» (aff) = Affiliate Links Where I Get Paid

You may have noticed in several of my posts, such as Reading Aaron Walls SEO Book, and Is Buying Links A Waste Of Money?, that I include an (aff) tag after some links.

I have seen several bloggers use this to identify affiliate links, and I think its a great idea so I decided to steal it. This (aff) marker lets you know that the link preceding the marker is an affiliate link. What this essentially means is that if you click through and either sign-up or purchase a product, I get paid. I only want those that are interested in products I mention to click through these links.I hope the products that I do mention and recommend are of value to all of my readers. I do plan on only providing affiliate links for products that I have purchased and used myself. This is the case with both affiliate links that have shown up on my blog.

SEO Book

The first affiliate link that was posted on this blog was for Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. Although I have a general understanding of basic SEO principles, I wanted to learn more about what I can do to optimize my blog. If you purchase the book, and learn just one thing to increase your exposure on the search engines, the book will pay for itself because it only costs $79! Of course, if you purchase after clicking through to Aaron’s site using the previous link I also get paid. If I can sell three SEO Books, then my copy of the SEO Book will essentially be free and paid for by my visitors.

Text Link Ads
Another affiliate with my blog is text-link-ads. I first used text-link-ads back in December. I purchased three text links on one PR6 site, and two PR5 sites to help build my link popularity for another website I help out with. The total cost of these three links was $135 but I only had to pay $35 because I took advantage of the $100 in free links promotion they were running. At roughly $12 per link, I thought that was a great deal. While I am not selling any links on here at the moment, I do plan to purchase a few text links to help get more links pointing at the blog. I’m not necessarily aiming to get direct traffic from these links in terms of click-thrus but I do hope to take advantage of higher search rankings because of it.

So, Why the (aff) marker?
So the question remains, why bother putting an (aff) marker after these links? Wont the (aff) marker discourage people from clicking? Honestly, I think it might, but I feel that because I am only providing worthwhile affiliate links that people will still click if they like it as well. I only want people that genuinely want a product to click on my affiliate links.

I hope you find some value in these two affiliates of my blog. When I do find more stuff that I think will help in terms of building and monetizing a website I will be sure to blog about it and shove the affiliate links in your face so you can click it and make me rich!

*update* I have removed the (aff) tag off my blog now.

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