At the end of my last post in this series on how to monetize you blog, I mentioned writing reviews in order to make money from affiliates.  Well, there is a little more to it than that.  Ok, a lot more to it. In fact, hundreds of articles, blog posts and books have been written on the subject, and there are conferences and seminars held around the world providing more information on how to make money as an affiliate publisher.

In the face of that wealth of information, this post will be a short and sweet overview for integrating affiliate advertising on your blog as a viable andgenuine source of income.

Bare Bones Introduction
Affiliate advertising is where you display an advert on your site and earn money when someone clicks through and completes a specific action on the site. This action is usually a purchase, but can also be signing up for a new account, completing a survey or requesting information.  (There are some affiliate programs where you can earn per click, but these are few and far between.)

You can become an affiliate of a company either directly, through their own independent program (Amazon being the most popular example), or by using an advertising network such as Commission Junction, Tradedoubler or Affiliate Window.

Once you have signed up and been accepted to an affiliate program, you will then have access to a wide variety of banners, logos and widgets which you can display on your blog.  The code for each of these will have your unique affiliate ID embedded in it, so that the company can track visitors coming from your site and allocate you any payment that you have earned.

You can place affiliate adverts in your advertising space, banner positions or write reviews about a product and insert your affiliate link.  A great example of this is to write a review of a book that you have enjoyed and then use your Amazon affiliate link to send your readers to buy a copy.

Perhaps you have a travel blog and have a post about finding cheap airfares that gets a lot of traffic.  Inserting an affiliate link for an airline would be a wise move.

Earning money as an affiliate takes patience and experimentation and should work as an overall part of your plan to earn money from your blog.  When done well, affiliate links can generate good revenue for popular blogs, but don't quite your day job until you have consistently seen great results over a period of time. 

Using product feeds or a program such as PopShops can make it easier to integrate relevant product links into your blog posts and make your readers feel like your affiliate links are a useful feature on your blog, rather than a sales pitch.

Top Tip for this money maker:

• Only use affiliate links that are related to your blog subject, and therefor of interest to your readers.

A Word of Caution:
Do not swamp your visitors with too many adverts, and avoid multiple flashing or animated banners too close together.  Many bloggers also advise full disclosure so that your visitors know which links on your site are affiliate advertising.