Newcastle Photographer and Content Creator, Mandy Charlton, Always on a quest for adventure, often seen on buses, trains and planes. On a quest to be happier and healthier. Lives in Newcastle with her 3 cats, Iris, Maggie and Arthur. Loves good vibes, musicals and cakes. Full time professional wedding photographer in the north east of england alongside content creator on Tiktok, Instagram and Facebook

Wednesday, July 06, 2016

A Business Mums Guide to Affiliate Marketing



I want to help you with your digital content marketing, I want to help you be the most awesome business mum (or dad) that you can be so that every day you wake up with a smile, ready for the adventures that your days hold.

When I started my business as a photographer it took me approximately 7 years to get to the peak in my business where I just couldn't take on any more clients, I shot 300 sessions in that year and the next January I had a massive melt down because I'd exhausted myself, I was also aware that I'm not going to be able to go and shoot weddings when I'm 90 but I'll probably be someone who'll never stop working (maybe because of a lack of pension plan).  The truth is I get bored easily so I don't for see a time when I'd want to retire and I've found that blogging is the key to that.  I blogged for 8 years and although I used it for my own business I really didn't see just what my blog would actually be capable of and that's the thing, maybe you are already writing great content or have websites you could monetise.

Now I'm not talking about wall to wall link pages with click throughs and pop ups and dare I say it, pop unders, I hate those!  But no one ever minded about a few well placed links to lovely things.

I'm very much experimental about what works for me and it may not work for you but if you look at your stats you'll find your first clues as to who's reading your blog and then you can simply customise your links to that or in my case I just choose the things I love and then if it's not working I change it. I can confirm that my readers love cooking, something I didn't know six months ago and I'm going to use this to hopefully share some tasty recipes from time to time.

But where do you start?  There are so many affiliate schemes out there and there's no right or wrong answer but at the moment my favourites I'm using Affiliate Window, Skim Links and Affilinet and they all seem to be working, they'd give you access to thousands of retailers so it's a pretty good place to find your feet.

So when you sign up they'll ask to you put some code on your site to verify you own it and then they'll review what you're already doing to make sure your suitable and then you can apply for programmes that you like, Skim Links might be the easiest because you only have to sign up once where as the others you have to apply to the individual retailers.  There's a lot of help and support on offer from the people running the programmes and I've even had a chat with a lovely man who runs one scheme who has beagles!

Once you've been approved for the various schemes and programmes you can start adding banners but although they can be effective the best method is probably that of deep linking, i.e you can give links to individual products comes in, so write your best content, recommend your favourite products and hopefully you'll be able to facilitate the feeding of your children and the running of your business!
Mandy and Holly living the digital nomad lifestyle

Here's a final thought though, everything I write or link to is something I believe in, I have refused schemes and links and products because they're just not my thing, I believe that you should always be true to yourself and if you are a content writer/blogger then you should always write the best content you can, whilst I might monetise my blog now I still write much the same content I always did because I want to help others, I want to record my own family history and finally because I love to write and I love to share photographs.


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