Affiliate Marketing and Blogging

Affiliate Marketing and Blogging

Affiliate marketing and blogging is an excellent way to earn a good income while having fun with a home based business.

Before I talk about blogging, a quick review on affiliate marketing…what it is and your niche.

Affiliate Marketing Basic

Affiliate marketing is an advertising model where a company pays compensation to third-party publishers (you) to generate traffic or leads to the company’s products and services.

The third-party publishers are referred to as affiliates and the commission fee incentivizes them to find ways to promote the company and the companies products.

Affiliate marketing has increased in prominence with the internet age. Amazon popularized the practice by creating an affiliate marketing program where websites and bloggers put links to the Amazon page for a product being reviewed or discussed in order to receive advertising fees when a purchase is made.

In this sense, affiliate marketing is essentially a pay for performance marketing program where the act of selling a consumer on a product is outsourced across a potentially vast network.

Affiliate Marketing Predates The Internet

Affiliate marketing has been around for longer than you think.

It didn’t just start with the invention of the internet, although that is where it really started to gain ground and take off.

Let’s take a look at how the history of affiliate marketing – how it developed and how it is different today from when it originally started.

The internet has made this kind of marketing more profitable and easier to expand your business. So while the history of affiliate marketing really started before the internet, it’s the internet that made this marketing strategy widely available as a business model to the masses.

The patent for affiliate marketing as we know it today was granted to William J. Tobin in 1989. He is a pioneer in the history of affiliate marketing.

William Tobin, set up the first affiliate marketing program ever for his company PC Flowers & Gifts.  He created several startup companies, which eventually led to PC Flowers & Gifts. They are known for setting up affiliate marketing for today’s floral company FTD, who delivers a good chunk of flower orders across the country. Mr. Tobin created the framework for what we have come to know as the history of affiliate marketing as well as modern day affiliate marketing. It has changed a bit over the years, but the basic concept is still the same.

With the introduction of the Internet, the world of digital marketing, analytics and cookies that have made affiliate marketing a billion-dollar industry.

A company running an affiliate marketing program can track which links bring in leads and, through internal analytics, see how many leads are converted into sales.

Find Your Interest

Affiliates are most successful when the products they promote match the interests of their followers and subscribers.

In addition, many successful affiliate marketers advise, recommending and promoting only products that the affiliate is personally familiar with. That’s because familiarity with the product, program, or service helps build trust between the affiliate and end-user.

Becoming a part of an affiliate network is an excellent strategy for bloggers looking to up their current income or even just to begin actually making money from their blog.

There are several options when it comes to affiliate marketing as well as strategies for making affiliate marketing work for you.

Below I will teach you what is affiliate marketing, examples of affiliate marketing in blogging, affiliate strategies and the top affiliate networks to join.

Affiliate Marketing and Blogging

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways people make money online and for some it can be a passive income once established.

It is a strategy where an individual partners with a business in order to make a commission by referring readers or visitors to a business’s particular product or service. But that really is quite a simple explanation. To be really successful at making money with affiliate marketing there is a little more to it.

In the case of blogging, a blogger will become an affiliate of a selected company and make money from being an affiliate by placing a link, button or banner within a blog post that will lead the readers to that affiliate products or services.

A good blogger and affiliate will utilize a number of different marketing channels to promote content such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter….

What does affiliate marketing look like when you’re a blogger?

An example of this could be blatantly creating a post that is actually about the company you are affiliated with or you could deftly weave the product or service into a post that is on a related topic.

An example of creating a post? Let’s say you are a health food blogger and one of the companies you are an affiliate of sells health food products.

In your article or post you would include a button, link or banner ad that would take the reader directly to that product and they could order it based on your recommendations.

An example of a link would be something like this:  Health Food

In this example I linked to Whipidia.  Of course you would link to your affiliate company.

If you would like to take a more subtle approach, include a product or service from your company that relates into your blog post.

For example, let’s say that you are a wine connoisseur and that is what your blog is based around. In any post that is enticing your readers to open up a good bottle of Merlot or what have you, it would be wise to embed an ad for a quality, easy-to-use wine opener, wine glasses or stoppers that keep the wine fresh.

The best is to approach content creation like you are trying to explain something to a friend or family member.

Don’t write like a salesperson!  As I said, write like a friend who is recommending a good wine.

Yes, you are in fact selling something, but your blog doesn’t suddenly have to turn into a commercial or take on a voice that may be causing your readers to click away.

Often, bloggers will talk about how the product or service was beneficial to them while it relates to the blog’s topic.

How Do Affiliate Marketing Bloggers Get Paid?

Well believe it or not, an affiliate marketing business is probably one of the most profitable you’d likely to come across. Set up correctly, it can be very lucrative. An affiliate’s payment is based off of affiliate commission from the company they are an affiliate of.

Affiliate marketing for bloggers is most effective when you, the blogger, have a strong audience that relies on you for trustworthy information. Building your audience is a key component to success (and passive income) through affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing bloggers can get paid in different ways, based on different performance factors. The three most common ways to earn money through affiliate marketing are:

• Pay per sale: This is a commission-based payment method where you earn a set commission based on each sale that comes from a referral visitor from your website. The more sales you generate for the merchant, the more money you make.
• Pay per lead: Merchants pay you each time you bring a lead to the company. This method is used when a user signs up for a program of some sort – a trial, demo, newsletter, etc.
• Pay per click: Click-through affiliate marketing pays you each time a visitor clicks on the merchant’s ad that’s on your blog. However, not each click converts to a sale and can become quite expensive, so the pay-per-click method is rarely offered by merchants.

How To Grow A Blog Audience

Before you can make money with affiliate marketing with a blogging platform, you need to grow your blog audience.

If your blog is brand new, it will take some time before you get enough traffic to monetize your site with affiliate links. At this point is where many affiliates seem to fail.

A new blog can take weeks or months to be recognized by Google.  The best way to get Google to recognize your blog is to write good content weekly.  Have patience, focus on your product, be consistence and promote.  There are other ways to get Google to recognize your blog such as Google’s Search Console.

That’s a subject in itself and not covered in this article.

You’ll need to incorporate a number of tactics that have the potential to increase your reader base.  Here are 5 tactics:

1. Publish Outstanding Content.

It’s very simple – if your content isn’t that good or can be found somewhere else, your blog will not be successful. Period. Do not simply post an article because it’s Wednesday and some “guru” says you should blog mid-week. Write something of value. Give your readers something they can use so they leave your blog feeling more enlightened than when they arrived.

Keep a friendly informative tone in your writing.  As mentioned, don’t just post for posting sake.  Produced good readable content.  The more you write, the better you will become.

Understand your competitor’s strategy.  Google and find site within your product niche.  See how the product content and the competitor’s keywords for ranking.

2. Reach Out To Other Bloggers.

Make mutual connections with other bloggers by reaching out and engaging with them on social media, email, or face-to-face communication if possible. Leave comments on their blogs. The key is to provide value! If you can, help with link building, and guest posts contributions. If you can show that you’re a valuable resource, they may help you in the future.

3. Guest Blogger.

Find a number of top blogs in your niche and submit your articles to be posted as a guest blogger. Introduce yourself and get to know the blogger before sending your pitch to increase your likelihood of being picked up.  Guest blogging will help increase awareness about your blog, but you also need to include an author bio (typically positioned at the bottom of the blog) with a link connecting readers to your website or an opt-in page to receive an email when you post new articles.

4. Perform Keyword Research.

Although your blog posts should focus on a very specific niche and related topics, you need to know how well these articles can potentially rank on Google. Use tool like Google Keyword Planner or my favorite, Jaaxy Keyword tool.  Jaaxy is very powerful and much easier to use.  View your target keyword’s monthly search volume and competitive metrics when deciding on the blog title. Remember, the target keyword should be used in your META title and throughout your body copy.

A great SEO tactic is to do create one “featured article” where you send all guest post and link building traffic. This post will be the cornerstone of your website and you should focus on getting as many links as possible to this URL. Aim for a target keyword here with 25,000+ searches per month on  Jaaxy and make sure to shorten the blog URL to only include the focus keyword.

5. Get Social.

Make it easy for readers to share your content directly from your blog with social media share icons.  Shared your content to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, or other platforms. Place the buttons before, after, or floating to the side of your content for the most use.

Once you build a solid audience through your blog and social content, you have more validity with advertisers and will be able to join more affiliate programs.

Summery Note

My Top Advice If You Want To Become An Affiliate Marketing Success Story

Have patience! That is my #1 tip for those that want to become their own affiliate marketing success story. You have to be patient. This is a business just like any other businesses. Most small businesses takes, a few years to truly start turning a profit? Affiliate marketing absolutely is a legitimate business that can earn you well into the 6 or even 7 figures, but you should not expect that to happen without months, of hard work and consistent effort.

The vast majority of affiliate marketers never find success simply because they give up. Most people are very motivated in the first few weeks, but then life gets in the way, other things take priority, and affiliate marketing businesses become deserted and go nowhere.

If your ready to become an affiliate superstar, I suggest you look at Wealthy Affiliate and the 7-Day FREE Starter Package.  Leave your credit card behind and sign up for 7-days.

If you like Wealthy Affiliate’s program, then and only then become a Wealthy Affiliate Member.

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PS:  Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I may earn a commission. Know that I only recommend products, tools, services and learning resources I’ve personally used and believe are genuinely helpful, not because of the small commissions I make if you decide to purchase them. Most of all, I would never advocate for buying something that you can’t afford or that you’re not yet ready to implement.