blogs & affiliate programs

what do people think of selling t-shirts on blogs?

[richards1052]

I have a political blog & a company selling political t-shirts has asked if I'd like to participate. I was wondering whether there are others out there doing this & what their experience has been.

I have amazon & adsense ads featured at my site. But I've never sold t-shirts before & it seems well, a little low brow. On the other hand, even though I prob. won't sell much merchandise for the site, the 20% commission sounds pretty good.

Are there any issues or catches to consider in agreeing to become an affiliate of such a site?

[frup]

Really no harm in trying it out. You'll know very quickly whether your readers are interested in buying t-shirts or not. I'd give it a week see what happens, if you aren't making money within a week forget it, it's unlikely that you ever will. That's my rule of thumb with affiliate programs: if it doesn't work within a week, it never will.

[gdguide]

I gotta tell ya. In my limited experience, Blogs are useless for advertisements and selling. I advertised on a VERY well known blog on my topic with a PR7 and 3 million page views a month. My ad, which does well on related non blog, did so poorly I didn't come close to breaking even for the $500 I put in. You would think 1.3 million unique visitors a month would translate into something where I could at least break even.

Blog viewers seem to ignore ads and selling from what I've seen. There is no harm in trying on your own blog, but beware of trying this anywhere else. It seems the blog viewers are a different breed.

Brian

[mmoncur]

Blog viewers aren't just a different breed, they're a million different breeds. There's no single audience for weblogs, so what works on one won't necessarily work on another.

[Shawn Collins]

I gotta tell ya. In my limited experience, Blogs are useless for advertisements and selling.

I think the operative term here is "limited experience."

Blogs can be an excellent place to run the right type of ads.

Just like any medium, you've got to test until you find something that works best.

I've had ads on content sites, PPCs, newsletters, blogs, etc. thathad horrible performance.

Rather than blaming where they were placed, I went back to the drawing board and put together better ads.