Promoting affiliate products can be financially rewarding.

And it can be win-win: your site visitors get a relevant link, you get a commission.

In a nutshell, that’s why it’s often a good idea to promote affiliate products.

Of course, you need to make sure that the products you promote are good quality – I hope you’d do that anyway but it’s always worth a reminder. I decide against some products I think about once I’ve checked them out.

It’s well worth checking out any products you promote as their quality will reflect on your reputation.

If it’s a product that’s on Amazon then, providing there are a reasonable number of reviews then you can probably rely on those as a substitute for actually checking out the product yourself. Especially if you’re promoting higher priced products where you couldn’t hope to buy every single Rolex or whatever just to do a review.

But using reviews from elsewhere on the web as a basis for your review can be a minefield. So many review sites are set up with the express purpose of earning commissions that it’s very difficult to know which, if any, reviews are genuine.

Which means you need to use your judgement

If the product fits with your page and is good quality, that’s likely a good fit to drop an affiliate link.

If you have to twist and turn to fit the affiliate link onto the page, that’s time to re-think whether or not you should be including the affiliate link in the first place.

Promoting affiliate products can help turn your hobby into an income stream

That’s maybe one of the best reasons to promote affiliate products.

If your website started out as a hobby (lots do) then dropping in the occasional affiliate link can help to pay for your hobby.

That happens a lot on places like Facebook where people drop hash tags into their posts and start to get noticed by the product owner. I know people who get T-shirts and other merchandise simply for doing that when they post on Facebook.

That’s not affiliate marketing in the traditional sense but it works the same way. The “payment” is in kind rather than cash but it’s an area they’re in and almost certainly a product they’d otherwise be buying so it’s the same as getting a commission from an affiliate program.

Hobbies are a good place to start affiliate marketing

If it’s your hobby you’re already interested in the niche.

Regardless of where you are in the niche – anywhere from absolute novice through to expert – there will be things to write about.

If you’re a relative novice, you can write about how to start (even if you’re not a natural born writer) and get commission on all the various bits and pieces that people need when they start a new hobby.

Plus all the “how to” information they’ll need.

The affiliate links supplement what you’ll be talking about on your site and you could say something along the lines of “this goes into a lot more depth than I could hope to on a single page on my website”.

As you grow in expertise in your niche, your topics may change.

Or you may still address beginners – there are lots of ways you could do this without talking down to people. For instance, something along the lines of where you’d start if you knew what you know now. So that beginners can use your hindsight to short cut their learning curve and avoid possibly expensive mistakes.

That could be anything from buying expensive kit because it’s cheaper in the long run in your niche through to buying cheaper kit because no-one ever uses even a fraction of the capability via all the add-ons and nice-to-haves.

All along the way, you’d be promoting relevant affiliate products. Because you could never hope to have the full range of products to satisfy everyone’s needs. Not even large companies can do that – otherwise there would be no add-on markets in everything from phones to cameras and software and near enough every other market you examine.

If you’d like help with affiliate marketing, check out my quick start guide here.