Shameless Plugs Are Shameless
Basically what I am doing here is pointing you toward products and services that, if you buy, I will get paid a commission on. This is called affiliate marketing. You will normally see this icon –> 
<-- beside most of my affiliate links.
When I first heard of affiliate marketing, I wasn't much of a fan. I'm still not gushing over it. However, as a marketer and a consultant, I felt I had to explore this area. There are a lot of scams out there in internet marketing, and affiliate marketing is totally jam-packed with them. It's also quite hard (at least for me) to make a lot of money doing it, but there are some people who legitimately have been able to make a living. As someone once told me, you have to be really into number crunching to make it work, especially with pay-per-click strategies on places like Google AdWords and Facebook.
The other way that I see people "succeed" with affiliate marketing is to hit up all of their family and friends to convince them to buy stuff that they really don't need. That is a lot like the Multi-Level-Marketing (MLM) approach of AmWay, something that has always creeped me the hell out, to be blunt.
So, if I am talking about a product or service, and you click a link, I want it to be perfectly clear that if you decide to buy that product or service, I will be paid some small amount of dollars (or more likely, cents.) In the case of Amazon links, if I am talking about a product like the Kindle, for example (which I am totally in love with at the moment,) and you click on my link for it, you will go to Amazon.com to view it. If you purchase, Amazon knows it came from my site, and will pay me roughly 15% commission. If you make any other purchases from Amazon while you're there, they will also pay me a commission.
If I ever start to make any real money, I'll post details about it, but for now it really is mostly an experiment.
You may also notice that some links have been shortened. Most affiliate links are quite long, and some have to be encrypted in order to protect the affiliate's account (in this case, mine.) I use a plugin for wordpress called Pretty Links.
It basically turns this long, ugly link for Kindle 3G:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002Y27P3M/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=bosnovwebdes-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002Y27P3M
Into this:
http://malcommc.com/kindle
Which is much easier to work with.
Of course, then I’ll add my tooltip icon and the end result would be inserted when I am writing an article that mentions how the Kindle is the best gift that I received at Christmas last year.
To wrap this up, I am posting this to be as up-front as possible. I also want to say that you are in NO WAY obligated to buy anything from any link that I post. I’m only going to be posting links to things I’m talking about already anyway, and those that know me would tell you that I have never been a hard-sell kind of guy. In fact, I usually fail at salesmanship in general! I feel that selling should really be about finding out what people need and proposing some solutions, not forcing things on them that really won’t benefit them.
If you have any questions about any of this, please leave your comment below.
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