The real benefit is that they have so many other products and such well tested merchandising that most people end up finding something to buy, even if it’s not the product that was promoted. I’ve seen some Amazon affiliates end up with significant commissions on computers, when they were promoting music, or something completely unrelated.

I think I’ll definitely cover the various options out there from a convenience perspective. Different networks are going to perform differently depending on the type of blog – product focused blogs like a PurseBlog or BagSnob probably do very well with affiliate links, while more editorial blogs like the Sartorialist might not (just a guess, for all I know he may be making a mint off of affiliate links).

Shopstyle is interesting because from what I understand they calculate averages based on the commissions (and their starting commission would be much higher than a publisher would get on their own) they get as a network. It may not seem like much on a per click basis, but I think unless you’re one of those blogs that has a really strong, shopping audience, your standard earnings per click would be really up and down.

It’s definitely a time investment though, and without a guaranteed payout I think bloggers should definitely understand some of the things that they may overlook to get the most for their efforts.

It can definitely be time consuming to find the right product, then weigh it against all of your options. My shopping posts are generally more collage style and it still takes an hour to make sure I’ve got everything tracking properly, deep links good to go, etc.

Amazon, especially now that they’re making a push to have more fashion items, is nothing if not convenient for the fact that you have such a big selection in one place, so only one set of links to deal with. Just from a convenience point of view, options like Skimlinks or Viglink style options are starting to look more appealing since you can at least cut out some of the link preparation part.

Hope you find ways to simplify the process also!

If you are new to affiliating, or not sure how to best go about it, or feel a bit scared about how to link to a lot of different merchants, you can join a network like us and it makes it all super easy. Even automatic if you want it to be. We have the dashboard feature mentioned in the article and this makes it even more easy to work what content and links are working best, to help you increase revenue with out changing any of your content. We also have a guide that explains the basics of this and some tools available http://ow.ly/nip59

When I started blogging I felt that using affiliate links on my site was dishonouring my readers, however I have learnt that as long as you don’t allow the links to overtake your site then you are doing your visitors a favour. I used to get comments on people asking me where to buy replicas of clothes worn by celebrities so this was when I decided to look into affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a good money earner. I have even gone as far as to get a programmer to create me a WordPress plugin which automatically convert my links to affiliate links from major affiliate networks like commission junction, affiliate window, link share. Skim links is very good for people who don’t want to do all the deep linking stuff. I have tried ShopStyle but have had very little return. I read a recent article which suggested that ShopStyle offers very little commission rates and is a way of bumping up their own SEO ranking.

I would suggest trying a few which work for you and if you have a site which brings in a lot of traffic then you can definitely monetize on this.