Affiliate marketing is an amazing way to make money with a blog – especially if you’re just starting out with little traffic.
Most bloggers find affiliate marketing as an excellent and easy way to generate income from their blogs as you don’t have to create your own products to services.
However, affiliate marketing with a blog has to be done right to make it work.
The key component is to pick high-quality affiliate programs that are related to your niche and your targeted audiences’ needs. If you can do that successfully, you’ll get better results.
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Is Affiliate Marketing A Good Way To Make Money With A Blog?
Generally speaking yes, affiliate marketing is a good way to make money with a blog. Affiliate marketing is one of the best, most popular, and most lucrative ways that most bloggers make money from their blogs.
The beauty of affiliate marketing is that most of the heavy left is being taken care of for you. In terms of:
- Product creating
- Shipping
- Customer service
- Refund, etc
Your goal as a blogger or Affiliate marketer is to just market the product.
However… There are a few mistakes you can make that might prevent you from earning affiliate income with your blog.
You need to find or promote the right product or service that aligns with your niche and your blog readers’ needs.
For example, if you have a blog about boats, and all of a sudden you start promoting weight loss products.
Guess what?
Your readers will be confused and the vast majority of them are going to stop following your blog.
And most definitely none of them is going to purchase anything through your affiliate link.
Why? Well, because that’s not what they’re looking for.
That said…
The Key to succeeding with affiliate marketing with a blog is to opt for affiliate programs that are relevant to your blog niche and more importantly helpful to your audience.
If you can do that successfully, your audience will trust you.
And will be willing to purchase anything you recommend to them on your blog.
Related Posts!
What Is Affiliate Marketing With A Blog?
The idea behind how affiliate marketing works with a blog is simple. You (the blogger) create your blog, then, you fill your blog with useful articles.
Then, you sign up with an affiliate program or network you believe in or have used before.
As you sign up with the affiliate product, you’re given a unique affiliate link that’s tied to your account.
You then grab that link and place it within your article (at the part of your article where it makes sense).
At the point when your readers click and purchase the item, you get compensated (you get paid money).
- PS: I have another post where I go more into detail on what affiliate marketing is and how it actually works. Check it out.
What Are The Benefit Of Doing Affiliate Marketing Through A Blog?
There are a lot of benefits that come with doing affiliate marketing with a blog.
- A blog can allow you to get a ton of free target traffic to your affiliate offer and make a significant income.
- Blogging can be a great way to reach new potential customers, increase brand awareness and increase your affiliate income.
- With a blog, you’re able to share your knowledge about your affiliate product with others.
- It helps you meet other affiliates who are on the same path as you and learn new things from them.
- You can add your affiliate link multiple times on your blog without any third-party restrictions.
- Blogging is a free marketing strategy for affiliate marketing. The traffic you get from a blog to your affiliate offers is free (meaning, you don’t have to pay for traffic).
How Much Can You Earn With Affiliate Marketing Using A Blog?
How much can you earn with affiliate blogging?
Well, there is no fixed amount of money you can earn with affiliate marketing blogging. You can earn $0, $10,00, or $100,00 or more per month of blogging. So, there’s no specific amount of money.
How much you earn from a blog depends on various factors like:
- Your knowledge level about your niche: If you have good knowledge about your niche you’ll likely avoid common mistakes that people make that delay their success.
- The type of product you promote: High-ticket products pay a high commission, and low tickets pay a low commission. If you’re promoting low-ticket products, you won’t earn that much.
- How much traffic you’re generating on your product: Traffic plays an important role in whether you’ll make money or not.
- The amount of time and effort you put in: If you’re not putting any effort into promoting your product, you’ll not make any money.
- How many sales you’re generating: The more products you sell, the more money you earn.
- How big is your email list: The more targeted email lists you have, the higher the sales and money you’ll likely earn from your affiliate marketing.
How Can I Create My Own Blog And Monetize It With Affiliate Product
In case you’re new, making money with affiliate marketing through a blog is not a get-rich kind of thing. It takes real effort and a lot of work in the beginning.
But once that’s done, everything becomes much easier.
Now…
To start your own blog and monetize it with affiliate products, you’ll first need to decide on a niche. A niche is simply a topic you’re interested in, knowledgeable about, passionate about, or simply an area you want to build your business around.
Once that’s done, you want to choose a domain name. A domain name is simply the name of your blog and then you want to get a self-hosted service.
With a self-hosted blog, you own it and you can do anything with it.
One of the best web hosting providers is Bluehost. With Bluehost, with just a click of a button, your blog is up and running and it’s cheap and secure.
If you choose to go with Bluehost, they offer a free domain name for the year and a free SSL certificate.
Now, once you get all that done, you want to start building your blog with WordPress.
Why WordPress?
WordPress has a lot of functionality that allows you to design your blog the way you like it.
Now, the next thing is to pick a theme. A Theme is simply the design of your blog – how your blog is going to look to the general public.
A theme is one way of making your blog look professional in the eyes of your readers.
Having a niche and clean theme makes readers see your blog as a reliable and trusted source and this can help increase your conversion rate dramatically.
WordPress also comes with a lot of free themes that you can use for your blog.
But if you can afford I’d highly recommend you go for a premium theme.
Premium themes have a lot of functionality over free themes and will probably make your site load faster for your users.
One of the best themes right in the marketplace is the Thrive theme. It has all the functionality that a good theme is supposed to have.
It is customizable, meaning you can customize it the way you want and it comes with speed as well.
Finally, you want to research affiliate programs in your niche and sign up with them.
To find affiliate programs related to your niche, simply type (your niche + affiliate programs).
And some cool ones will pop up.
But before you sign up with them, you want to do your own research before anything else.
Then, start producing useful content and then place your affiliate link into your blog article.
To break it down for you here are the steps to start blogging for affiliate marketing:
- Step #1. Pick A Niche
- Step #2 Find And Sign Up With Affiliate Programs
- Step #2. Set Up A Self-hosted Blog
- Step #3. Start Producing Great Content On Your Blog
- Step #4. Build Organic Traffic To Your Blog By Optimizing Your Post With SEO
- Step #5. Drive Traffic To Your Affiliate Link
- Step #6. Convert Click To Sales
PS: Read the full post here on how to start a successful blog step-by-step.
NOTE: As I stated earlier, making money with affiliate marketing with a blog takes time. Be patient and put in the work long enough before giving it a quit.
How To Write A Good Blog Post For Affiliate Marketing?
Content is the key component for every online business’s success, this means, without it, your success is just a daydream.
To write a blog article for affiliate marketing, you need to first:
- Step #1. Decide On A Topic (It’s easy to write about topics you’re interested in and knowledgeable about, don’t write about things you’re not familiar with).
- Step #2. Do Through Research For The Topic To Generate Ideas (good blog content starts with proper keyword research).
- Step #3. Gather Information From Other Sites (gather information from other websites and YouTube videos).
- Step #4. Write An Outline Of Your Content (Take time to properly format your blog post).
- Step #5. Start Writing (Start your content with the intro, what is, why, how then the conclusion).
- Step #6. Make All Your Paragraphs Short (for better user experience and readability you want to keep your paragraph short).
- Step #7. Write In A Language That’s Easy To Read (don’t use big grammar when writing. Try writing in a friendly tone).
- Step #8. Write Clickable Headline (you can use headline analyzer tools like Coschedule.com to analyze your headline score).
- Step #9. Add relevant images To Break your content (it helps your blog stand out).
- Step #10. Proofread Your Content (Take time to read over your content. Use tools like Grammarly to check for any grammatical errors and spelling mistakes).
- Step #11. Master Proper On-page SEO (master proper SEO so people can find your blog on the search results.
- Step #12. Include A Disclaimer In Your Content (If you have affiliate links within your content, you want to be transparent with your readers by stating that. Most of your readers will appreciate your honesty which can lead to them trusting you more and eventually purchasing the product through you).
NOTE: It’s very important you write about stuff you know about or are familiar with, this will help you come out with quality and unique content.
Is Making A Blog On A Specific Product Or Niche Good For Affiliate Marketing?
In my opinion, I think yes, it is. Making a blog on a specific product or topic can help you attract a lot of targeted and potential buyers to your blog and this can help you easily convince them to click through your affiliate link and purchase the product or service you recommend on the blog.
Though… Blogging about different types of affiliate marketing products may be good sometimes in terms of traffic, conversion rate, and revenue.
But in my opinion, I think it’s not a good practice especially when you’re just starting.
When you’re just starting out, I’d highly recommend you focus your blog on one specific product or service.
And over time, as you start getting enough attraction or success from that product, you can perfectly switch to a different one or add a second one.
What Is The Best Way To Sell Affiliate Product With A Blog?
Well, one of the best ways to go about this is to write a review about the affiliate product or services you’re promoting.
Writing reviews about the product is good but in my opinion, I think writing problem-solving content and then linking the affiliate product as the solution is better.
Taking this approach you’ll get better results.
Can You Earn With Affiliate Marketing If You Don’t Have Popular Blog?
Can you earn with affiliate marketing if you don’t have a popular blog, the answer to that is yes, you can.
The thing is, in affiliate marketing, you don’t necessarily need to have a popular blog with a ton of traffic in order to make money off affiliate marketing.
What you actually need is a blog with targeted traffic even if it’s little traffic.
If your blog gets targeted traffic, you’re off to go.
By the way, what do I mean by targeted traffic?
Well, targeted traffic simply means, getting people or visitors to your blog who are interested in your product or service and are more likely to buy it.
So, targeted traffic is all you need to make affiliate sales with your blog.
That said…
To drive targeted traffic to your blog, all you need is to learn the basics of SEO, produce quality content related to your niche, and then you want to niche down.
What do I mean by niche-down?
I mean don’t spread yourself too wide – focus on one aspect of your niche or topic and go all in. Don’t write about multiple topics on your blog, leave that for the future.
SEO – Simply means optimizing your blog post with certain keywords to rank in the first position on Google.
Taking this approach, over time, you’ll start to attract targeted traffic to your blog.
Can I Earn From My Blog Before Monetizing It With Affiliate Marketing?
Yes, you can. Affiliate marketing is not the only option for earning money with a blog. There are many different ways that bloggers make money from their blogs.
One of the popular ways is through ads. There are two types of ads.
You can place CPC (cost-per-click) ad banners on your blog and each time your readers click on the ads you get paid money.
But with this method, the money you get paid is small.
Another method is to place CPM ads within your content.
With this model, you get paid depending on the number of visitors who view the ads on your blog.
You’ll be paid everytime the ads on your blog are viewed 1,000 times.
That said… The problem with these methods is that it’ll likely take time before you start earning a decent income.
You only make good money if you have loads of traffic to your blog.
How Can I Grow My Affiliate Marketing Business With The Help Of A Blog
- Focus On Creating Great Content
- Focus On Generating Traffic
- Build A Sales Funnel
Focus On Creating Great Content
To be successful with affiliate marketing blogging, you want to focus on producing high-quality content.
The more content you produce, the higher the chances of people coming back to your blog and eventually start clicking on your affiliate link.
The more clicks you generate on your affiliate link, the higher the conversion.
So, the critical component is to create useful content whether it is a review, how-to, or guide-type post.
Whichever one it is, make sure it provides value.
Focus On Generating Traffic
In affiliate marketing traffic is the lifeblood of your business, this means, if you don’t get the traffic you won’t make money.
Traffic is more important than the affiliate offer you’re promoting.
So, you want to focus on traffic first before focusing on promoting your affiliate offer.
So, how do you get traffic?
Well, that takes us back to the first point. You get traffic by creating relevant and high-quality content.
The greater your content, the higher traffic you’ll possibly attract to your blog.
You want to also find relevant social media platforms and promote your content there.
You can use prominent social media platforms like YouTube, Pinterest, Facebook, etc.
Build A Sales Funnel
As people start visiting and reading your blog you can collect their email addresses and promote your offer to them through email marketing.
You do this by offering them free items (e.g. ebooks) in exchange for their email address.
And add them to your email list.
Then you follow up with them with a series of emails, this is going to build trust and a relationship with them and at the same time sell your affiliate offer to them.
Can Affiliate Marketing Be Use For Any Blogging Niche
Are there affiliate programs for any blogging niche? Well, I would say yes, the niche ideas in affiliate marketing are endless.
Affiliate marketing is rapidly growing and it covers almost any niche you can think of under the sun.
Whatever your blogging niche may be, there is probably an affiliate program for it.
Though it is often hard to find an affiliate program for a certain blogging niche, however, with proper research, you will find some reputable ones.
Simply – run a Google search and try typing (your niche name + affiliate programs) and you’ll definitely find programs that are worth joining.
IMPORTANT: Don’t start in a niche if there’s no money in it.
PS: I wrote another article where I go more into detail on can affiliate marketing be used for any blogging niche. Check it out!
What Are The Best Blogging Niche Or Topic For Affiliate Marketing
There are a handful of niches out there, the best niche solely depends on one’s interest and experience.
The thing is, what’s best for you, may not be best for another person. So naturally, it depends on your interest.
Figure out what your interest is then pick a niche according to your interest.
That said…
There are some niches out there that are always profitable for blogging like health, wealth, and relationships.
- Health – People are always looking for ways to be healthier.
- Wealth – People are constantly looking for ways to make money online or increase their income.
- Relationship – People are looking for ways to improve their relationships, being in a marriage, dating, etc.
These three niches are called evergreen niches, meaning people are constantly looking for products in these niches year after year and are willing to spend money.
- PS: I have another post where I share with you some of the profitable niches for affiliate marketing.
What Is The Best Affiliate Program For Monetizing A Blog
As an affiliate marketing blogger, your goal is to find products that provide solutions to the pain points and desires of your readers instead of just looking for which is the best.
That said…
There are a handful of affiliate programs out there for monetizing a blog.
Here are a few things I recommend you focus on when choosing an affiliate offer for monetizing your blog:
- The Demand Of The Product Or Services – When picking an affiliate offer, don’t look at the commission structure, and how much you’ll get paid for selling the product. You want to research to see if the product is in high demand in the marketplace or not. There is no point in promoting a product that people are not in need of.
- The Commission Structure Of The Product – Check to see what payment model the product uses.
- The Cookie Duration Of The Product – You need to understand the cookie duration of the product. The cookie duration is simply how long the customers you referred to the product are being tracked. The thing is, people don’t normally purchase products at their first exposure, so the longer the cookie duration, the higher your chances of earning a commission.
- Possible Recurring Commission – Here, you want to check if the affiliate program offers a recurring commission. A recurring commission simply means you earn money month after month as long as the customer keeps using the product or service. This means you’ll earn money even if you don’t work.
Are you ready?
Here Are Some Of The Best Places To Find Affiliate Program To Monetize Your Blog:
- ClickBank
- ShareASale
- Amazon
- Cj Affiliate
- Warrior Plus
- JvZoo
- eBay
- Home Depot
How To Monetize Your Blog Or Website With Affiliate Marketing
Below Are The Steps You Can Take Towards Monetizing Your Blog Or Website With Affiliate Marketing:
- Step 1. Know Who Your Ideal Audiences Are
The first step is to identify who your target audiences are, what they’re in need of, and what they’re hoping to achieve so that you can help them with that.
The thing is, online, not everyone is your target audience, and if you’re trying to market to everyone you’re just wasting your time.
Find who your target audiences are and target them only.
- Step 2. Create High Engaging Content
High-quality content is the key component of making money online with affiliate marketing using a blog.
It doesn’t matter the kind of product you’re promoting if your content provides no value to your readers.
Guess what?
They’ll barely click on what you’re recommending on the blog.
- Step 3. Research And Join Quality Affiliate Programs
If you’re confused about which product to promote that’s related to your niche, well, I got you covered.
To find products related to your niche, simply type your niche name plus affiliate programs in the Google search field.
And you’ll discover some really cool ones.
But before you take any further steps on that, you want to conduct thorough research about the product before working with them.
Find other affiliates in your niche who are promoting that same product and see if they’re making money with it or not.
Find out what they’re saying about the product.
If you’re satisfied with what you see, then go on and sign up for that product.
- Step 4. Promote The Affiliate Product Within Your Blog
There are so many ways in which you can promote affiliate offers with a blog.
You can promote affiliate offers by writing a review about the product or simply inserting your affiliate link on your blog post.
Those are all amazing ways.
But those methods are not going to yield a great result in the long run.
The best way to promote affiliate offers is to build an email list.
So, how do I go about that? Great question!
You can write great and useful informative articles about topics in your niche.
Then, within your content, you want to offer something of value for free in exchange for your visitor’s email addresses.
Once they have opted-in their email addresses for the free item and you capture their email addresses.
Now, you can send them to your affiliate product sales page.
If they don’t buy the product for the first time, don’t worry, you can follow up with them with further emails about the affiliate offer over and over again until they’re ready to buy it.
This is where the money process begins.
Why do I need to capture visitors’ email addresses first?
Well, the thing is, if you’re sending people to a direct affiliate link without capturing their email addresses and they don’t buy the offer, you have lost them for life.
But if you have their email addresses, you can follow up with them through emails and do repeated marketing with them.
OVERVIEW!
The above step is how you monetize a blog or website with affiliate marketing.
To capture your visitor email addresses, you’re going to need an email service provider.
My recommendation is GetResponse.
GetResponse offers all the necessary tools you need to run a successful email marketing business.
Tips To Sell Affiliate Products Through A Blog
There are a variety of ways in which you can sell or promote your affiliate product through a blog.
Below are some of the best ways I have found:
- Write Review Post: A review type of post is one of the popular methods that many bloggers utilize to promote their affiliate offers. A review type of post is simply providing information about a product to your readers and guides them to make a purchase decision. A few things to remember, when writing a review post to promote affiliate products don’t write only the good side of the product, including the bad side as well, you should be honest about this.
- Blog Post Promotion: Another method for promoting affiliate products is to write blog content and within the content, you place affiliate links in the part of the content where it makes sense. One of the strategies that a lot of bloggers leverage is, after inserting the affiliate in the post they go on and promote that post on social media. This technique helps them to reach more targeted customers. That said, with this method, you need to write high-quality and targeted posts, I mean articles that people usually search for before making a purchase decision. An example of this is ‘Best-type of posts.
- Banner Promotion: When you start getting a good number of traffic to your blog, you can place a banner of your affiliate product on the site sidebar. Banner promotion works really well but, don’t place too many banners, this may confuse your visitors.
- PS: You can read more here on how to promote affiliate products with a blog.
What Are The Best Blogs About Affiliate Marketing?
What are the best affiliate marketing blogs? Well, there are a ton of them.
Most of the top blogs in the affiliate marketing space mainly focus their blog on affiliate marketing.
They provide helpful tips on affiliate marketing.
If you’re looking for a specific blog about affiliate marketing, you should follow the following.
- Zac Johnson
- Mobidea Academy
- I Am Attila
- Spencer Haws (Niche Pursuits)
- Pat Flynn (Smart Passive Income Blog)
- John Chow
- Matthew Woodward
- Luke Kling
- Shawn Collins (Affiliate Marketing Blog)
- Missy Ward
- Charles Ngo
- PS: Read more about the above-mentioned here, Best Affiliate Marketing Blog
FAQs!
Is Affiliate Marketing A Good Way To Make Money Online?
Yes, definitely – affiliate marketing is one of the most popular and lucrative ways of making money from a blog – In fact, you can make a lot of money from it if done correctly.
The idea behind affiliate marketing is, that you’re simply helping promote a company or an individual product or service.
And for every sale or purchase made that’s directed from your blog, you get compensated for that sale.
Can I Become Rich With Affiliate Marketing Blogging?
The answer to that is yes, blogging is an amazing way to make money from affiliate marketing. There are so many affiliate marketing bloggers who are quite rich. Most of the top bloggers are making anywhere from $100,000 to $200,000 per year and more.
That said, making money with affiliate marketing from a blog highly depends on your niche and the quality of your content, and how much targeted traffic your blog receives per month.
Is Blogging A Good Option To Run Affiliate Marketing Business?
Yes, it is. Blogging is a great way to drive relevant organic traffic to an affiliate product and generate decent sales especially if your affiliate offer is aligned with the traffic.
In fact, you can leverage a blog to market almost anything if done right.
If you’re very good at writing SEO content then blogging is the best way to go but keep in mind, blogs do take time to build and get traction.
What Are Other Options For Affiliate Marketing Other Than A Blog?
Blogs are excellent ways to promote affiliate offers, but there are other options for promoting affiliate offers than blogs, you can use other platforms like social media to promote your affiliate offers.
Social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, etc, are the best alternative.
You can use paid advertising on all of these platforms and reach large audiences in no time.
Is Blogging An Effective Way To Generate Click For Affiliate Marketing?
Yes, blogging is one of the great ways for getting targeted traffic for affiliate marketing and making sales but it’s a long-term process. It takes a lot of time and effort to start generating traffic to your affiliate offer which will result in sales.
If you’re not willing to put in the time and years of hard work for at least two years, then, pick a different strategy.
There are many different ways to do affiliate marketing too, don’t depend on one option.
However, blogging can be very rewarding once you put in the necessary work. There are a number of people who are making six, seven, and even eight-figure incomes from blogging.
Is It Possible To Use A Blog To Promote Multiple Affiliate Product At The Same Time?
Yes, you can definitely promote multiple affiliate marketing offers on one single blog as long as the product is relevant to your blog niche and the content on your blog. Make sure you’re creating useful content and don’t try to spam your affiliate link all across the content.
If you take a content-first approach, your readers will be much happier and will probably click on your affiliate link, and also your site rank well in the search results.
Can Affiliate Marketing Be Profitable Without A Blog?
Absolutely. There are many different ways, blogging is not the only way to do affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing can be very profitable even if you don’t have a personal blog or website.
One of the best ways to do affiliate marketing without a blog is to create YouTube videos where you add your affiliate link in the video description box.
However, blogging is certainly a good way to make money online as an affiliate marketer.
If you enjoy writing, then blogging is definitely the best path to go.
In my opinion, it will be much more lucrative if you have a blog and YouTube so you can rank your content on the blog and get target traffic along with your YouTube video.
Can I Start A Successful Blog Without Affiliate Marketing?
Yes, it can be done without it. You don’t necessarily need affiliate marketing to make a blog successful. Affiliate marketing is just one of the many business models for making money with a blog. If your blog gets a good amount of views, you can earn from your blog using ads or sponsored posts – it’s all about views.
Wrapping Up!
In conclusion on, “is affiliate marketing a good way to make money with a blog”? The answer to that is yes, blogging is one of the best methods for affiliate marketing.
However, success with affiliate marketing with a blog requires consistent effort, hard work, and above all patience.
The reason why a lot of people fail to make affiliate sales with a blog is that they lack patience and belief.
A lot of people believe that making money with affiliate marketing through a blog is a quick way of making money online.
Nope! That’s wrong thinking.
Online, there’s nothing like get-rich-quick kind of stuff. Everything takes time.
The longer time you spend building your affiliate marketing blog, the more skill and experience you’ll gain, and the more successful your blog will become.
