Blogs as Affiliate Marketing Tools

There was a post over at Allan Gardyne's forum about whether or not you can make money as an affiliate using blogs instead of websites. The consensus seems to be that it's not the format of the website that's going to determine whether or not you make money. I'm not 100% sure I agree. The real answer is going to be pretty similar to the answer you'll see to most poker questions, "It depends."

I know one blogger who's the premier blogger in his niche. We spoke last week because he wanted to ask my advice on how to make more money as an affiliate. When I found out what he was actually earning, I was stunned, because I had thought he was making quite a bit more than that. His niche is traditionally a high dollar niche for affiliate sites, and he gets a lot of quality traffic. But the target market he caters to often is already a customer at the affiliate sites he's promoting, so his earnings are limited as a result.

Most of the blog success stories that I've seen are bloggers making a lot of money from Google Adsense. The variety of ads that are available, and the guaranteed revenue from getting a click through, almost guarantee a maximum amount of earnings. My guess would be that if you were going to do well marketing an affiliate product of some kind in a weblog, you would do it by actually promoting the product in a post, and linking to the affiliate code in the post, rather than just running a banner ad across the network of your blog.

That's what would make the most sense to me as an affiliate marketer, anyway. And just as an aside, the initial question of can you make money with a blog as compared to an actual website is a bit of a misleading question, because it assumes that a blog isn't a website. A blog is a website though--it's a frequently updated website that "logs" something, and usually has room for the reader to interact with the blogger.