Want an easy way to start making money with your podcast? Start using affilate links in your content.
It may sound too simple to be effective but signing up for an affiliate program and placing links in your website’s text and/or mentioning them on your podcast is the easiest way to start monetizating your show. You can literally make money while you sleep.
As a podcaster you have a lot of influence over the purchasing decisions of your audience. This is an important relationship that you have with your listeners and shouldn’t be taken lightly. If you want to start making money with your podcast, you can sign up for an affilate program for a product or products that you recommend on your show, in blog posts and in the descriptions of your videos. By choosing to recommend products and services that you trust and use with your own podcast, you’ll help remove some of the guess work out of your audience’s own purchasing decisions. Hopefully you’ll also be able save people some money in the process by doing the research for them (finding the best price) while making a little money to help cover the costs of your show.
Your audience trusts your recommendation because they trust the relationship you’ve established together. When you recommend something on your site on in your podcast, your listeners are much more likely to go out and buy that product than they would be if they saw it in a random ad online or heard it from somebody they didn’t know as well as you. Affiliate links work best when you are looking out for the best interests of your audience.
On this episode I sit down with Daniel Clark from QAQN.com to talk about his experience with affiliate marketing, how to get started and why there’s often a negative connotation associated with the term “affiliate marketing.”
Daniel has enough experience with making money using affiliates that he co-hosts a show all about it, Affilate Marketing Fanatics.
We start our conversation with Daniel’s background in podcasting and affilate marketing and move into a talk about why a podcaster would want to be an affilate for products they recommend, the best way to implement affiliates into your website and podcast and if all podcasters have the ability to make affilate income from their show?
Other topics included in our conversation include:
- percentage rates for different affiliates (how much you get paid). Personally I’m seeing the best returns from my preferred podcast gear supplier B&H.
- Banners vs. text vs. widget links to products. – Text links seem to work best for most affiliates.
- Do some niches do better than others? – I’m finding that one particular segment of my viewers converts much better than the rest. Listen to find out how I use YouTube in conjunction with my podcast to reach this segment of my audience.
- Rules and regulations that need to be followed when using affiliate links. The best practice is to make it clear that the links you are using are affilate links.
- Tracking and inserting affilate links with WordPress plugins.
- The best affilate programs to get started with. Amazon is likely the easiest, B&H is my personal favorite.
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Daniel’s Podcasting E-Book
- Ray’s panels from BlogWorld NYC 2012
- Affiliate Summit
- E-Junkie – Sell digital products
- Ad manager plugin for WordPress
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