Not the get-rich version. The version where you already have an audience and want it to earn properly.
Stuart Miles Posted
There is a lot written about making money from affiliate links and most of it is aimed at someone starting a blog. This isn’t that.
This is for publishers who already have an audience and suspect it should be earning more than it does. Usually they’re right.
The equation, and which bit actually moves
Affiliate revenue is four numbers multiplied together: traffic, the share of readers who click a product link, the share of those who buy, and the commission rate.
Publishers instinctively try to improve the first and the last. Traffic is hard and slow. Commission rates are largely fixed until you’re big enough to negotiate.
The two in the middle are where the movement is, and almost nobody works on them.
Where the money usually is
Links that don’t earn at all. Most sites carry a meaningful share of plain retailer links that were never affiliated — pasted by an editor in a hurry, or written before anyone was paying attention. They send traffic to the retailer and earn nothing. This is the single most common finding, and it is pure recovered revenue rather than new work.
Programmes that quietly ended. Retailers leave networks. Programmes close. The link keeps working for the reader and stops paying you, and nothing alerts you because from the outside nothing is broken.
Old articles nobody revisits. A round-up from two years ago that still ranks is still earning something. Update the products and the prices and it earns properly again. Refreshing beats publishing on almost any measure.
Prices that are wrong. A reader clicking through to find a different price than the one you showed doesn't just fail to convert — they stop trusting the page. Stale pricing costs more than the sale.
What moves the click-through rate
Placement, context, and giving people a reason to click.
A link buried in paragraph nine of a review does almost nothing. A price and a retailer name near the recommendation does a great deal. Readers who are ready to buy want to know what it costs and where to get it, and they want it where they already are.
More than one retailer helps as well. Some readers won’t buy from Amazon, some only buy from Amazon, and some are looking for the cheapest. Showing a single option loses all three.
What moves the conversion rate
Mostly things you don’t control, which is worth accepting rather than fighting. The retailer’s checkout, their stock position, their price against everyone else’s.
What you do control is whether you sent the reader to the right retailer at the right price. Sending someone to a retailer who is thirty pounds more expensive than the next one converts badly, and it should.
The reporting problem underneath all of it
Everything above assumes you can see what’s happening. Most publishers can’t, and it isn’t for want of trying.
Every network reports differently. Different metrics, different attribution windows, different currencies, different definitions of a confirmed sale. Building one number you trust means exporting from each of them and reconciling by hand, which takes days and is stale by the time it’s finished.
I did this at Pocket-lint for years. By the time the spreadsheet was standardised, the month it described had moved on.
It matters because without page-level attribution you can't answer the only question that counts: which articles earn, so which should I write more of. Cross-network reporting exists for exactly that.
What I’d fix first
- Find the links that aren't earning. It's the fastest money on the list and it needs no new content.
- Fix the highest-traffic pages first, not the oldest.
- Get prices live rather than typed, so nothing goes stale again.
- Then, and only then, worry about traffic.
The first one takes about a minute. A free link audit shows you the split across your site — links going through your own accounts, links being monetised by someone else, and links earning nothing at all. No account needed.
If you'd rather start from the beginning, how affiliate links actually work covers the mechanics.
Common questions
How much can a publisher earn from affiliate links?
It depends on traffic, click-through, conversion and commission rate. The biggest gains for established publishers usually come from fixing unaffiliated and broken links rather than from adding traffic.
Why are my affiliate links not earning?
Common causes are links that were never affiliated, retailers leaving a network, closed programmes, or stale prices that lose the reader’s trust before they convert.
What is a good affiliate conversion rate?
It varies enormously by category and retailer. A more useful question is whether you are sending readers to the right retailer at a competitive price.
Should I focus on traffic or on monetisation?
Monetisation first if you already have an audience. Recovering revenue from existing traffic is faster and more certain than growing traffic.