4. How Affiliate Marketing Actually Serves Your Audience

How affiliate marketing actually serves your audience. Alright, well when the topic of using affiliate marketing to make money online or any type of selling to one's online audience, most people who don't use it very often or have never used it at all, start getting kind of all itchy and uncomfortable.

They feel like affiliate marketing is self-serving. So, affiliate marketing is all about me, the blogger or the influencer, making money off my audience. And I don't blog to make money, I blog to serve my audience. And if I can get some money on the side, that's just an added bonus. But that's not my intent.

There's the impression primarily, I find from female bloggers, that our work online is only about producing helpful content to our tribe and that our readers will be suspicious of our intentions if we're making money or obviously making money off of them.

And for some reason, everyone thinks it's okay, the same person is going to think it's okay, to run ads on their site because that's way more covert or maybe their readers expect it or don't even really notice it. That parts confusing to me.

Well, by the way, I never hear men saying stuff like this. Men are never wringing their hands wondering if they're going to alienate their readers by making money. I've never encountered a man apologizing for sending an email to their list, promoting an affiliate product or doing an affiliate launch.

I've never read in a Facebook group from a man who got a nasty email from a subscriber that they ... Complaining that they received more than one email in a week selling them something. I'm sure that men, male bloggers, male online influencers, that they get these types of emails every once in awhile.

That their response is so different then what a woman's typical response is.

The woman is oftentimes in agony over how she should respond to this reader complaining. And then, maybe she should stop emailing people so much or maybe, change her promotional schedule during the launch.

She's wondering if she should change midstream from what she's been doing and planning to do. That one email ruins her entire day and makes her question everything that she has ever done on her blog. She like just, completely starts to spiral.

Well, do you know what the man does? He deletes the email and moves on with his day, because he knows that it's perfectly reasonable for a person to get paid for their work.

So, I want you, if you struggle in this department, I want you to change the way you think about affiliate marketing and kind of making money on your blog, in general.

So, affiliate marketing is symbiotic. Symbiotic, I don't know how you're supposed to pronounce that, and I learned all about symbiotic friends from Diego, Dora the Explorer's cousin. I don't think I learned anything about this when I went to school for all the years I went to school. But I definitely learned it from Diego. So, symbiotic relationship is when both parties contribute something and then, both parties receive its bounties. It's pretty awesome.

So again, affiliate marketing is kind of, symbiotic or maybe it really is. You contribute amazing content that includes affiliate links. That helps your reader.

So they read the content and they are helped. And when your reader purchases something ... Or purchases that helpful item that you just linked too. You are then helped with a paycheck. So it's a little bit like, you scratch my back and I scratch yours. I give you free, amazing, helpful content that makes your life more awesome and you scratch my back by, if you purchase something, I make a cut of that.

And you as an amazingly talented blogger, demonstrating her expertise in a particular area, are in the unique and powerful position of identifying your audience's pain points and finding products and services that will solve those problems for them. And for most