A friend of mine recently asked me for advice on trhe following issue. She runs a blog where she writes about affiliate products in a certain niche trying to make money by referring people to those products. Not every post she writes is a product review, she also has articles on topic of the niche she’s in. She has been approached by someone who offered her to place their links on a few pages of her blog – including those general interest article pages. The links are on topic, the money offered for those links seemed about right to her, considering that the blog is pretty new and doesn’t yet get a ton of traffic. The way this was supposed to be done was non-revealing and wouldn’t strike Google as paid links. Still she was in doubt.
Guess what I advised her? NOT to go for it. Why? This was a seemingly easy way of making extra cash… Yet the main point of an affiliate blog is to have your readers as concentrated as possible on your offers, and placing those links would have added an extra distraction to them. Remember the main rule of landing pages: the less distractions there are and the more straightforward the page is, the better. With an affiliate blog, every page can be regarded as a landing page. I have seen people sometimes come to my affiliate blogs through some really stupid posts and still convert into product buyers. You never know what might work in the long run. Hence, we’re looking at a one-time short term earning versus long term value. Nevermind that you might not have enough traffic to your affiliate blog yet to see the conversions – if you don’t give up and keep working on it there might come a day when you will regret placing those paid links on a page that all of sudden started getting major traffic.
The final choice is yours of course but my opinion is: it’s NOT worth it.