Earning with affiliate programmes

What affiliate means, briefly

You recommend someone else’s product through a link of your own. If a person clicks it and buys, you earn a commission. No stock, no orders, no support. In exchange you are paid only when someone actually buys — so what decides the outcome is not traffic but whether your readers trust you.

Where to start

• Pick a subject you genuinely use. Readers spot writing about something you have never touched, and they only need to spot it once.
• Have somewhere to publish before you apply. A site, a channel, or a social account with an audience. Most programmes look at it before approving you.
• Join two or three programmes, not twenty. Twenty dashboards are unmanageable, and links everywhere turn your content into a list of ads.
• Write content that answers one specific question. "Which video editor is light enough for an old laptop" sells; "Top 10 best apps" does not.
• Measure before expanding. Keep what earns, drop what does not. The first three months exist to tell you which is which.

What to look at when choosing

• Cookie window. If someone clicks today and buys next week, do you still get credit? 24 hours and 30 days are different worlds.
• One-off or recurring. Subscription software often pays every month while the customer stays. Ten of those beat a hundred consumer orders.
• Payout threshold and method. A 100 USD threshold paid by international transfer means your money sits there for a long time.
• Approval rate. Recorded commission is not approved commission. Cancellations, returns and duplicate customers all come off.
• Is the product worth recommending. Listed last, matters most: people buy because they trust you, and a bad product spends that trust.

Three things that are not optional

• Say that the link is an affiliate link. One line at the top of the article is enough. Hiding it breaks nearly every programme’s policy, and readers who find out are gone.
• Mark paid links with rel="sponsored nofollow". Google requires it; skipping it can earn the whole site a manual action.
• Declare the income. Affiliate commission is taxable personal income in Vietnam. Local payers usually withhold it; money from abroad is yours to declare.

Common mistakes

• Stuffing a link into every sentence. One or two well-placed links beat ten scattered ones.
• Copying the vendor’s own description. Google already has the original.
• Buying ads to push affiliate links before you know your cost per sale. The fastest way to lose money.
• Quitting in month two. Content needs time to rank; three months is the earliest you can read a trend.