At Sharp Blogger we help bloggers make better decisions. So that they can get real results instead of just spinning their wheels in the blogging wilderness.
We believe that one way to be a sharp blogger is not ignoring easy opportunities to get paid for your efforts. After all, you work too hard on your blog not to get compensated, right?
It’s what we teach, and it’s what we practice.
So let’s talk about affiliate links.
Affiliate Links
Sometimes when we recommend a product, we’ll link to the company’s website using what’s known as an affiliate or referral link. Basically, if you end up buying a product that you found via our link, we get a commission from the vendor as a small “Thank You”.
Sometimes that commission is just a few dollars; sometimes it’s a little more. Sometimes it’s a one-time commission; sometimes it’s a rolling commission — so if you sign up for a monthly subscription service we might get a slice of that monthly fee.
But here’s the important thing — that referral doesn’t cost you a penny. The entire commission comes out of the vendor’s pocket, not yours.
And it goes without saying that we’ll never recommend a product simply because it pays us a commission because that would be sleazy, right?
So we’ll only recommend products that we’ve personally used or that come highly recommended by trusted peers. (After all, if we only recommend products we’re using ourselves right now, we’d be doing you a disservice, because there are tools that are a great fit when you’re starting out, but not when your blog is bigger. Make sense?)
So that you can easily tell when we’re using an affiliate link, we’ll put (affiliate link) after it.
For instance, this is what an affiliate link to our recommend blog host Bluehost looks like:
Bluehost (affiliate link)
Now it’s possible that we didn’t mark some links in older posts as clearly as this, so the safest thing to assume is that any time we link to a third-party product, we might get a small commission.
All good? Great!