Affiliate marketing programs for bloggers can cover pretty much any topic. You should choose a product which is suitable for your audience, according to your blog topic. So if you’re blogging about sports cars, for example, it’s not a good idea to sell fertiliser from your blog! You won’t sell any fertiliser to car enthusiasts because that’s not what they are looking for when they visit your blog. This brings us to an important issue about aligning your blog topic with your product. Get this wrong at your peril!
Ideally when someone comes to your blog, you’ll have products and services which are useful and valuable to them. They’ll see your products and buy, or purchase from your email list after signing up for your freebie – an ebook or pdf download typically.
Affiliate Marketing Programs For Bloggers
What is your blog about? What kind of person visits your blog and what kind of products would interest them based on this?
Ask yourself these questions to determine which product or service you should choose for your blog. Then do a search for “{your topic} affiliate programs” on the search engines. You should find many since there’s so many affiliate programs available to join.
So if your blog is about bonsai trees for example, do a Google search for “bonsai tree affiliate program”.
If you’re yet to choose a topic for your blog, consider what you would be comfortable blogging about for the longer term. What are your interests and passions? See also affiliate marketing through blogging and blog niches that make money.
Affiliate Marketing Programs For Bloggers – Choosing Products For Your Topic
Your choice of affiliate marketing program is pretty important too. If you pick a bad product or don’t get a good match, it can be harder to make money from your blogging. Clickbank is a good place to find a lot of digital affiliate products, but there’s also a lot of products which don’t do very well on Clickbank too. It’s a good idea to research your products well before choosing it. A bad product won’t sell, and this could be for a number of reasons: bad sales page, poor product, or negative reviews etc.
Join Clickbank and you can browse through hundreds of digital products in the Clickbank marketplace.
Here’s another way to find products you might want to sell from your blog. Looking at this particular product notice the Grav: 1.51 under the product listing. This means very few affiliates promote this and this can be for a few reasons. This might be good if there’s less competition for SEO (search engine optimisation). But it might also mean it doesn’t sell well.
Choose Products You Purchase Yourself
The best way to align affiliate products with your blogging is to choose products which you have purchased (and value) yourself. If you’re recommending a nice restaurant to a friend, you really should have been there yourself! The same goes for affiliate products. If you have personally bought a product, you’re also in a much better position to recommend it to your website visitors and email subscribers.
When I started out as an affiliate, I just promoted affiliate links willy nilly! I didn’t buy the products often but was just desperate to make money from selling them. Unfortunately this was a difficult learning curve and many products I choose didn’t sell at all.
Having great products which are hugely valuable is a must if you want to make consistent sales. It’s also worth choosing products which offer recurring commissions if you can too. Affiliate products with recurring commissions are usually things such as training and education tools, memberships and software type products.
Offer A Giveaway Product On Your Blog
Whatever affiliate program you decide to join is a representation of you. Your blogging style and content will draw in an audience who should be a good match for your product. However, not all products sell directly from a marketing banner placed on the side of your website.
Sometimes you need to build a relationship with your audience over a longer time period. With physical products you can find on Amazon, it’s much clearer cut what value your products offer. So if you have a photography blog, for example, you can sell cameras and camera equipment from Amazon. You can sell photography courses perhaps too.
With digital products such as trainings and courses, the product value is typically less obvious than with a physical products from Amazon. In the case of digital products (trainings, courses and software), you may have to take a different approach to marketing from your blog. The power of email marketing can help you build relationships with your subscribers and sell less tangible products like these.
To build an email list of subscribers from a blog you’ll need to offer some valuable freebie giveaway which connects you to your affiliate products in some way. On my site I offers a number of ebooks and a free video series explaining the different affiliate business models you can use to build an income online.
Not Started Yet?
If you’ve not started blogging yet and are yet to choose your topic, it’s worth giving it some serious consideration. Blogging is a long term marketing strategy and great fun if you choose a good topic you align with. But it can be tough to earn from if you don’t get the traction you need, or if you choose a topic which is not your passion.
I made the mistake of building a blog with the sole intention of making money from it. I didn’t build it around my passions! I found a domain name “whentoharvestgarlic.com” and starting building content. 6 months in and I was demoralised and burned out. I didn’t give a hoot about Garlic harvesting which made the topic hard to write for and less than a joy. I quit after a year and my site slowly dropped off the search engines!
It was a valuable lesson. So if you’re thinking of picking a topic just for the money it could make, I’d advise you to pick something else which you’re passionate about instead. That way writing is easier and more fun, and you can sustain the necessary effort over the longer term.
The best micro niche for blogging is definitely one you’re passionate about.