Why You Should Monetize Your Blog 

If you are running your own business, you should have your own blog. If you have your own blog, you should be optimizing it by adding a few links. If you are adding a few links you might as well make a little change. Here are three places to start when considering optimizing your blog with affiliate links. 

ShareASale 

VigiLinks 

Rakuten 

I wish I would have used those affiliate marketing groups first. Instead I looked into individual affiliate programs, which are great too. But once we were approved to work with those groups, our options to make affiliate income on our everyday recommendations really opened up. While we definitely want to be on the receiving end of affiliate income, we don’t want to feel pressured to sell products on the blog. The number one goal is for legal professionals to benefit from reading the blog. I guess you could say, the best interests of the legal professional are the Paralegal Power Blog’s main concern. 

This is why Viglinks works so well for us. We just signed up for their program and through the magic of our website we can just type away and if one of the links we send people to has an affiliate program, Viglinks will take care of it for us. You do not need your own website to work with them either. You can link to social media posts and emails as well. Is there a product you are always raving about? If so, it is likely that product works with Viglinks, ShareASale and/or Rakuten. You could receive affiliate income just by writing about it in your blog or on your social media accounts. 

Another reason why Viglinks is nice to work with is because they provide a VigLinks button for all affiliates, which keeps us compliant with the Federal Trade Commission. You will notice the Viglinks button at the top of every blog, it looks like this:

Anytime we receive any type of affiliate income, we have a “material connection. The Federal Trade Commission requires that we disclose to readers and visitors of our site when we endorse a product or service and have a “material connection” to the seller. You can find all the deets on this law at FTC’s 16 CFR § 255.5 or simply by clicking this little icon that is always located at the top of our blog. 

Making affiliate income is not the main purpose of this blog and rather a byproduct of our main objective –  increase a legal professional’s success, excellence and efficiency. Viglinks helps us monetize our blog while focusing on providing educational blogs that meet our objectives. And if they happen to be somewhat entertaining, well that’s another plus. 

When deciding to work with affiliates make sure you read all correspondence. I know all you powerful paralegals do this second nature. However, just a reminder, because the information can be lengthy and boring, but make sure you read and understand the terms. You will come to find that most of the terms are pretty easy to follow.

If you do decide to add affiliate links to your website, I suggest you check out ThirstyAffiliates as well. I started a Wunderlist trying to organize all of our affiliate links and then I found ThirstyAffiliates and it is all I needed to keep one central list of all of our affiliates. It is a free plugin I installed on our website. I just go into the plugin and list all of the affiliates I need in one place, which is what my Wunderlist did for me. What Wunderlist didn’t do was automatically update the link everywhere on my website when I updated it in the list. ThirstyAffiliates does that. So it keeps all the links in order and updated. But more than that, it helps protect your affiliate income from theft and shortens long, ugly affiliate links. 

We absolutely appreciate all of the subscribers and readers that support the blog by clicking on the links in our blog posts and hope you found this information helpful.