31 July 2016 ‘Affiliate Marketing’ Isn’t A Dirty Word

Most people in our game cringe when you mention “affiliate marketing”. But despite its bad rap, I’ve had only positive experiences to date.

The first: on a couple of content websites I built and eventually sold. While a majority of revenue was generated through advertising, affiliate links to merchandise generated a passive, ongoing source of income. Even with relatively big traffic numbers the income was small, but incremental and not bad for a student who had no idea what he was doing.

The second was directly influenced by the first. After selling one of the websites, I was discussing with a Creative how the site made money. Less than a month later, he came up with Homepage For The Homeless, a simple but brilliant idea to turn your everyday online shopping into a charity donation.

Since then I’ve always wanted to explore further, especially understanding if communities can be built and leveraged while maintaining transparency. And if affiliate marketing is sustainable on higher priced items.

With that in mind, this post is about to become my third experience with affiliate marketing. That’s why I signed up to FlexOffers, an affiliate service who combine a number of various networks into one program, making it easy for newbies like me.

And yes, that link is a referral one. And they sponsored this post too.

So here’s the question – does paying the bills hurt my credibility, even with transparency?