In this guide, we review the aspects of Affiliate Marketing With A Blog, how to create a free blog for affiliate marketing, how to start a blog for affiliate marketing, and how to monetize a blog with affiliate marketing.
If you’re looking for a way to make money online and don’t know where to start, affiliate marketing is an excellent choice. It’s easy to get started with affiliate marketing and the best part is that it doesn’t require any technical skills or previous experience. You can earn money by promoting products on your blog or social media channels. The best part about affiliate marketing is that there are so many different products available for you to promote – from books and courses (such as this one!) all the way up through electronics like smartphones or laptops!
Affiliate Marketing With A Blog
I’m sure you’ve heard of affiliate marketing before — it’s one of the most popular ways to make money online. What you might not know, however, is that affiliate marketing isn’t just for bloggers. It can be used by anyone with a website or even just a Facebook page! If you’re interested in starting your own blog and learning how to make money with affiliate marketing, this guide will help get you started on your journey toward financial freedom.
How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing
If you’re looking to make money with affiliate marketing, it’s best to start by familiarizing yourself with the different types of programs available. Some affiliates are paid per click, others for impressions and some for sales. Choosing the right program for your blog will have a significant impact on how much money you can earn from it.
If you’re still new to affiliate marketing, our recommended strategy is to choose a niche that you are passionate about and write about topics related to that niche in order to get traffic (you’ll learn more about this below). Once people find your site and become regular visitors, they will be much more likely to buy something from one of your recommendations because they trust what you write on your blog as being unbiased advice rather than just trying to sell them something at every opportunity!
Another great way of increasing revenue is by experimenting with different strategies such as Instagram or Facebook advertising – this allows businesses who might not otherwise know where their target audience lives outside traditional search engines such as Google or Bing so they can reach out directly via social media instead; making sure they don’t miss anyone who may otherwise have been missed out before now due simply because there wasn’t enough time spent researching which language/country/region etcetera…
What You Need To Get Started
In order to get started with affiliate marketing, you need to have a website. A blog is also helpful, but not necessary. You’ll need a business name, an email address and a payment processor (like Stripe). It’s also important to have your own domain name so that customers can find you easily online. The hosting service is another thing you may want to consider investing in before you start your new affiliate marketing business because it will help protect the integrity of your site from hackers and other cyberthreats
Choosing The Right Niche
Choosing the right niche for your blog is an extremely important step in affiliate marketing. If you choose a niche that you are passionate about, then you’re more likely to stick with it and continue writing great content.
If you don’t have any experience or knowledge of the topic, then choosing a blog niche can be very difficult. You also want to make sure that there is enough demand for whatever product/service you will be reviewing because this will help increase traffic and conversion rates on your site.
Finally, if there are already thousands or millions of other blogs covering exactly what yours will cover, then it might be hard for new visitors to find your site through Google search results.
Creating Content
When it comes to creating content, the best thing you can do is create something that your audience will find useful. This can be in the form of a blog post, video, or infographic. If you’re struggling to come up with ideas for new pieces of content, think about ways you can expand upon what you already have created. A good rule of thumb is to write at least 1-2 blog posts per week (but don’t worry if you don’t have time for that).
Always make sure that the quality of your content is high – this means using good grammar, spelling everything correctly and making sure that any images included in your posts are high quality. The more effort put into creating each piece of content will show and make readers more likely to become engaged in their reading experience.
To find keywords for your blog posts, use tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs’ Content Explorer tool which allows you to easily find trending topics and understand what people are searching for online at any given time – this way when someone searches Google they’ll see one of our articles instead!
Coming Up With A Marketing Strategy
- Choose a product to promote.
- Decide how much you want to earn per sale, and calculate the amount of traffic you need to generate in order to reach that number (this information should be provided by the company that offers your affiliate products).
- Determine what type of content will best drive traffic (i.e., if you’re writing an article about ways to save money on groceries, consider using #foodporn as part of your headline).
- Come up with several different ideas for promoting the product or service and choose which one will work best for you at this time (you may want to experiment before settling on any one strategy).
Finding The Right Traffic Source
Choosing the right traffic source is important for your business to succeed. Here are some examples of different sources:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Social media advertising
- Email marketing
- Content marketing, including infographics and slide shows (we’ll discuss this more in the next section)
In order to choose the right traffic source for your niche, you need to determine which platforms make sense based on how many people use them. For example, if you’re trying to target women ages 25-35 who live in New York City and love fashion, then Facebook Ads might be a great option because there are over 1 billion users across all demographics who love fashion! But if you’re targeting men over 60 who live outside of Chicago who love baseball (and only baseball), then Facebook Ads would not be the best choice because that audience is simply too small. Use Google Keyword Planner or another keyword research tool like AdWords Keyword Tool by Google or SEMRush , depending on what platform(s) you want your blog posts shared through so that they can show up when people search for related topics online–this helps ensure that people find out about what you’ve written about without having any outside influences swaying them away from doing so (e.g., advertisements).
Making money with affiliate marketing isn’t as complicated as you might think.
Making money with affiliate marketing isn’t as complicated as you might think.
Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online. It’s easy to get started, and you don’t need a lot of experience or technical knowledge. You can start with as little as $5!
how to create a free blog for affiliate marketing
In this guide, you will learn, step by step, how to start and grow an affiliate marketing blog that can make you a decent income, and you can sell it for more than $100K.
Most probably, you already know how to start a blog. If you don’t, check our complete guide on starting a blog.
An affiliate marketing blog is different from a personal or a blog that complements a company’s business. You must create content for people looking to buy products and services. Also, you have to monetize the traffic and ultimately generate sales through affiliate programs and offers.
So in this guide, you will have everything you need to create a successful affiliate marketing blog. You should be willing to learn, put in the time for research, and have persistence.
But before anything else, let’s dive into affiliate marketing.
1. What affiliate marketing is, and how does it work?
According to Rakuten Advertising research, 81% of brands rely on affiliate programs. If you want to step into the game and learn what it takes to become a successful affiliate marketer, then keep reading.
Affiliate marketing is performance-based marketing, where you earn a commission by selling others’ products or services (on successful transactions). That means if someone buys something through your affiliate referral links, you get paid. If not, you don’t. It’s as simple as that.
The significant part is that you don’t have to worry about creating a product, delivering it, taking care of stocks, refunds, customer service, business development, invoices, and many other things a company has to.
Think, for instance, about Amazon. Through Amazon Associates, the affiliate program of Amazon, you can earn from 2 to 10% of the product purchased through your link without taking care of the things above. You can advertise pens, smartphones, computers, groceries, subscriptions, etc.
Your job is to gather an audience and promote the products you choose to your audience. It’s that simple.
And what’s the best way of gathering an audience and promoting the products to them modern, compellingly? If you answered a blog, then you were right.
2. Examples of Profitable Affiliate Marketing Blogs
Here are several affiliate marketing blogs that make a fortune online. The affiliate marketing nice is enormous, so there are thousands of such blogs, even hundreds of thousands, in my opinion. But I’ve chosen only five from different niches. This way, you will know what an affiliate marketing blog looks like.
Nerdwallet is essentially a review affiliate site for financial products. They cover everything from credit cards to mortgages to investing and insurance. Have stellar content, an exceptional user interface, and an excellent marketing team.
Their stats look impressive: 11M visitors/month, 50000 backlinks, a DR of 83, 170K Facebook followers, and 65K Twitter followers.
This blog is run by Abby, who writes about DIY, crafts, and organization. It’s a trendy blog, and since Abby shares her income reports, we know that she makes about $40,000+ per month.
Abby makes most of her money with affiliate marketing (mainly through Amazon Associates and hosting affiliate marketing with Bluehost), selling her courses.
Abby’s blog stats look impressive for a personal blog: 53K visitors/month, 4000 backlinks, a DR of 65, 32K Facebook followers, 40K Youtube subscribers, and 8K Twitter followers.
This affiliate marketing blog provides in-depth reviews and opinions on the best home security and home automation products. Probably most of their income comes from promoting OfferVault pay-per-call programs like Vivint. Vivint pays up to $560 for a qualified sale.
Safewise affiliate marketing blog stats: 485K visitors/month, 7000 backlinks, a DR of 75, 14K Facebook followers, 40K Youtube subscribers, and just 1,5K Twitter followers.
Dog Food Advisor helps dog owners choose the best food for their four-legged friends. Mike, the website owner, monetizes the website through affiliate links and is featured as a “Buying Tip.” There are no other forms of advertising, including banner ads or pop-ups, under or overs. The site probably has a mailing list in the hundreds of thousands, so that’s another potential revenue source.
Dog Food Advisor affiliate marketing blog stats: 542K visitors/month, 5000 backlinks, a DR of 76, 280K Facebook followers, and just 2,4K Twitter followers.
Dating Advice aims to help people improve their dating skills and find the best dating site for their needs. Its focus on ‘expert advice and emphasis on answering genuine questions essentially brings dating mainstream. This affiliate marketing website makes most of its money by referring people to dating websites such as Match, eHarmony, etc.
Dating Advice affiliate marketing blog stats: 413K visitors/month, 3600 backlinks, a DR of 78,13K Facebook followers, and 14 K Twitter followers.
3. How to choose a profitable niche for your blog?
Niche research for affiliate marketing can be dull. It takes a lot of time. But if you do this one step in a hurry, you’ll regret it in the long run. Could you take my word on this? It is frustrating to invest a lot of time and money in the long run in a niche that doesn’t make you too many profits or is also competitive.
Here’s a quick tip for finding a profitable affiliate marketing niche: “Identify a niche where you can promote products that have a HIGH sales volume and LOW competition.”
There is a complete section on choosing an affiliate marketing niche in the Affiliate marketing guide for beginners guide I’ve written. Read it first, and then you can come back to this guide.
Questions you should ask yourself when choosing an affiliate marketing niche:
Please spend enough time finding the right niche.
Here are, in my opinion, the best niches for affiliate marketing in 2022 and beyond.
The Best Niches for Affiliate Marketing in 2022
Parenting, Prepping & Surviving, Personal health, Weight loss, Cryptocurrencies, Relationships, Gambling, Green energy, Remote work, Cybersecurity, Finance, Make money online.
The affiliate marketing niches mentioned above are selected based on the popularity and high returns for the affiliate marketers. They have been working great in their effectiveness in attracting maximum traffic and keep doing it in the long run.
Do not forget that selecting a niche is the foundation of how much money you will ultimately make through affiliate marketing. Hence, if you fail to choose a good one, all your efforts go in vain. And that’s my second warning on this matter. I have been there and done that.
Useful readings on how to find your niche:
4. Define Your Target Audience
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is trying to appeal to everyone. Instead, narrow down everyone to a smaller group of people who want to buy and have the money to buy your product.
For example, if you sell dog jumpers, a person who doesn’t own a dog isn’t part of your audience, so you don’t want to appeal to them.
What is the target audience?
You may think that the target market and target audience are the same. They are entirely different marketing terms.
The target audience is the people to whom you propose your marketing and advertising efforts.
A target market is anyone who might be interested in your products or services, and your target audience is the group of people to whom you recommend a specific marketing asset or ad. The target audience is a part of your target market.
Facebook is an excellent example of what you should do. They allow you to narrow your audience based on demographics and other characters. You can set an income range, target males or females, or exclude anyone with children. It all depends on your marketing plan.
A marketing asset can be a landing page, Facebook post, email, or product page.
Try to establish empathy with the audience you are planning to target. Know their difficulties, how they feel about them, and what they do to figure them out. The best way to learn this, in my experience, is through monitoring conversations in groups, forums, blog comments, and social media.
I know you want to know more about everything, so I have a link to help you a lot. Join HubSpot Academy for free. Get free online certifications, product documentation, and training videos to learn what you need to succeed.
5. Find Affiliate Marketing Programs
Now that you know the niche where you want to build an authority website and set up the target niche, it’s time to find affiliate marketing programs. When we look for affiliate marketing programs, we look for products to review and advertise on our website and make commissions through their affiliate programs. Let’s make sure we are on the same page.
There are three places I use to find affiliate programs:
5.1 Find affiliate programs through affiliate networks
Affiliate networks bring together thousands of publishers (bloggers) and advertisers. Signing up for an affiliate network gives you access to thousands of affiliate programs. You get performance details, advertising creatives, etc.
Our Top 21 Affiliate Marketing Networks in 2021, along with PROs and CONs for each network, how to signup to get accepted, and other helpful information.
I recommend looking into ShareASale, CJ, Amazon Associates, and Clickbank. Unless you are into a tiny niche, you will find several affiliate programs for you. The advantage is that using an affiliate network. You will have all the earnings centralized in one place.
5.2 Find independent affiliate programs
Believe it or not, many more affiliate programs are run independently by the product creators without using any affiliate networks. That’s because they have a proprietary affiliate software. They want to have complete control of their affiliates, etc.
There are many places to find affiliate programs. I would start with affiliate programs directories, doing some Google search on the most available products in your niche + affiliate program. Then you can visit your competitors, see which products they advertise, and search for their correspondent affiliate programs.
5.3 Select the best affiliate programs
Now you should have a pretty good list of affiliate marketing programs. Don’t jump in and signup for them. Before affiliate managers accept you as a publisher, they want to see your website and traffic sources.
Some affiliate marketers are very picky about choosing blogs. That’s because they don’t want to see their brand advertised on shady or questionable websites. So we have to build an excellent affiliate marketing website first.
We can apply when we have our blog ready and at least 200 visitors ready.
6. Find The Most Important Keywords
Discover the best topics for your content, find the best keywords, drive traffic fast to your website, and get quality backlinks. All of that will skyrocket your rankings if you do it right.
You have probably seen that most of the guides out there mention keyword research as the most important thing for creating content. But no one tells you that even if you optimize your blog post for important keywords, there is no guarantee that Google will rank you for that specific keyword at all.
My advice is to concentrate on creating content for the audience. Don’t focus on keywords because they will be naturally in your blog post. Later, you can optimize it for keywords you already rank for.
Don’t get me wrong. Keywords are essential, but not like they used to be. With this tactic, you’ll find only content that is proven to work. You just need to create a better version of it. But first, let me show you how to find keywords.
How to find keywords for your blog?
You’ll do this with a free tool called Ubersuggest. You can do it with any other free or paid keyword tool, but I like this one because I can do it all in one place. This is how you do it.
Go to Ubersuggest. The first thing you’ll see is a search box. If your website is, for example, about coffee tables, then type coffee table in the box.
As you can see, it will show your keyword along with suggestions and related keywords. I wasn’t aware that coffee tables are so popular. In 10 seconds, you already have a couple of the right keywords and ideas for your future blog posts. I usually write down keywords and content ideas on paper. It’s easier to keep an eye on them while writing posts.
You’ll see a list of top pages for that particular keyword when you scroll down.
Click on Show Keywords to see which keywords are driving visitors to those pages. You’ll get this.
I write down all the valuable keywords on paper. Aim for the long-tail keywords. Remember, you are looking for high volume and CPC keywords, but low SD(up to 50 is good). I include keywords with high SD and spread all of them across my blog posts where applicable.
Here is a video guide created by the ahrefs team to learn how to do keyword research to find keywords you SHOULD target. The result? More rankings and organic traffic for your website.
how to start a blog for affiliate marketing
Promoting affiliate products is one of the most effective ways to make money from your blog. But a lot of bloggers are still too afraid to give it a go.
If you choose a trusted affiliate program that you know and love and then promote it properly, you’ll find that you can create a long-term (pretty) stable source of income.
Today, I want to show you a few solid ways to make a bit more using affiliates.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a blog monetization method where product companies incentivize bloggers and publishers to refer their product by offering them a commission for every sale they refer. With affiliate marketing, you choose a product you like, promote it online with a referral link, and earn commissions when someone purchases it through your referrals.
The easiest way to find a product you want to promote is by joining an affiliate program like ShareASale, Amazon Associates or Commission Junction and browsing through their site.
After selecting a product, you can get an affiliate / referral link and promote the product through that link on your blog.
Is Affiliate Marketing Worth It?
Why get started with affiliate marketing? Here are a few advantages over other ways of making money with your blog.
Advantage #1: Monetize Your Blog From Day 1
To start monetizing your new blog, you don’t have to wait for a few months until you grow a massive following. Even if you monetize your blog from day 1, it doesn’t look amateurish because affiliate links are seamlessly and naturally integrated with your content.
Advantage #2: Earn Money Even Without a Massive Following
Unlike other modes of monetization like advertising, you don’t have to grow a massive traffic base in order to start making a solid income. All you have to do is to ensure your website is attracting the RIGHT traffic that actually wants to read your product recommendations.
For tips about driving the right traffic to your blog, check out our guide on blog SEO.
Advantage #3: Generate Passive Income
With affiliate marketing, you can write a single blog post recommending an affiliate product and have that post generate money for you again and again.
That’s called passive income. Passive income is any income that requires no effort to earn and maintain. You already write blog posts anyway, and likely recommend products that you like, so why not make passive income from doing so?
Advantage #4: Make MORE Money
With affiliate marketing, you earn money based on the number of successful referrals you generated. For example, if you could successfully refer a premium product, like WPForms, you can earn up to $59.90 per referral.
Let’s say your affiliate conversion rate is 2%. That means for every 100 referrals you sent to the affiliate website, 2 people are actually purchasing the product. That also means regardless of the size and reputation of your website, you can make $100 from those 2 referrals provided that the affiliate commission is $50 per sale.
Now let’s take a look at how much you can earn with advertising.
The average CPC (cost per click) of AdSense, the largest advertising network in the world, ranges from $0.15. The average CPC that you can earn from AdSense depends on a lot of different factors, including the size and reputation of your website.
For example, if your average CPC is $0.25, then you can earn $25 for 100 ad clicks; whereas, with affiliate marketing from our above example, you can potentially earn $100. Without a doubt, affiliate marketing is a better way to make MORE money.
How to Start Affiliate Marketing (Step by Step)
There’s a huge potential for you to make a big income with affiliate marketing if and only if you follow the right strategy. Here are the exact steps that experts follow when they do affiliate marketing.
Step 1: Start a Blog for Affiliate Marketing
Of course, to start affiliate marketing, you’ll need to have a blog or a website. Majority of the companies that run an affiliate program only approve you as an affiliate if you have a blog or a website. That’s because having a blog establishes authority on your niche and it gives some assurance that you’re not a spammer.
While there are a lot of blogging platforms out there, we always recommend WordPress for starting a blog because not only is it free, but it also gives you full control over your content.
To start a blog, aside from choosing a platform like WordPress, you’ll need to own a domain name and web hosting.
A domain name is your blog’s address (URL) on the internet, like BlogTyrant.com or Google.com, and web hosting is where your blog’s content and files are stored online.
When a visitor tries to access your blog by typing in your web address (domain name), they’ll be directed to the blog you’ve set up in your web hosting server.
To start a blog, we always recommend using Bluehost for web hosting.
Bluehost is one of the largest web hosting companies and an officially recommended hosting provider by WordPress.org.
The combined cost of a domain name and hosting can be quite expensive, especially if you’re just starting out.
That’s why we’ve worked out a deal with Bluehost to offer our users a FREE domain name and over 60% off on web hosting.
For a complete step-by-step guide, check out this guide on starting a blog.
Step 2: Choose the Right Affiliate Products
Everyone has different rules and ideals when it comes to promoting affiliate products.
For example, successful entrepreneur and affiliate marketer ShoeMoney once said that he doesn’t promote private affiliate products unless he has met the owner in person to judge whether they are a trustworthy character.
Here’re a few ways to choose the right products for promoting on your blog:
Now that you have a better understanding of the kind of products that you want to promote, the next thing you need to do is to sign up as an affiliate for those products and grab the affiliate link.
Step 3: Attract the Right Audience With the Right Keywords
To generate affiliate sales, you need to ensure you’re attracting the right audience who actually wants to try out the service you recommend.
Now the question is, how can you determine if your blog is driving the right traffic and understand their intention?
If you’re like most bloggers, Google is the #1 traffic source that brings traffic to your blog.
You’re more likely to make affiliate sales from your blog if the search engine traffic you drive has an investigational intent.
Generally speaking, there are 4 types of user intents:
As an affiliate marketer, you’ll want to rank your blog for investigational keywords. Your potential audience uses investigational keywords when they’re not yet ready to purchase a product. They want to compare products and search for reviews and recommendations before making a final purchasing decision.
Some of the phrases you’ll often see in investigational keywords are:
If your site is ranking for keywords with these phrases, you’re likely driving the right audience to your site.
To see the actual searches your users used on search engines to find your site, you can go to the queries report in Google Analytics by navigating to Acquisition » Search Console » Queries.
To know more about keyword research and ranking for the right keywords, refer to OptinMonster’s keyword research guide.
Step 4: Promote Your Affiliate Products Within the Content
One of the best ways to make a long term affiliate income is to write a detailed piece of long-form content (like a tutorial) and make your affiliate an integral part of that content.
I really like this strategy because you benefit from the initial promotion, and then all the long-term traffic that comes from your blog’s Google rankings.
It’s also a nice one because you don’t have to shove the product down people’s throats. You just gently recommend this or that product as being a good choice for that particular part of the process.
Before you add any affiliate links to your WordPress site, I strongly suggest you install Pretty Links, one of the best affiliate marketing plugin.
Pretty Links helps you cloak the affiliate links that you promote on your website.
Affiliate links are typically long, ugly-looking URLs like this:
http://example.com/products/?product_id=123&affiliate_id
Pretty Links helps you cloak such affiliate links and make them shorter and neater:
http://www.yoursite.com/refer/productname
In addition, this plugin lets you manage your affiliate links from a single location on your WordPress dashboard. The benefit is that even if the companies change the affiliate URL in the future, you don’t have to dig deeper into your blog archives to change the affiliate link. You can easily change it by replacing your affiliate URL right from the Pretty Links dashboard.
How to Make Even More Affiliate Income
Now that you know how to get a head start with affiliate marketing, let’s take a look at how to make even more money by recommending products on your blog.
how to monetize a blog with affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways for bloggers to start making money. If done right, it can be a really great source of passive income that pays off for months or years to come.
It’s how I earned my very first bit of income on my first blog and how this website brings in at least $20,000 every month.
I’ve learned a lot about affiliate marketing for bloggers over the years and it’s been a part of my job as a blogger that I really enjoy. I like to work with other brands and form partnerships with the companies that I believe in and really care about.
Consider this article the 30,000-foot overview of some of my best tips and strategies.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is when you earn a commission for selling other people’s products. This commission can be a set amount or a percentage of the sale or a set dollar amount and is determined by the company/owner of the affiliate product.
These commissions often range anywhere from 15-70% of the product sales price.
If 70% seems high to you, it’s because it is. But the reason it’s so high is that the affiliate is doing most of the grunt work to bring the customer to the sales page.
The product creator gets to sit back and earn passive revenues. Once you create a product that people want and a sales page that effectively sells your product — most of the work is done.
All that is left is to get more visitors to the page. That is often one of the hardest parts.
Affiliates are responsible for not only getting additional visitors to the page but also for convincing their readers WHY they believe the product is worth buying.
The more you can convince your reader why they need the product before they click the affiliate link and see the sales page, the more likely they are to purchase the product.
Many affiliate companies also have pretty high commissions to remain competitive. They want you to promote THEIR product or service rather than their competition’s, so they keep their commissions competitively priced.
How Does Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers Work?
Before you are eligible for affiliate revenues, you must sign up and get approved by the affiliate company. I’ll talk more about how to find and join affiliate companies and programs later on in this article.
After getting approved for an affiliate program, you will receive an affiliate link to the product’s sales page. This special affiliate link is how your affiliate sales are tracked. You can add these links in articles, emails, social media posts, Facebook groups, etc.
Here is an example from a post that was on my health blog on Himalayan salt lamps:
When someone clicks your affiliate link, a cookie is attached to their browser that tracks whether or not that person purchases the product from your link. These cookies generally last anywhere from 30-365 days, which means that if someone clicks your link and purchases anytime within that cookie’s period, you will receive a commission from that sale.
Important Note: In order for this cookie to work, the person has to purchase from the same device and the same browser.
Another caveat is that if someone clicks on another affiliate link that isn’t yours and then purchases the product, the affiliate whose link was last clicked will get the credit for the sale – not you. The affiliate company decides how long this cookie length is, and you can find out how long it is by reading over their affiliate terms and conditions.
The sales that you make from your affiliate link are tracked, and most companies will pay you for the sales between 30 and 90 days after the sale is made (to make sure that no returns or refunds are requested).
Affiliate Rules and Disclosures
A really key part of successful affiliate marketing for bloggers is following all affiliate rules and using the proper disclosures on your site. Not the most fun part, I know.
In addition to cookie lengths and commission amounts, affiliate companies also have specific rules for promoting products. You can generally find these rules at the bottom of the company’s website. The links are often named the following:
These can be very basic (don’t claim the affiliate product is your own) to pretty big (don’t promote the product in your emails).
The rules will vary between affiliate companies, so it’s always important to read over ALL rules before applying to their program.
For example, the Amazon Associates program is much stricter with their policy and does not all you to include affiliate links in emails or any other private resources.
In addition to affiliate rules, you also have to have the proper affiliate disclosures on your website and anywhere else you have affiliate links (videos, courses, emails, etc.).
For example, Create and Go is an affiliate for ConvertKit, an email marketing software that we use and recommend to our students.
[The link above is an affiliate link. If you click that link and decide to sign up for ConvertKit, we may receive a commission for it (after you complete your free trial and pay for your first month).]
The above statement is called a disclosure. It just means that we’re giving you a heads-up that we are paid for our referrals.
Disclosure rules exist to protect the consumer from purchasing from biased opinions of people on the internet. Some people only promote certain products and services because they are paid for referrals, so disclosures exist to make this affiliate relationship more transparent.
Disclosure rules are generally set by both affiliate companies and the government. You have to abide by both.
In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission is the governing body over consumer purchase behavior online, and they set the rules on disclosures.
It’s important to note that it’s not enough to ONLY disclose an affiliate relationship somewhere in a Disclaimer or Disclosure page linked at the bottom of your website.
The affiliate relationship must be disclosed before or close to the affiliate link.
If you’re including affiliate links in an article, it’s a good idea to include a disclosure BEFORE your content. If you include affiliate links in a social media post, you must disclose that it is an affiliate link within the post itself:
If you include affiliate links in emails, you must disclose that it is an affiliate link within the email itself:
And so on… Your affiliate disclosures must be clear and visible — meaning that the reader should never have to hunt them down. You can read the FTC’s Endorsement Guides for more information on what is required.
Why Affiliate Marketing is the Best Way to Start Monetizing a Blog
It honestly provides a really great balance of risk and reward. Perhaps the easiest way to make money is by putting ads on your blog. It’s fairly easy to set up and 100% passive.
If you’re going to go that route, our favorite ad company to start out with is Ezoic. Once you reach 50k pageviews, you can partner with a premium ad network.
But the problem with ads is that the low risk also comes with the lowest reward, and you’re going to make pennies rather than dollars. On the other end of the spectrum, creating and selling your own products is probably the best way to make money with your website. But it also comes with the highest risk.
It takes time and money to create your own products and if you don’t know how to sell them properly or your audience doesn’t want them, you’ve wasted even more time and money.
I know because this happened to me. The very first product that I created was a diet and fitness plan that I thought was just AWESOME. But guess what… Our audience didn’t agree.
We didn’t know who our target customer was, what they wanted, or how to sell anything to them.
With affiliate marketing for bloggers, you can promote different products and services to your audience with generally no investment of money and far less investment of time. If you have trouble selling one product or your audience doesn’t like it, you can try another one.
How to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers
The best way to get started with affiliate marketing for bloggers is to begin adding affiliate links to existing articles on your website that are already popular.
The Amazon Associates program is one of the best places to start because everyone already uses and trusts Amazon. The cookie length is only 24 hours and the commissions are quite low, but it can be a good, passive way to earn a couple of hundred dollars per month.
It was we earned our first $85.62 of income and we eventually earned over $1,000/month with Amazon when our website was at its peak traffic.
In addition to linking Amazon products, you can also do a simple Google search for affiliate programs in your niche. You’ll come across various affiliate programs and networks through this method.
For example, if you were in the pet niche and ran a Google search for “pet products affiliate programs,” you’d find a link on the first page for Petco’s Affiliate Program.
You could then check out their program and see how affiliate referrals work, how much they pay, when they pay, what rules they have for promoting, etc.
There are also a whole host of other articles that will come up that compare other affiliate programs for pet supplies that you can check out for ideas. You can join as many different affiliate programs as you want through this method. Just make sure that the company and the products are a good fit for you and your audience.
What are the Best Affiliate Marketing Programs and Networks for Bloggers?
In addition to signing up for Amazon Associates and looking at individual affiliate programs, we have also used affiliate networks in our affiliate marketing for blogs strategy.
These large networks exist to connect you with affiliate companies and products. You can use their platform to search for popular products in your blog niche.
As you can see above, different programs offer different commission percentages on sales. Some of them also offer straight dollar amounts — not percentages.
But you can’t compare commission percentages alone because the sales price matters. This is why they also advertise the average EPC, or earnings per click, so you can better compare average earnings between companies.
The company above with the highest commission percentage (75%) also has the lowest earnings per click, which means that the sales price for that product(s) must be much lower than the other programs.
Some popular affiliate networks include:
These products can also be promoted in your articles, videos, emails, social media, etc.
Just make sure to read over the affiliate company’s terms and conditions before promoting the product as rules will vary between companies.
How to Make Your First $200/Month with Affiliate Marketing
As I stated earlier, these are the affiliate marketing for bloggers strategies that we used to earn our first bit of income.
It was with a combination of the strategies below that we were able to more than double our affiliate marketing revenues within the first few months of earning anything with our blog.
Below are the best places to start adding your affiliate links to your blog.
1. In Articles
The first place that you should start adding affiliate links to is your posts.
You can add affiliate links wherever you discuss relevant products or services, but perhaps the best way to get clicks and generate affiliate sales is through review articles.
Our two favorite types of review pages are:
Product Comparisons
I personally use these types of review articles mainly with Amazon products, because they are less expensive and usually an easier sell. Even if someone doesn’t decide to purchase a product from your article, the articles are still very good at getting clicks to Amazon, which can result in future sales.
Here is an example of a past review article on plant-based protein powders from my health blog:
I compare and contrast 5 popular plant-based protein powders that are linked from Amazon.
Another example of a different kind of product comparison review article is our review of MailChimp and ConvertKit for email marketing.
Review of a Specific Product or Service
When you are reviewing a specific product or service, you generally want to include the following:
A good example of this type of review article is our review of ConvertKit for email marketing. In this article, I discuss why we love ConvertKit so much and why it’s different from other email marketing services that we have used in the past.
You can also create a different type of post that educates the reader on a specific topic and offers a solution (in the form of an affiliate link) at the end.
2. In Social Media Posts
You can generally include affiliate links in Facebook posts, YouTube videos, Instagram posts, and Pinterest pins. Just make sure that you read over all rules and disclosures for each platform before you add your affiliate links.
On Facebook, I sometimes include affiliate links on our page when I link posts or videos: or when I refer students to our affiliate links when they ask about certain software:
Just remember to always specify that you are using an affiliate link! And remember to refer back to the FTC guidelines regarding this because rules are subject to change and they have become more strict and regulated over the last few years.
3. In Emails
You can link affiliate products in your articles all day long, but selling affiliate products in your emails is a way to really step up your game.
Sending emails to your audience allows you a chance to build a better connection with your reader by…
The people on your email list are going to be the people that know you best and trust you a bit more, which means they will be more likely to purchase from you.
You can use affiliate links in your emails in two different ways:
We’ve done both with great success!
Advanced Affiliate Marketing: 6 Tips for Making Six Figures
For all of you preferred video learners out there, here is a video on Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers from our YouTube Channel below.
Affiliate marketing is a huge part of our monetization strategy for our business, and we’ve learned a lot along the journey to the $20k/month mark. These are our top tips below for earning six figures through affiliate marketing on your blog.
1. Pay Attention to Your Competitors
There are quite a few successful blogs out there making six figures solely from affiliate marketing, but here is the interesting thing about it. You also won’t be able to find many that disclose specifics on affiliate earnings.
This is because affiliate marketing for bloggers is highly competitive and relatively easy to copy because the products exist out there for anyone to market.
It’s a little different when it’s your own product and only you can promote it.
It’s for this reason that most people are pretty tight-lipped about their specific strategies for affiliate marketing for blogging. But even if you don’t know how much they are making, pay attention to what your competitors are promoting and how they are promoting it.