Joining Affiliate Programs

Up until now, we have been focusing on sponsorships and advertising as ways to generate revenue for your podcast. The rest of this chapter is focused on the other ways podcasters are generating revenue to support their addiction (no Dan, we are not talking about you).

One method used by many podcasters is affiliate links, where you, the podcaster, put up a special link on your site for a product you may have talked about on your show. This link is to a site where the listener can then purchase the product you mentioned, and you receive a cut of the action. The most popular of these is the Amazon Associates program (www.amazon.com; click Join Associates at the bottom of the screen).

With Amazon, you can receive "up to 10%" in referral fees on all "qualifying" purchases. The reality is you will likely receive about 7.5% to 8.5% on purchases, which is still a nice amount for just adding a link.

Joining the Amazon Associates program is free and requires that you simply fill out an online application. Then you are notified in 1 to 3 days on whether you were accepted. Pretty much as long as you have a website and you fill out the form correctly you should be accepted.

You then find the items in Amazon that you mentioned on your show and you want to have links to on your site. You copy over the HTML code for these items and place it in your site. You will need a site that you can edit at the HTML level and/or add in HTML code.

Here are two examples of podcasts that use this service:

• Burning 20 (www.burning20.com), a fitness and weight-loss podcast. The host, Adam Tinkoff, lists on his site the Tanita scale he uses to weigh himself on his show. This has led to quite a few purchases from his listeners.

• The M Show (www.themshow.com) is a podcast in which host John Wall reviews different books and DVDs (see Figure 18.10). This is the perfect use of associate links. If you have a podcast where you are reviewing a product, by offering up the link you are actually providing an added value to your listeners. It keeps them from having to find the product you reviewed. You offer them a simple click and purchase of something you convinced them to buy during your review.

Figure 18.10. The M Show with Amazon Associate links.

There are other affiliate programs beyond Amazon. If you have a poker podcast or talk about poker on your show, why not set up an affiliate link with one of the poker networks. One example is PokerAffiliate.com (www.pokeraffiliate.com), which represents a few different poker rooms.