If you are a blogger, then you know how difficult it is to make money blogging. On the flip side, if you are looking for ways to boost your earnings and make your blog visits more appealing for potential advertisers, then this blog post will be of help. This article presents a list of ideas that can easily be implemented on any type of website and blog or blog-related site in order to increase the chances of ads being shown on the relevant page. If you have a profile in Spotifystorm, you can get vast amounts of your audience from there. Not all of the ideas listed in this article will work for any blog, but if you are looking to make your own blog more lucrative, then you should try at least some of these out. Let’s know about them!
How To Choose A Niche For Affiliate Marketing
Is Affiliate Marketing Worth It
Making Sense Of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing For Dummies: A Basic Outline
What Does An Affiliate Sale Need?
Affiliate Vocabulary: What Does It All Mean?
The affiliate code
Tracking code
The merchant
Affiliate networks
Commission
Conversion
How Can You Find Affiliates?
How to Become And Affiliate
The Three Ways Affiliate Programs Measure Pay
What are the best ways to promote your links?
Review a product
List posts
Tutorial Posts
Case study
Round up posts
Interviews
Ultimate guides
Applying it to old posts
Don’t forget your disclosure
What they don’t tell you about SEO
Usually traffic and affiliate income are positively correlated.
What To Avoid As An Affiliate
Final Advice
Many people enjoy blogging as their pastime. Turning that pastime into money is priceless. If you’re already blogging, then one of the best things you can do to earn money through your blog is affiliate marketing.
How To Choose A Niche For Affiliate Marketing
It doesn’t even matter what niche you’re in. Whether you’re in the food, puppies, crackers, parakeets, soccer gear, or any other niche imaginable, it’s never too late or too ‘niche’ to get into affiliate marketing.
Is Affiliate Marketing Worth It
You can be entirely new to affiliate marketing or a veteran at blogging and still achieve success. But, before we get into how exactly affiliate marketing programs can work for your blog, you need to make sure you have a blog up and running first. We’ve made this an easy step-by-step affiliate marketing guide for beginners and broke it down into key sections.
Making Sense Of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is simply promoting and shedding positive light on a product that you love because of how helpful it’s been to you. That promotion can come in the form of blog posts, emails, social media posts, or downloadable guides. For now, we’ll stick with blog posts. It’s a great (and the easiest) place to start. The way it works, once you’ve applied to become an affiliate of a product and have been accepted (more on that later), you’ll get a link unique to you that you can use in your blog posts. That unique link is how companies are able to track your earnings and pay you.
Affiliate Marketing For Dummies: A Basic Outline
Make a post about a product + add a unique affiliate tracking link throughout the post + have people click on the link and make a purchase = You make a small commission because of that purchase. So now imagine, if you take that process and add a lot of people reading and clicking, you can quickly find that you’re on your way to growing an income through affiliate sales.
Now, it’s easier said than done. Why? Because a lot of what decides your affiliate success isn’t necessarily how many affiliate programs you are a part of but how well you market them. It’s achievable nonetheless.
What Does An Affiliate Sale Need?
There are a few factors that go into making the affiliate sale like:
The amount of traffic to your site: Some of your affiliate success will depend on how much traffic gets to your site and clicks your link (more on that later).
Sharing your blog content strategically: Constantly putting your posts in front of an audience that wants to read it is important to making affiliate sales work.
Including the links in your post the best way possible: You don’t want to be spammy with the way you include your links in your posts and have it be a turn off for anyone reading them.
The great thing about affiliate marketing is that, if you were to do nothing else for your readers but give value and add the links, that’s really all the ‘salesmanship’ you need to do. That’s because if the product is good, and you share it with your audience in a trustworthy and helpful way, the product can just ‘sell itself.’
For example, you wrote a guide on how to use Product A and your experience with it. You mention the good, the bad, and the ugly.
These are the benefits that come with that post:
It provides value to your audience by giving them ideas along with directions.
It promotes a product you’ve come to know, use, and possibly love.
Affiliate Vocabulary: What Does It All Mean?
Sometimes diving into making your first affiliate sale can be intimidating because of all the jargon you come across. Here are the basics:
The affiliate code
This is the code your affiliate will provide you with to put in your site and keep track of all your sales.
It can look a little something like this: https://myuniqueaffiliatelink.com/&%$+=1763896469
and it’s what you would copy and paste into your site.
Tracking code
This refers to the unique ID that is included in the link you use on your site to send traffic to the merchant.The ID helps keep track of your earnings and referrals.
For example, your tracking code would be the ref: ID17653-2 part of your link >> https://myuniqueaffiliatelink.com/&%ref: ID17653-2.
The merchant
The merchant is the maker or the original seller of the product. They are the ones either directly providing you the option of applying to get your affiliate link or can go through affiliate networks, which is the next definition.
Affiliate networks
Picture an affiliate network as a huge umbrella where individual merchants can participate and interact. When you apply to become part of an affiliate network, it becomes easier to find, organize, and apply to many affiliate merchants. It makes the affiliate process easier for both merchant and affiliate.
Commission
The amount you’ve agreed to get paid for making a sale, a conversion, or a click (which is predetermined by the merchant before getting assigned your link).
Conversion
A conversion is the fulfillment of the desired action through that link.
It might be a click, a sign-up, or a purchase. It can differ from merchant to merchant.
How Can You Find Affiliates?
Many are right in front of you. The process can be as easy as a simple Google search for a product you’re using that you would have no problem promoting. Here’s an example:
Vivian is a foodie. She loves blogging about food, dreams about food, and thinks about food all day. What’s a food product she constantly uses and loves? Maybe she loves organic coconut oil. She uses a specific market to buy several organic products and absolutely loves them, their discounts, and their customer service. She should check if they have an affiliate program. A quick google search for the market name followed by “affiliate program” yields their affiliate program webpage. It’s the very first thing that comes up in the search. Typically, she would be presented with the option to sign up.
How to Become And Affiliate
If you’ve followed the same steps as Vivian from our example, simply fill in your information and usually they’ll let you know by email in a short period of time (sometimes that same day) if you’re eligible or not.
Every affiliate program is different. Not all of them will ask the same questions (for example some may or may not ask “ number of unique page visitors a month”) and some will have specific criteria before assigning you an affiliate link.
That’s why it’s important to make a list of all the products you use to do a quick Google search for their affiliate programs. Some will have them, some will not.
The Three Ways Affiliate Programs Measure Pay
Pay-per-sale: This payment model is the most basic and easy to understand. You simply get paid according to the amount of direct sales you generate through your unique referral link (they have a way of storing cookies and tracking it so it stays accurate to your own account).
Pay-per-lead: The pay-per-lead method isn’t necessarily tied to the amount of direct sales you make. Instead it decides payment based on if a certain action was accomplished through your unique link. That action can be anything from signing up for a newsletter or making a download. You’ll be informed of what method of payment is used when you sign up to your affiliate so you aren’t left in the dark as to how you’re getting paid.
Pay-per-click: And finally, there’s payment per the amount of clicks on your link—which is pretty straight forward.
What are the best ways to promote your links?
It’s a good marketing strategy to come up with creative ideas to promote an affiliate link when blogging (instead of just randomly plopping it in your post).
Here are some ideas to get your affiliate brainstorm going:
Review a product
After you’ve researched, applied to, and have been accepted to affiliate programs for products within your niche you can begin blogging a review on that product.
Reviews are great because no one wants to buy a product blind sighted. We love seeing other people use it and look at their experience before feeling like we’ve made an informed decision when we decide to make a purchase.
When writing your review, think about:
What drew your attention to it at first?
What could the product have done better?
How do you use the product in your own life?
Would you recommend it?
Is the customer support great?
If you switched from a different product, what made you do it?
Add some bright and clear pictures to the post, along with some honest insight, and you’ve got yourself your first affiliate post.
List posts
Did you ever buy the bags of mixed candy that brought all kinds of treats in one big bag? That’s kind of how list posts work. It’s an excellent resource with bits of information all in one place. It’s such a time saver, and it adds so much value.
When you write your list posts with your affiliate links in mind, here are some blogging ideas to use:
Is a holiday coming up? Put together the perfect gift guide.
Make a complete list of the blogging tools you use to stay organized
Are you an avid course buyer? You can make a list of all of them with mini reviews included
Tutorial Posts
Tutorial posts are superb method of blogging because they are two things: major problem solvers that offer solutions and they come from a relatable perspective. Is there an online program you use that people could benefit from a tutorial?
How about a recipe tutorial? Or a savings plan tutorial?Or how to groom your pet seamlessly while using X product? The possibilities are truly endless with a little (or a lot of) brainstorming and planning.
Case study
Case studies are so valuable because they provide results driven data from personal experience. The fact that it comes from a fellow blogger makes it that much more down-to-earth. For example, a case study can be written on how upgrading your site lengthened your visitor time with a before and after comparison. You can talk about the programs you used and how helpful they were (while appropriately including their affiliate links) in the process.
Round up posts
Round up posts are different from a list post because they are usually made around the idea of “the best of something” that goes further than simply compiling a helpful list.
Interviews
Used an online product and know the blogger/creator? Reach out to them for an interview. People love to get a look ‘behind the scenes’ on what it took to create, market and maintain an online product. An interview is a great way to bring awareness to a product you love in a value filled way while endorsing your affiliate link to that product.
Ultimate guides
Make a guide to trump all guides. And add the affiliate links that are relevant to it. As an easy example, you’ll see many bloggers have a ‘How To Start A Blog’ guide.
This is because the moment a blogger is trying to start their first blog is the moment they most need guidance, and that’s where guides are super helpful.
Applying it to old posts
If you’ve applied and gotten accepted to affiliate programs and have a backlog of old posts that could benefit from these links, it’s a good idea to add them. You’ll have to go back and read through to see where exactly you can insert a post without having it seem like you randomly stuck it there (and who knows, make some grammar corrections while you’re at it).
There are always creative ways to include and relate a link whether you’re updating a story to how you did something, made a list of the best tools to use, or happened to mention how you got started using a certain product.
Don’t forget your disclosure
When you publish anything with an affiliate link, it’s important to include a disclosure denoting your content contains affiliate links. It’s not the best practice to exclude them. One of the key concerns is making it visible in your content.
What they don’t tell you about SEO
SEO (search engine optimization) is when you format your blog posts to rank for keywords that people search for on Google to give your post a better chance of appearing on the first page of a given search result. Why is this an important part of making an income with blogging or affiliate marketing? To be able to make a formidable income through affiliates in your blog posts the amount of traffic you get is very important.
And to increase that traffic significantly while thinking long term, your best bet is to set your posts up to rank better with SEO. According to Moz, the first 5 results on a Google search get 68% of the clicks. That’s a hefty chunk of traffic. You want to make sure you rank as best as you can to get a part of it.
It’s key to note that the most reliable source of constant traffic is using SEO (as well as building your own email list) to rank in search engines.
While you might be doing well with Pinterest traffic, or social media engagement, those traffic sources are prone to algorithm changes out of your control which can make your traffic fluctuate. Only relying on social media channels to increase income through affiliates is a roller coaster game to play. It makes your traffic less reliable and by default your affiliate income as well. Though we’re not saying you can’t make a killing with affiliate income solely through social media traffic. In fact many bloggers do just that.
Usually traffic and affiliate income are positively correlated.
This means the higher the traffic the higher the chance of people clicking on your links and increasing your overall affiliate income. Being able to do SEO well takes a lot of knowledge and research. Neil Patel has an awesome guide for SEO beginners you can check out to make sure you are formatting your blogging website as best as you can.
What To Avoid As An Affiliate
You don’t want to randomly post links to a product for no good reason. Ever seen sites with ugly boatloads of links everywhere that were clearly put together for sole profit without giving any sort of value? You don’t want that to be you. It’s not good for your credibility, your business lifespan, and your brand. Remember you’re blogging, not selling.
Weaving in affiliate links throughout your posts seamlessly is the key to making your links more enticing and clickable.
This is hard to do for products you don’t actually use yourself without seeming inauthentic or salesy. That’s why, when working with affiliate links, it’s better to only endorse products you use and would have no trouble recommending naturally, whether you made a profit off it or not.
Final Advice
Some relatively easy to join as an affiliate, you have to make a sale within a certain number of days after getting accepted, otherwise they’ll shut down your account and you’ll have to wait a while before you can reactivate it.
Depending on the affiliate, you can expect a delay in getting affiliate payouts, especially when you’re first starting out (sometimes for about a month or longer)
This is just the beginning. While in theory affiliate marketing is quite easy, it can take some creativity in setting up so you can market it successfully.
Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to start making money while blogging, and can serve as a gateway for future income streams to ultimately grow your blog income. When you’ve gone through the basics, there are also strategies for sending email with affiliate links incorporated, creating sales funnels for your links, and using them on social media. Some bloggers go on to establish closer relationships with their affiliates and even go on to negotiate discount rates for their audience.
