Trail and Hitch is more than a personal adventure blog, it’s also an attempt to make some money from our experiences and writing. Part of our new lifestyle is to find a means to make a living from any place on the globe so that we can live where the winds of adventure blow us.

There are plenty of ways for a blog to make money though by and large all of it is some kind of marketing. We could do fairly traditional banner ads and the like which pay per click but we need a big audience to make them pay and I’m just not a fan of sites plastered with the darn things. We could advertise our own products for sale, and I will, but as of yet I don’t have any to sell you. We could collect email addresses and send spam to them but I object to that on principle. What remains and makes the most sense for us is something called Affiliate Advertising.

Basically we become salesmen for various products you can order on line. If you use a on our site to purchase a product we can make a little money from the sale. A lot of companies have programs like this, most notably Amazon as they sell such a wide range of products. Affiliate links can take various forms. You will sometimes see them looking like more traditional ads in banners or sidebars, or they can simply be text links embedded in a blog post like the one you will find at the end of this article. Sometimes they will take you to a specific product, sometimes to a general marketplace. Whatever it is you buy, if you got linked by an affiliate link the person who put the link up is getting a small cut of the sale. Amazon for instance tends to pay about 4%-5%.

Affiliate advertising has the advantage of working well with a smaller audience but can still grow as your audience does. I also feel it is an honest sort of advertising. You effectively become a salesperson for a product and if you make a sale you get paid. Unlike many sales jobs with affiliate programs you get to pick what it is you want to sell so you are never compromising your values for a paycheck. If you think it’s a good product you can promote it and if you find fault you can stop and find something else.

Trail and I are still very new to all this. We have one post that contains affiliate links for Amazon and there will be more. Sometimes it will just be a product we talk about in a broader post, other times it will be part of a product review for something we are using while on the road or we have recently enjoyed. Whatever the case we honestly think that if you are in the market for such a thing it’s a product we feel is worth the money. If you think you would like to buy it, then by all means please use our link to do so. You will pay the same price and we will make a little of what Amazon would otherwise be getting.

Finally you can use affiliate links as a way to essentially donate to our endeavor. If you use one of our general amazon affiliate links anything you buy will earn us some commission. So any time you have some shopping to do, if you do it through us you are helping us out. Holiday season is coming up so it’s a great time for us to make some money using affiliate links for things you were already going to buy. Allow me to demonstrate…

Go here to shop on Amazon and support the adventures of Trail and Hitch:  Amazon Home Page