I don’t know if there is a home for burnt-out bloggers, but if there is, could someone book me in, please. I recently had the ‘bright’ idea to try affiliate linking, which means if you buy a product via one of my affiliate links I get a small percentage of the price, normally about 6%. I’ve never, ever done this before, but more and more blogs do it so I wanted to see what it is like in practice to go through the procedure. I think that performing heart surgery would be easier. It’s the most complicated, annoying, frustrating and irritating thing I’ve ever come across and I’ve spent two days being the meanest, most irritable bitch in the world because of it.
I’m not that techie, so anything over and above usual blogging is genuinely difficult for me (I even needed a glass of wine to get me through the new Blogger layout – where the f*** is everything?). The thing is, you don’t need to be very techie to actually start a blog, but my goodness, if you want to do anything over and above regular blogging, you really do. I am never, in my wildest dreams, going to be able to read html any more than I’ll ever be able to speak Japanese.
The Affiliate Link thing – I can’t understand why it isn’t possible for the merchant site to just record the traffic you send to a particular product and record any sales as a result of it just using a normal link. Instead, you need to use a link generated by the affiliate link site (which so far it seems don’t work as often as they should), shrink it and add it in that way which just adds to it. Plus you need to remember who is an affiliate and who isn’t in order to generate a link in the first place. That’s not how I blog.. I just blog and go. It seems the onus is firmly on the blogger and not the affiliate when we’re the ones generating traffic to their site. Make it easier please!
And then with the news that Google can deem you have too many affiliates and delist you, which, when you’ve put four years into your blog day and night, is just too scary to contemplate, I am starting to wish I had never even heard of affiliate links.
So, given that making money from affliate linking doesn’t seem to add up to much monetarily (6% of £1.99 for example), and other than ensuring that via ads and countdowns and the occasional sponsored post I can actually afford to blog as much as I do, I am not money-driven particularly. I am going to work with literally only a handful of affliates experimentally. I’ll let you know who they are when I’ve worked it out myself. That’s if I ever do work it out and not just cancel the whole thing, which is what I feel like doing.
PS Sometime Later: I have just cancelled the whole thing. I’m going to look to work in a bespoke way with some retail sites ON MY OWN. Will keep you posted
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