Affiliate marketing vs blogging? Which is better? Affiliate marketers are often bloggers too and the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Bloggers though can earn money from blogs in another way – through advertising. This makes blogging quite versatile since you can place adverts on any content you might have. Affiliate marketing on the other hand tends to be more specific. An affiliate website is often built with a specific purpose in mind – to sell a specific affiliate product.
Affiliates can also use paid marketing and drive traffic towards landing pages. There, they get visitors to subscribe to an email list and follow up with email marketing. But this too can be done from a blog of course!
Blogging can be done in a pretty much any area. If you have an interest or passion, you can start a blog around it. So, many people start blogs around passion projects. Blogging is often the first step for anyone wanting to turn a passion into an income.
Affiliate Marketing Vs Blogging
Blogging is definitely a slow, long term strategy. Many bloggers do what they do for pleasure, rather than for making an income; and an income is definitely not guaranteed from either a blog or affiliate marketing.
As an affiliate marketer and a blogger, I can say that blogging can be incredibly frustrating if your sole reason for it is to make money. After building a number of blogs in areas which I wasn’t particularly interested, I would say that’s a pretty bad strategy. Blogging only for money is demoralising, especially if you’re not interested in your subject. But it can be fun if you enjoy your topic.
Successful bloggers therefore usually love their topic. Their blogs marry up with their interests. This means they can blog around a topic for a long period of time. This is usually what is required to make a blog successful. Top earning bloggers have usually been at it for years, not weeks.
Affiliate marketing offers other faster strategies which you can implement to make money through online selling. With affiliate marketing, you can use paid marketing, email marketing, video and a whole host of other strategies for making money. Blogging is a strategy used by affiliates too, but a long term and mostly slow one which requires a lot of work and consistency.
Blogging And Google Adsense
Google Adsense is the “go-to” advertising platform for bloggers. Adsense lets you place code on a blog and earn advertising revenue from clicks made on them by your visitors. The main problem with this earning strategy is that you need thousands of daily visitors to your blog to make it worthwhile financially. But if you love your blogging, why not turn it into an income if you can?
You only earn tiny amounts from advertising clicks on a blog. This is why many bloggers turn to affiliate marketing to monetise their blogs. You may need 1000 clicks to earn the same as you would from one affiliate sale! So, if you can turn your visitors into buyers, you can make more from affiliate marketing in less time and with less traffic.
Traffic is a major issue for many bloggers and affiliate marketers. Without it, you won’t make any money whatever your monetisation method is. Bloggers attract traffic organically, although they can use paid marketing too. Their main method is using SEO (search engine optimisation) and the goal is to have free traffic find their blog posts. In order for this to happen, they spend a lot of time creating and sharing content.
Blogging is a great idea if you enjoy writing. But if the idea of spending months or years putting out content and plugging it on social media isn’t for you, affiliate marketing might be a better option.
Affiliate Marketing Options
Affiliate marketing is the business of promoting other people’s products and services online. Even with high ticket affiliate products to sell, you still need a method to put them in front of people. For some this means using paid marketing and building an email list. You can use a blog too, which is what many affiliates do. Affiliates use YouTube, social media platforms and a whole host of strategies to earn money from the internet. So if blogging is not for you, but you want to earn online, affiliate marketing might be an option.
See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.
Learn more about affiliate marketing, check out the free video series by clicking on the image below.
