Affiliate Marketing and A Lot of Linky-type Love

Is it a good day or a bad day? Damn, I'm confused...

First thing this morning, I woke up with a pain in my arm. Not just any old pain, but a wincing , tear inducing, what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-me!?!?!?! pain in my forearm. Nothing I did made it better or very much worse aside from rubbing it ~ Don'tTouchIt! DONOTTOUCHIT! ~ which made it really hurt... I want hospital-grade-instantaneous pain relief! Why does Advil take so long to kick in?

Once I could move my fingers without becoming bleary-eyed, I got online, and found some great comments on my last post, one of which is from my bud over at The Retirement Chronicles that I want to answer ~ and I picked up an award from The Retired One. It goes along with another one that I got from Pehpot at Make or Break yesterday, so I'm all giddified cause I'm a blog-approval-craving-pleaselikeme-whore that way.

Then I get another comment from Can Can at Mom Most Travelled telling me that there is subsidized childcare at BlogHer '09 so maybe I can sign up for the fully-funded-free-ride contest over at Momma Findings... which was totally cool of her to let me know!

Then I go to refill my coffee and come out to a goldfish landmine field which was laid with great care, strength and dexterity by my turbo-terror-tot, all, and I mean ALL over the living room floor. On the upside, he had actually drank his milk, instead of spitting it all over the furniture and the floor, and himself as well. I actually remember, not so long ago, when I could walk into my house and it did not reek of old milk. Good times...

So, now you see my confusion... bad, good, good, bad... I don't know what kind of day I'm having! So I've decided to concentrate on the good (with a healthy dose of Advil) as any one of my new affiliate Hay House authors would tell me to do.

Which brings me back to affiliate advertising and answering The Retired One's comment question (completely paraphrased by me): What is affiliate advertising? But before I do, I have to let y'all know, that The Retired One reached out to me in December, when she was super-brand-new to blogging after she found me on LinkReferral which is a traffic exchange site. I fell in love with her wit and humor and writing straight off the bat, she leaves me fantastic comments all the time that crack me up, and if you're looking for a new blog to make you laugh, you really-seriously-doitorIwillhuntyoudown need to go over to The Retirement Chronicles and have a read. She's one of the cool people. You'll like her.

OK, now that my shameless plug of The Retirement Chronicles is over (for now, today) I'll explain affiliate marketing for anyone who doesn't know what it is yet.

While some blogs make money by "pitching" their site to large companies in an effort to get them to advertise on their site for a fee, I, who am stupid as a stick about pitching companies, chose to go with affiliate marketing. This is where you sign up with one main company, such as Link Share, who then hosts many other big-name companies. You choose which companies you'd like to run ads for, and then apply to said company through your account at Link Share. If you are approved, they have several types of ads that a site owner can run, such as text links or banners, etc. If someone clicks through one of your ads and buys something (this part depends on the company's terms, sometimes you just need to refer someone), you, as Jane Doe site owner makes a commission based (again) on the agreed to terms of your contract.

The trick to this kind of making-money-with-your-blog, is finding ads to run that will appeal to your audience and be utilized, thereby making sales, which is what makes you money. If no one buys anything, or signs up for anything, you get nothing. However, it is free for you, the site owner, to run the ads, so you're not paying out to make nothing. That is the upside. And, there are (supposedly) people out there who are making a fair monthly income running affiliate marketing. I, so far, am not one of those people.

Then again, I started doing it in hopes of maybe supplementing hubby's income and buying my own cheesecake. At the very least (cause when you first start, and you sign up for a bunch of newsletters on/about/from affiliate marketers, it sounds OMG- next-year-I-am-buying-a-mansion-and-a-pony lucrative), with my common-sense I hoped to (realistically) pay my dial-up Internet access fee. But, hey, like I said, it's free to join these programs, so no harm, no foul, just kinda disheartening.

So that, dear readers, is how affiliate marketing works, and how it's worked out for me. I want to thank all of you for your comments... If you have left a comment this month, you may want to check back and see my response. I've been adding my response comments, and will continue to do so ~ usually on the day that the new post goes up, so I can catch all of you at once. In line with expanding the whole comment concept, please feel free to ask any questions that you have, I'll do my best to answer them, or point you in the direction of someone who can. Who knows, you might wind up asking something that to answer, will take me most of a post, and you'll wind up with a buncha linky-love... So comment, and ask away!

I'll post the awards Monday, so I can start the new week and the new month on a YayMe note... as well as showing some more linky-type love, cause I love, Love, LOVE paying it forward, and isn't February (according to Hallmark) the month of love?

Good luck to whomever You are rooting for in the Super Bowl, and happy weekend everyone!