Do You Click on Affiliate Links or Just Avoid Them?
New Here? You may want to Subscribe to my RSS feed for daily updates. Or if you prefer, 
Subscribe by Email What is RSS? Thanks for visiting!
We all have them. At least anyone who is trying to make a little money from their blog(s).
The question is do we, as bloggers, click on other peoples affiliate links? Or do we go look up the service ourselves in Google and join through the back door?
I’m sorry to say I have actually done it both ways.
When I first started out, I would look up whatever service was being offered, join the service and hope someone would click on my affiliate link. No excuses, I just didn’t trust the posts I was reading at the time. Granted, I didn’t really know that much about blogging and how it is a community. When no one clicked, I would wonder why. Were they doing the same thing I was doing? Did they go get the information themselves rather than click my link? Didn’t people trust me and my recommendations?
After a while, I started learning from the people whose blogs I was reading. They built a trust through their posts with their honest approach to their readers (me). I started commenting on posts where I thought I could make a contribution. And they actually responded to my comments! That for me was a big suprise at the time. I started feeling that I was a part of their community. And as part of that community, I tried to think of ways to repay their kindness.
Since I was looking for ways to monitize my blog anyway, I decided to use the affiliate links that were recommended by the blogger friends I had met, read and trusted. I know they have no idea that I used their affiliate links to join various services, but I have reached the minimum amount for each one in the allotted time for them to get their “bonus”. In other words, we all made some money because I trusted what they said about these programs.
In keeping with that philosophy, I will now click on affiliate links for books, CD’s, services etc that are recommended by my Trusted Blogging Friends (if it’s something I wanted). If you can’t trust a Blogger, who can you trust?
How about you, do you click on affiliate links? Why? Why not?
Related Posts:
My Skype: joe.hauckes