Affiliates Update

As you may or may or may not know, Coupons, Deals and More is a “for profit” blog. That means I (theoretically) make money on the blog to cover expenses, and a salary for the time I spend posting. Some of the cash is made through passive income – I make money for each unique reader that comes to the blog, you do not have to do a thing except stop by daily! Unfortunately, I am losing one of those passive income folks tomorrow – Juice Box Jungle.

I also make money through click-throughs … see the google ads in a post? If you click it once, I get a few pennies for it. And those pennies add up! As long as no one or two folks click a lot (I’d get banned if they did – google wants a click from many people not a lot of clicks from one person or ip), I make a few dollars a day from those. I used to make a decent amount of money though google, but then I decided to block a few of their spammier advertiser as well as political ads. Because of these blocks, that income went down … a lot.

I also have lijit which is the search function on the site. When you do a search on the blog, a box pops up with the returns. If you click something on the top of the search return (not to the blog, outside the blog), I make a few pennies… same with the big ad they have on the bottom of the right of the page.

Because my passive income has been severally reduced, I have spent some time updating my purchase-through affiliates. Because I added so many all the affiliate buttons would have overwhelmed the front page, so I decided to create a dedicated affiliate page. This lists nearly all of my affiliates that pay me a commission when someone makes a purchase.

The positive to this page is the affiliates are no longer “in your face” on the front page, and they are all listed together.

The negative to this page, is they are no longer “in your face” so folks will not be aware of them.

With that in mind, I am starting a new daily feature:

This will highlight whatever I have found that day that might be worthwhile to purchase. You are under no obligation to purchase anything – EVER!

This is just a compromise I made with myself on how to possibly make a few dollars from affiliates while getting most of the affiliates off the front page. And hopefully highlighting a good deal too!

I will continue to leave the coupon printing affiliates on the front page as well as highlighting a decent coupon code or deal from an affiliate.

Remember if the affiliate deal does not interest you, skip it! But they will be appearing daily starting tomorrow.

And for those interested in how much I make via the blog: I work at least 60 hours a week on the blog. I have had exactly one day off since Christmas. This is just what you do as a deal blogger. I make minimum wage for 40 hours of that work week. And, I am one of the lucky ones! No one ever becomes a blogger to make money – or if they do they are disabused of that notion quickly. If you are very, very, VERY lucky, like I am, you can do what you love and draw some type of salary while doing so.

Would I do this for free is I was not making minimum wage? Of course! Minimum wage where I pay both sides of social security and am taxed at hubby’s tax rate is not a real reason to blog, it is just a perk. I blog because helping people to save money is what I love to do! Details on my About Me page.

Would I do this if I had to pay the server bill, blog upgrades, contests, RAOK postage etc out of my own pocket instead of with blog profits? Of course! Hubby would have a conniption but we’d work around that.

My point is that earning through the blog is very nice, and some of the earnings I must do because there are costs associated with running a blog. The salary is my perk and I thank all of you who come here to read daily for making that happen! To be perfectly clear though, none of this post is meant to be a justification for making money from the blog as no justification is needed; we all like to get paid for our work. It is, however, part of my opinion that Coupons, Deals and More should be transparent and upfront about having affiliates and making money from them.

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