Check in time. How are things going? What questions do you have and what have you had trouble with? By now you should have joined a couple of affiliate links and are ready to start adding those links to your website.

We don’t want to just start throwing ads and links all over but we do need to get them in there. A lot of the decision as to where to put your affiliate links will depend on the layout of your blog. For example, on my blog I have some great space down the side that I will put three 125×125 square banners.  Each of these banners leads to an affiliate product that goes very well with my topic. But how do you get those to show up on your blog? Once again, we are using WordPress as the example and the easiest thing to do is to go back into the “Appearance” tab and click on Editor. Once in the Editor, this time you will look for the “sidebar” option in the list of files. If you are placing your ads in another location you will need to locate that file, but for this example I used the sidebar.  You may have to play with it a little but grab the code that the affiliate program gave you and copy and paste it into the sidebar file. Make sure you put it in a place that will make it appear where you want it to. You can even choose to use some of the “Styles” defined in the page already by taking some of the code from another section in the sidebar. Click the “Update” button to save your changes and check it on your live website. If something looks wrong, go modify the placement and try again.

If you are using a longer banner, you may want to include that in your header file and save the side space for a Google Adsense snippet (which we will cover tomorrow).

If you have a large selection of actual products and if you have tried them yourself you might also try posting a review of the affiliate product. This works well because your post is about the product specifically and should be filled with keywords that may help people find that product making it more likely to be found in search engines. Reviews also let you get in as many affiliate products as you can keep up with and of course keeps a running archive so it’s always available.

So go ahead and get some ads up on your website and start making money!