How to Make Money as a Book Blogger Part 5: Affiliate Links

It’s time for a new post in the “How to Make Money as a Book Blogger” series, and today we’re getting to the good stuff, the actual making of the money! In previous installments, we set up our blog, and we worked on building traffic to it. Today we’re going to talk about signing up for affiliate programs and adding affiliate links to our posts.

Overview of Affiliate Marketing

We’ve touched upon this in earlier posts, so just a quick blurb here:

Affiliate marketing is the internet version of getting paid on commission. You sign up with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, or other online sellers, then promote books on your blog by including special affiliate links (on the surface, these links don’t appear any different from regular links, and they can go to specific book pages, to searches, or to category pages in the bookstore).

If one of your readers clicks on the link and goes on to purchase the book or ebook, you’ll receive a percentage of the sales price (it varies from retailer to retailer, but 5-7% is about average for books). You’ll also get a cut of other purchases the buyer may make during that shopping trip (with booksellers, there’s usually a 24-48 hour window during which you’ll get credit).

Signing up for an Online Bookstore’s Affiliate Program

It’s not hard to sign up to be an affiliate, and it doesn’t cost anything. As long as you have a website, especially one that’s book-related, you shouldn’t have trouble being accepted into affiliate programs for the online bookstores.

Here are the sign-up links for the major ones:

• Amazon Associates Program
• Barnes & Noble Affiliate Program
• Smashwords Affiliates
• Borders Affiliate Program

You can also sign-up at Commission Junction if you want to browse around and see what other outfits have affiliate programs. CJ acts as a middleman, categorizing and listing hundreds (probably thousands) of online stores.

Adding Affiliate Links to Posts

When it comes to making sales, text links inserted directly into a post work best. Amazon, in particular, has a lot options (product previews, banners, kindle chicklets, etc.), but I recommend sticking to old-fashioned text links.

After fifteen years of staring at banner ads on the web, we’ve all gotten good at ignoring them, and funky widgets tend to clutter up a site, but links directly in the content of the post are a different story. Since we’re presumably reading the words on the page, we’re more likely to notice and click on a link in our eyes’ path.

Most affiliates have wizards of varying degrees of sophistication that will guide you through creating the links you want. Smashwords keeps things the simplest. Scroll down to the bottom of any of their book pages, and, if you’ve signed up for their affiliate program, you’ll see a link you can simply copy and paste (it’ll already have your affiliate ID embedded).

Tips for Selling More Books Through Your Affiliate Links

In the third part of this series, I suggested some “what to write about” ideas, such as book reviews, new releases, and lists of books by category (i.e. 99-cent ebooks, mystery bestsellers, medical thrillers).

One of the great things about book blogs is you’re naturally going to attract people who love to buy books. They’ll already have accounts set up at Amazon or other popular stores, so there aren’t a lot of barriers between them and making a purchase.

Reviews traditionally do a great job of converting (turning clicks on links into sales on the other end) for you. If you’re going to do a review, you’ll want to include at least one affiliate link to the book in the post. Unless you’re participating in an author’s blog tour or some such, you may want to avoid linking to the author’s various sites and social media pages. It’s up to you, but the fewer things in the post there are to click, the more likely people will click your affiliate links (you can always link to favorite authors in a blogroll list over on your menu).

You don’t need to create a link every time you mention the book, but once near the beginning and then at the end improves the odds of someone checking it out.

Can You Still Make Money if You Tell People to Avoid the Book?

You may wonder if it’s worth adding affiliate links when your book review isn’t going to be flattering. My response is: sure, why not? Sometimes people’s tastes will be different than yours, and they may want to check out the book anyway. Or, they may click on the link to see if the reviews at Amazon agree with yours, at which point they may wander off and buy something else at the store. You’ll still get credit and make a percentage of the sale.

Also, if you post a review suggesting folks steer clear of a book, you could always end with a couple of recommendations (with affiliate links, of course) to similar reads you did enjoy.

Even if you liked a book, don’t feel you need to make it sound ultra scintillating to encourage people to buy it. Readers will appreciate it if your reviews are balanced, raising good and bad points. We tend to trust reviews like that more, and it’ll be clear you’re genuinely interested in helping people find enjoyable books, not just sell things.

Don’t Forget…

I want to emphasize again that no matter how brilliantly you place your affiliate links or how great of reviews you write, you won’t make any money if you don’t have anybody visiting your site. Lots of great content built up over time plus lots of visitors every day is the secret to making money from a blog.

I’ll talk about adding advertising to your book blog in the next post in this series (hey, there’s no reason to limit yourself to one source of income!), but, in the meantime, you may want to check out How You Can Make Money Promoting My Ebooks (and other people’s too), a post I did a couple of months ago. It talks more about Smashwords, in particular, and how to find authors offering high affiliate percentages over there.

Until next time!