At Square Pixel Photography we use affiliate links in order to generate the revenue required to keep the site running. If you’re interested in what that means, please read on
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate links are a way for a website owner to make money from the content on their site.
By using a special link in the content of a website, when a user clicks on the link and subsequently purchases a product or service from the destination website, the referring website makes a small commission.
Affiliate links don’t cost anything to the person purchasing the product or service, but reward the referring website owner for sending a person to the product or service owner’s site.
Why Use Affiliate Marketing?
Running a website costs money. The more popular the website, the more money it costs to run.
For a website like Square Pixel Photography there are basically three ways to make money.
- By asking people to pay to read the content of the site
- By adding banner advertising to the site
- By participating in affiliate marking partnerships
The first option isn’t currently viable for Square Pixel Photography as the site is small and people would just go elsewhere
Banner advertising is horrible for the user experience (don’t you hate browsing sites where there is more advert than content?). And with the rising overuse of banner ads, a lot of people use ad-blocking software.
By using Affiliate marketing, Square Pixel Photography is able to keep a high quality reading experience for users, while linking photographers to products they are interested in, and the small commissions earned help cover the costs of running the site.
Free content for readers, no ugly banner advertising and the ability for readers to help keep the website going.
The downsides of affiliate marketing
With affiliate partnerships, there is a risk that the website content is written in an overly positive manner in order to encourage readers to purchase things and make more money for the site.
Square Pixel Photography is committed to writing honest opinions about all of the products and services in all articles on this site. An honest review is more important to Square Pixel Photography than the potential income from a dishonest review.
If money making was the primary goal of this site we would have gone down the ugly banner advertising monetisation route as well as using affiliate marketing. We’d rather be known as a trusted source of honest information than a money-hungry website seeking maximum profits.