have to say that's true.
-Aud
