Emails Or Blogs? Which Is Best For Affiliate Marketing? (Explained)

email marketing or blogging which one is best for affiliate marketing

Email marketing or blogging which one is best for affiliate marketing?

When it comes to affiliate marketing emails and blogs play an important role but in terms of promoting affiliate offers, email is probably the best option, it converts really well. Once you’ve built an audience, you can easily connect with them in a personalized way and increase sales in no time.

However, blogs are good for getting targeted traffic to your offer but not for generating real affiliate sales in the long term. You should always send your blog traffic to your email list.

Taking this approach, you’ll get better results in the long run.

Email Marketing Or Blogging Which One Is Best For Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing works better with blogs and with emails. As an affiliate marketer, why not start both. Both strategies can literally drive sales to your affiliate offer when done right.

However, if your goal is to build a long-term sustainable affiliate marketing business, then I’d highly recommend email marketing.

Email marketing gives you the ability to reach and connect with your ideal customers more easily and increase sales at an affordable cost.

A blog is only beneficial for driving search traffic to your affiliate link but not for generating affiliate sales in the long term.

Though you might somehow get a few affiliate sales with a blog but it does take a lot of time and effort.

And it’s not a guarantee that you’ll earn money.

That said…

Most successful affiliate marketers I know make most of their money through emails.

So, if you also want to be part of those successful affiliates who are making a killing from affiliate marketing.

Why not also do email marketing.

So, What Is Email Affiliate Marketing?

how to do affiliate marketing without a website using email marketing

Email affiliate marketing is simply a marketing strategy or process where an affiliate marketer promotes an affiliate offer by sending an email campaign or sending direct email messages to targeted customers or people on their email addresses.

In other words…

Email marketing is when you write an email to promote affiliate marketing products”. 

This method is quite helpful and a very effective way of promoting affiliate offers.

Email can help you enhance your online business, build trust and relationships with existing customers, and increase your affiliate sales.

Types Of Email Marketing:

  • Standard Email
  • Transactional Email
  • Newsletter Email
  • Standalone Email
  • Cold Emails
  • Mass Email

How To Start Email Marketing:

  1. Research and sign up with an email service provider
  2. Create a landing page
  3. Start collecting emails by giving out free items to people
  4. Plan and write a helpful, educational email
  5. Schedule your email
  6. Send an email and track your result

Best Email MarketingTools For Affiliate Marketing:

  • GetResponse
  • ConvertKit
  • Aweber
  • SendinBlue
  • Drip
  • MailChimp, etc

The above-mentioned are all amazing tools for email marketing, but I recommend GetResponse, it is an amazing tool.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

what is affiliate marketing and how does affiliate marketing work

Affiliate marketing allows affiliate marketers to place their affiliate links in their blog posts.

And it enables them to make money when their reader clicks on the link and purchases the product.

How To Start Affiliate Marketing With A Blog:

  1. Decide On A Niche
  2. Research And Join An Affiliate Program
  3. Create Your Blog
  4. Start Writing Content Related To Your Niche And Affiliate Program
  5. Obtain The Affiliate Link Of Your Product
  6. Share That Link on Your Blog
  7. Collect A Commission Anytime Your Reader Purchase Through Your Link

PS: To learn more about affiliate marketing, I have another post where I go more into detail on what affiliate marketing is and how it works.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work Through Email Marketing? 

how affiliate marketing work through email marketing
How affiliate marketing works through email marketing

Email is an amazing way to make money from affiliate marketing. 

How affiliate marketing works through email is quite simple. 

You first create content either on a blog or social media.

Then, you place or embedded subscription form within the content.

Emails are typically acquired by offering free items like ebooks, and training courses in exchange for people’s email addresses.

Now, as they opt-in for the free item, their email is then stored on your list. 

An email containing affiliate offers is sent out to the list.

And when sales are generated, you get paid a commission.

How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing With Email Marketing

  • Step #1: Choose A Market Niche – The first step required to make money with an affiliate program with email marketing is to decide what market, niche, or topic you want to target.
  • Step #2: Pick The Right Affiliate Program – This is an important point that needs to be taken into account. There are a handful of scam programs out there, if you really want to make money online you need to go after the right product. Don’t just pick any product just for the sake of making money, pick wisely. Another point that needs to be taken into account is that you want to promote products that offer a recurring commission. That way, with each referral you get, you’ll make money month after month on that customer.
  • Step #3: Create Your Blog – You need a platform to build your email list before sending out an email. A blog is an amazing platform to get targeted leads. Today, creating a blog or website is relatively easy and simple.
  • Step #4: Get A Professional Email Tool – To capture people’s email addresses, you need an email service provider. There is quite a handful of them out there. But some of them may restrict you from promoting affiliate links through their service. So, if you want to pick the right one, I recommend GetResponse.
  • Step #5: Start Building Your Email List – You need to build an email list of targeted audiences before sending out emails. You can collect or capture the email addresses of visitors on your blog by offering them freebies such as ebooks, training courses, etc. Important: Make sure you provide useful content on your blog, this will entice your visitors to want to sign into your mailing list.
  • Step #6: Build Trust With Your List –  Do not start selling to your subscribers as soon as they opt into your mailing list. Doing so, they might unsubscribe. You want to gradually build trust and relationships with your subscriber by consistently adding useful value to their lives while they’re on your list. You have to give value first so your list can get to know you better before asking for a sale. Taking this approach, you can easily turn them into potential buyers who will buy from you over and over again.
  • Step #7: Sell To Your List – We are here to make money right? When you have done things correctly, this step becomes much easier. As you’re providing free value to our list, you want to also recommend your product to them as well. For every three useful email content you send out, the fourth one should be a recommendation of your product.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Through Blogging?

How affiliate marketing work step by step

The concept of how affiliate marketing works with a blog is simple:

You find a product you like or have used before, you write a blog article about it then with the article, you place a link to your affiliate product.

Now, when visitors or readers click on the link and purchase the product, you earn money which is termed as commission.

That said…

Let’s take a look at how to make money with affiliate marketing using a blog.

How To Do Affiliate Marketing With A Blog

affiliate marketing with a blog
  • Step #1. Decide On  A Niche – The first step of making money with affiliate marketing using a blog is to decide on a niche. You don’t want to randomly promote affiliate products. You want to pick a specific niche, area, or topic you’re interested in and go all in.
  • Step #2: Pick An Affiliate Offer – Once that’s done, the next step is to research and join an affiliate product you believe in or have used before.
  • Step #3. Create Your Blog: When you have gotten the above-mentioned down, the next thing is to build your blog. This is the platform that you’re going to use to promote your affiliate product. If you haven’t started your blog yet, you can check this tutorial on how to start a blog.
  • Step #4. Do Keyword Research: You need to start writing a blog but you don’t want to write about anything. So, you need to do keyword research to figure out what questions, phrases, or terms people are searching for that are related to your niche and product. This will help you get targeted traffic to your affiliate offer which will eventually result in sales.
  • Step #5. Start Producing Great Content: Once, you have your keyword down. The next step is to start writing an article that’s focused and related to your keyword. Sprinkle the key phrase in the article, and add other variations of the keyword in the article so Google can get a clear picture of what your article is all about.
  • Step #6. Include Your Affiliate Link In The Article: This is where the money process begins. You want to add your affiliate link in the part of your article where it makes sense. Don’t spam your link in the article, rather, let it come naturally.
  • Step #7. Publish Your Article: Once, you’ve checked and see everything is on point, just click publish that’s all. And when people search that keyword and your article appears in the search results and when they buy anything you recommend in the article you get paid. 

How Much Can You Earn With Affiliate Marketing With Email Or A Blog

If you’re asking how much one can earn with affiliate marketing using a blog or email, well, it depends on many factors.

It depends on many factors such as:

  • The niche and the keyword you decide to go after
  • How many eyeballs you’re getting on your affiliate link
  • Your conversion rate
  • Your approach/marketing strategy
  • Your effort
  • Your knowledge and experience level about your niche
  • Your following base, etc

It also depends on how successful your blog is and how many target subscribers you have on your list and how engaging they are.

So, it’s hard to give a straight answer to this.

However, the main factor is traffic and conversion if you get a good number of traffic to your affiliate link and a good conversion rate.

Well, you can definitely make a significant income from affiliate marketing.

That said…

In my personal opinion, I think if you get somewhere around 100,00 visitors and you average around 1-2 click-through rates, and you promote a high ticket affiliate program.

Well, you can make anything from $10,00 or more.

PS. I wrote another article where I break down how much money affiliate marketers actually make.

What Are The Benefits Of Email Marketing For Affiliate Marketing

Benefit of email marketing for affiliate marketing
The benefit of email marketing for affiliate marketing

There are tons of benefits you can derive from email marketing

Here Is Why You Should Use Email Marketing In Affiliate Marketing:

  • With a strong email marketing strategy, you can reach and connect with your target audience in more personal ways and increase sales.
  •  You can use auto-responder to set up a series of useful emails with your affiliate link in it which will be sent out to your list automatically without you having to do anything.
  • You can directly connect to your subscribers with your product.
  • With email marketing, you can reach tens and thousands of people with just a click of a button.
  • It allows you to promote the same product to the same customer over and over again until they’re ready to buy it.
  • You can promote your blog content to your email subscribers and increase your blog traffic especially if you have a larger email list
  • It is an effective way of getting long-term customers to your business who will buy from you over and over.
  • It’s a very cheap marketing strategy and offers a high conversion rate.
  • With email marketing, you own the traffic and you can control it.

What Are The Benefits Of Having A Blog For Affiliate Marketing?

A blog is an amazing way to get your voice and experience out there to the public.

Below are some of the benefits of having a blog:

  • Blog helps you drive targeted, qualified, and relevant traffic to your website which can be turned into email subscribers and sales.
  • It helps you educate and inform your audience about your affiliate product.
  • You can monetize your blog in multiple ways and increase your revenue.
  • Blog helps you increase your writing skills.
  • It helps you build an online presence and authority in your niche. Your audience starts to see you as an expert.
  • It helps get your name out there and increase brand awareness by creating quality content that helps your ideal audience.
  • You get to meet other people and build and maintain long-term relationships with them.
  • It helps you grow, and scale your business.
  • You own it and you can do anything with it without any third-party restrictions.

What Are The Differences Between Email Marketing And Blogging?

In this section, we are going to be looking at the difference between these two powerful marketing methods: Emails and blogs.

No: Email Marketing Blogging
1 You can send emails about new offers to your subscribers anytime and they’ll get notified immediately.
With blogging, most of the time your readers might not even notice when you release a new post with affiliate offers.
2 With email, when you build trust and relationship with your subscribers they’ll easily click on your affiliate offer.
With Blogs, people can choose not to click on your affiliate offer even if you build trust with them.
3 With email, you don’t get organic traffic unless you constantly drive new people to your email list.
A blog allows you to get repeated organic traffic to your affiliate offer once you’ve put in the work.
4 Email cannot be seen by anyone through search unless you share it with them.
Blogs stay on the internet and can be seen by anyone through search.
5 Email is a marketing channel that is used to inform or promote a product to a prospect.
A blog is a platform that is used to write or share views on a given subject.
6 It allows you to track, target, and send emails to a specific group of people.
With a blog, you cannot track and follow up with your readers.
7 With email marketing, you own and control your traffic. In blogging, you don’t own and control your traffic, if people leave they might not come back again to your site.
The difference between email marketing and blogging

What Are The Similarities Between Email Marketing And Blogging?

As an affiliate marketer, you might already know that emails and blogs are the most frequent methods used in terms of promoting affiliate offers.

So what are the similarities between these strategies?

  • Both are methods of promoting Products or Services
  • Both require strategies and skills to promote any product Effectively
  • You can make a decent income promoting products through these methods
  • Both strategies are based on building trust with people
  • Both strategies can allow you to grow or scale your business and income

Having said that, the above-mentioned are the similarities between email and a blog.

What Are The Pros And Cons Between Email Marketing And Blogging?

Pros ad cons of email marketing and blogging in affiliate marketing
Pros and cons of email and a blog for affiliate marketing

Every marketing strategy has pros and cons, no marketing strategy is proven to be 100%.

Let’s start with email marketing.

Email Marketing Pros And Cons

Pros:

  • Remarket. You can promote the same product to the same customer over and over again until they decide to buy it.
  • It allows you to do repeated sales. You can promote different products or services to the same customer over and over again and increase your revenue.
  • Email marketing can help you increase the click-through rate of your affiliate link and sales
  • It helps you target the right audience with a particular affiliate offer
  • If you target the right audience and build trust with them, earning through affiliate marketing with email marketing isn’t that difficult

Cons:

  • If You don’t build trust with your subscribers, they might not pay attention to you
  • Without proper experience and training, you might not see a high open-rate
  • If you don’t build targeted subscriber-based, you might not see a huge increase in sales

Blogging Pros And Cons

Pros: 

  • It helps you share your knowledge and experience on a given topic with the general public
  • Over a long period of time, it can allow you to make passive income online
  • It could be used to replace your day job, you can earn more income from a blog than your day job
  • It offers unlimited income potential, you can make money with a blog in many different ways

Con: 

  • Getting targeted traffic to your affiliate link with a blog takes a fair amount of time and effort
  • It requires consistent effort, time, and patience to see a result
  • It takes a ton of time to write blog articles
  • You need to get traffic before you make money

Can I Combine Email Marketing And A Blog To Promote Affiliate Product

The short answer to that is – yes, you can. Affiliate marketing can work very well with email and as well as a blog.

Some affiliate marketers like to promote their products with a blog while some prefer email marketing.

That said, whichever method you pick, it has to be done right, especially with a blog.

You can’t assume that placing random affiliate links or banners on your blog is going to automatically make you a ton of money.

Things have to be done right and that’s why email marketing has to come into action.

Why? Well, The thing is, people are interested in a specific product but are not ready to buy it on that spot.

After reading your review or whatever about the product. They’ll leave and never come back to your site again.

But as they visit your blog and you’re able to capture their email addresses.

Guess what? You can remarket that same product to them over and over again until they’re ready to buy it.

This is extremely important if you really want to make money off affiliate marketing.

Having a way to reach back to that person can be of great advantage to you and your business.

That being said…

Yes, you can do affiliate marketing with a blog and email. But you should focus on your audience’s needs first by providing useful value that helps solve their pain points or problems.

Taking this approach you’ll get better results in the long run.

Why Combine Both Marketing Strategies

Why combine email marketing and blogs to promote affiliate products?

Well, this is because not everyone on your list is gonna open your email and eventually click on your affiliate links, and not every visitor to your blog will click on your affiliate link.

So, combining both strategies can certainly increase your results.

As an online marketer, the goal is to get as much as eyeballs on your offers and email marketing and blogging have the potential to do that for you.

Also…

Blog helps you to optimize your email marketing process, It helps you generate leads that you can follow up with through email marketing.

Related Questions!

Email Marketing Or Blogging Which One Is Best For Affiliate Marketing?

Generally, email marketing and blogging are amazing marketing strategies but when it comes to scaling your affiliate business, email marketing is an excellent way. Email marketing provides you with direct access to your target audience and converts them into potential buyers and increases your revenue.

Does Affiliate Marketing Work Better On Emails And  Blogs?

Yes, affiliate marketing works better on emails and as well on blogs.  But I’d recommend you use a blog to get people to opt into your landing page and then use email to promote your affiliate links.

So, the strategy here is to offer your readers free items on your blog in exchange for their address and as they opt-in their email address, you can follow up with them with a series of email content.

NOTE: In your email, you should include your affiliate links.

How Can I Improve My Email Marketing With Blogging?

There are a ton of ways in which you can improve your email marketing strategy with a blog. The number way is to offer your readers something of value for free in exchange for their email addresses.

This free value could be a downloadable PDF, training course, etc.

Now, as you have that down, provide valuable content on your blog.

Create a signup form (capture page, pop-ups, and sidebar form) and link your free gift to it.

Place the signup form within your content. 

Get visitors to sign up.

As they sign up to your list, follow up with them.

Create a series of helpful emails to be sent out to them on autopilot. Include your affiliate product in the email.

There are a few email marketing tools you’ll need to run this successfully. My suggestion is GetResponse.

How Can I Write Email Campaigns That Converts For Affiliate Marketing?

Here are some tips on how to write emails that convert into customers:

  • Personalize your emails by customizing its script and media content/attachments as per the recipient’s details.
  • Use a catchy subject line that grabs your receiver’s attention.
  • Make sure that your text is free of errors as any errors in writing can lead to a poor impression immediately.
  • Address the problems or needs of your recipients by explaining how your product/service will solve their problems or meet their needs.
  • Provide actionable links and call-to-action, so that the recipient can immediately visit your website or contact you if interested.
  • Use simple language and clear structuring that your reader can easily understand.
  • Keep the mail brief and use a respectful but compelling tone.
  • If you use templates, make sure that the guidelines are followed and use various templates as per your target readers.
  • Avoid using the same text repeatedly to avoid classification as spam.

Source: Cyril Gupta user on Quora

Does Email Marketing Still Work in Affiliate Marketing?

Absolutely yes, email marketing still works in affiliate marketing especially if you target the right audience and follow up with them with helpful information, overtime, you can scale your affiliate earning.

Is Email Marketing An Effective Way Of Promoting Affiliate products?

Have you heard this saying before ‘the money is in the list”? Yes, email is by far one of the best ways to promote affiliate products. Email allows you to get access to your target audience directly, develop relations with them, and convert them into buyers.

When it comes to increasing affiliate sales, email is the best option.

Is Affiliate Marketing Like Email Marketing?

No, they are different things altogether, Affiliate marketing is a business model while Email marketing is a marketing channel.

Affiliate marketing is where you promote a product or service created by another individual for a commission.

While. 

Email marketing is a type of marketing strategy that is based on leads and sales, it helps you send emails to prospects or customers. It is used to build trust with target customers and increase sales.

ALSO READ!

Wrapping Up!

In conclusion on, “email marketing and blogging” which one is best for affiliate marketing? Well, both are great marketing strategies in general but if you’re an affiliate marketer or a business owner who’s looking for ways to increase your revenue, email marketing is the best way.

With email marketing, you own and control your audience and with proper strategy, you can make money from your list over and over again.

The key component is to target the right audience and offer them the right content and product.

Taking this approach you’ll be able to build trust and relationships with your subscribers and increase sales.