affiliate marketing blog  

Across the State Road that I live on are a few cornfields.  Pretty big ones, actually.  This year has been very different in that they’ve been hybridizing for seed.  If you’ve never seen this before once the corn reaches full height special wagons are towed through the field with ros of corn being either detassled, or with their tassles covered with a bag.

This preserves the genetics of the particular strain of corn they’ve planted.  Then, either various rows of corn are left with their tassles (to pollinate all the rest of the corn) or they use blowers and corn pollen of the chosen variety is dusted over all the tassles.

What does this have to do with Affiliate Marketing?  EVERYTHING!  You see, most of us affiliate marketing types have more than one website.  In more than a few niches.  And we’ve created a mess for ourselves if we havn’t been careful.  The mess being that we arn’t harnessing the strength of all of our sites working together.

Let’s say you have three sites…  T-Shirts (CafePress Store), Stickers (Zazzle Store), and a coupon site.  And they’ve proven to do pretty well.  And the principles of cross-pollination can take these three sites and turn them into a powerhouse for you.

Let’s say you take your t-shirt art on CafePress and reuse the designs (that work) for stickers on Zazzle.  You’ve now cross-pollinated those two sites with your product.  Then you take it a step further and create adverts that point between your CafePress and Zazzle sites.  Now you’ve enabled the hybrid to grow.  And how about you add in coupons to your coupon site and wrap it all up in a pretty bow by building out a blog where you feature items from the three sites.  Now your building a powerhouse set of web “genetics”.

Don’t tell me you havn’t thought of it.  You may have even taken a few minor steps in that direction.  Now how about we take this even further.  You see, your CafePress and Zazzle sites are your designs, your products.  Add some Esty into the mix?  Go set up that ShareASale account, AffiliatePLY for video creatives, Webgains, buy.at, etc…  And now your mixing affiliate marketing with your own creative products and with only four sites (CafePress, Zazzle, Coupon, and Blog) your exposing site visitors to your other sites and to affiliate products that you don’t build yourself (but you’ve chosen because it fits with your sites).

No, it’s not easy.  If it were easy everyone would be doing it.  And many that do this do it poorly because they just throw a bunch of stuff out there thinking it won’t be work.  No, this is real work.  You have to choose the affiliate products as carefully as you do when you decide that one of your pieces of artwork will make a good t-shirt or sticker.  But if you are consistant.  Choose affiliate products with care.  Be smart about your cross-pollination.  And keep up with the extra work it will take.

Image by kmakice via Flickr

We think a big reward will be in the offing for you.