What is Affiliate Marketing?
In the most simplest terms, Affiliate Marketing refers to the promotion of services or products through customers. It works like this: I buy a certain product, and then recommend it to you. Then you buy that product too through my 'referral'. In that case, the product's company will pay me, an 'affiliate', a certain amount of your purchase, as a 'commission'. If you refer other people, then you will get the commission, and so on.Most popular affiliate ad marketing companies include BuySellAds, ClickBank, Amazon etc. In fact, most of the companies nowadays are offering affiliate programs to anyone willing to join. It's high time that Google do the same. This was a much awaited feature among bloggers.
About Google Affiliate Ads
This great new feature has been introduced in the form of a widget, which you can easily add to your blog posts to earn money. Whenever you write a new post about a product or service from a featured advertiser, this Google Affiliate Ad widget will help you display an affiliate ad on your post. You can choose a relevant ad from the widget. This ad can be a text-link ad, an image or a fully fledged banner.
Getting Started
Before getting started, you need to make sure that you have an AdSense account. If you don't have one, Google AdSense. You do not need to set up AdSense Ads for this program. Just sign in using your AdSense account.
Limitations
Since Google Affiliate Ads is a brand new program, it is still in its initial stages. Currently, the number of ad categories is limited. So if you don't see the select ad option, the maybe it's because your blog content does not match the ad categories. Google is working on expanding their reaches, so be patient please!
Secondly, this service is currently limited to the U.S. People outside of U.S. can't use this feature as yet. But then again, it's fresh feature, and will take time to mature. I am expecting Google to extend this limit to more countries in the near future.
If this feature is not available to you, don't worry. It will be made available very soon. I will notify you of any updates that Google makes.Overall, I think that this is a great new initiative by Google that not only allows people to earn more money through Blogger, but also allows them to connect with their audience by selling products, as affiliate marketing is all about connecting with people and performance-based marketing. Do let me know about what you think about this exciting new feature. And for those who have this advertising option available, good luck with it . For others, stay tuned.
Once signed up, go over to your blogger homepage, and click on the Earnings tab. There, you will find an option Get Started. You will be guided through the rest of the process. It's that simple really! Browse through available ad categories to pick an ad for your blog.This feature is different from the pay-per-click model for AdSense Ads. Since Affiliate Marketing is all about the performance of the affiliates, this scheme pays on a par-per-action basis. Thus, you get a greater commission for a larger number of referrals that you make.
