Earn Passive Blog Income with Infolinks and Amazon Associates Easily - Getting Started with Infolinks

The objective of becoming an Infolinks publisher (or Amazon associate) is to have an additional income aside from Google AdSense. This will let you maximize your blog's passive income opportunities.

Infolinks (http://www.infolinks.com/) is an in-text advertising solution. It works by putting JavaScript links in your content. These hyperlinks are easily recognizable because they are double underlined and mostly green in color.

To get started with Infolinks, fill out an online application and refer to this page for guidance.

Below are the important things you need to know if you are planning to become an Infolinks publisher.

1. It is best to inform your readers about Infolinks, and how this can affect the user experience of your blog. Infolinks suggest mentioning that your blog uses some kind of in-text link advertisement. You can find more details here: http://www.infolinks.com/faq.html, under the section "Should I introduce Infolinks to my visitors?"

2. One of the most common questions pertains to income potential. The answer depends on the amount of traffic and impressions the blog gets.

To see a rough comparison between how much a high traffic blog (>500 impressions daily) and low traffic blog (<100 daily impressions) generates, check out the screen shot below:

There is a very big difference; you can see why it makes sense to get a high amount of traffic to your blog before signing up with Infolinks, because you need that traffic before it can become worthwhile. Of course, the amount of earnings can vary depending on your niche and the amount of content.

3. You will get paid by Pay Pal.

Here are some tips to help you increase your Infolinks earnings.

1. Since this is an in-text advertising method, it works best with substantial blog posts (around 400 to 500 words of original content).

This will increase the chances of Infolinks's text link appearing in your post, as well as visitor click through for those links.

2. Write blog posts frequently. The more posts you make to your blog, the more you will get impressions coming from long tail traffic. An increase in impressions can increase Infolinks earnings. Common pitfalls are to write post just for Infolinks or affiliate links. Your motivation to write SHOULD be to help your readers first of all; all other motivations should be secondary.

As to how many posts to write in a week, that depends on your time. If you are a full-time blogger, you can write one or two high quality posts per day. It will surely pay off in the long run.

3. Never stop your SEO efforts. This will help your blog posts get high ranks in search engines. The higher the ranking, the more organic traffic you will receive, which will translate to higher net impressions.

4. Maximize Infolink text impressions by placing the JavaScript code in your template, so that it will appear in all of your blog posts, not just a few.

Getting Started with Amazon Associates

The Amazon Associates program is very different from Infolinks and Google AdSense. It works by having Amazon affiliate banners and product links on your blog. Then, if your visitor clicks on these links, they will go the exact product page in Amazon.com.

You will ONLY earn money if the visitor successfully orders the product. To get started, you need to join: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/

Like Infolinks, there are some things you need to know about Amazon Associates.

1. The implementation of Amazon Associates is pretty manual in general (although there are blog platforms that offer modules or plugins that can automate the process). Unlike Infolinks and Google AdSense, where all you need to do is to copy and paste the JavaScript code and it's done, Amazon Associates works by pasting hyperlink code in terms of image or text links into your post or template.

This means that Amazon Associate affiliate links are crawlable and indexable by Google, because they are not JavaScript-based.

2. Search engines like Google recommend putting a nofollow attribute to affiliate links. This is also for your own good, because you will not leak unnecessary link juice from your blog without editorial merit.

How about the earnings? Well, Amazon Associates is a commission-based system.

The screen shot above shows earnings of $24.77 for total sales of $613.66 in Amazon. This is a commission of about four percent.

The formula for shipped items is:

Shipped items = Amazon Conversion Rate x Click through rate in your blog post for Amazon affiliate links x Blog Impressions

If you have 20,000 impressions for your blog, and 2% of your visitors click the Amazon affiliate link, you will have 20,0000 x 2% = you will be referring 400 visitors to Amazon.

These 400 visitors are still shoppers to Amazon, so how good the match is between your content and the product page is what dictates the conversion rate. So for example, if your Amazon conversion rate is 4%:

Number of shipped items = 4% x 400 = 16 shipped items

The sales of those items depend on the price of the product.

Here are some tips to increase your Amazon Associate earnings.

1. The tips for increasing Infolinks earnings can also be applied to increasing Amazon associate earnings.

2. Amazon Associates works best for blog posts about products -- posts that review products, give product details, and the like. The appropriate title tag is also a factor. For example, "Best car stereo for iPod in year 2010" indicates that the visitors clicking that result from a search on Google are most likely "ready to spend" visitors looking for the best car stereo systems. This increases the conversion rate.

3. If you cannot automate placing content text links to Amazon in common blog platforms like WordPress, Joomla, etc, then you need to prioritize your top content (those with very high page views; you can use Google Analytics to spot this content). Once you know which posts rank as your top content, put some related affiliate links on them pointing to Amazon. Depending on your users' motivation in reading your content and checking out the products in Amazon, these can convert well.

According to tips offered by ChisGuthrie here:

4. Content linking (using text links similar to Infolinks placed on your blog post content) is more effective than putting affiliate banners in the sidebars.

5. Using image links to Amazon placed in content is also more effective than using banners in the sidebar.