How to build an affiliate business through blogging? Blogging is a cheap way to build an affiliate business by creating written content. Building an affiliate business means selling other people’s products and services. There’s various ways you can do this and blogging is only one of them. Blogging is a slow but cheap strategy of building an audience and providing them with value. Over time, your audience will get to know you through your blog posts and eventually trust you (hopefully at least)!
When this happens, they are much more likely to buy something you recommend, (if it serves their needs). Blogging is a strategy I’ve used over the years to build my affiliate business. There’s been times when things weren’t going as expected and times when the sales were simply flooding in. The key to making blogging work for you is to be consistent with it. Over time, with enough effort in the right direction you’ll start generating traffic. Once you get visitors in large enough numbers you’ll start seeing sales dropping into your inbox.
There’s nothing quite like the feeling of having made a sale online through blogging. When you make it work, it’s truly inspiring. But before this can happen there’s some work to be done. So here’s how you can build an affiliate business through blogging.
How To Build An Affiliate Business Through Blogging – Your Topic
There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and this means that in nearly every niche there’s a tonne of competition. Some niches/topics are less competitive than others of course and this can give you an advantage. However, I would suggest that the most important decision to make is the topic of your blog. Your topic will determine a number of other things such as how you will monetise your blog, what you’ll blog about and how long you can sustain the efforts needed to become profitable.
Choose a bad topic and you could be blogging for a long time with no way to monetise it. Or, worse still pick a topic you’re not that into, and you’ll end up throwing in the towel! There’s nothing worse than trying to come up with ideas for your blog when you have no interest in your topic! I once built a website around the subject of mushroom harvesting and I lasted about 6 months before I threw the whole idea in the bin!
For one, it wasn’t a profitable niche. I couldn’t easily monetise it. Another reason my blog failed was because I didn’t care about mushroom harvesting! I just wanted a profitable website and the topic came up and filled a need. I learned a valuable lesson though from choosing a niche I wasn’t that interested in. Don’t do it – at least not as a blogger. If you’re a blogger, you need to keep creating new content over and over. So if you don’t care about your topic, or you don’t at least have an interest in it, you’re not going to last very long. Someone more passionate will soon take your place and take all your traffic too!
How To Build An Affiliate Business Through Blogging – How To Choose Your Topic
So how can you choose a topic you’re passionate about if you’re not sure of your niche? Well start with you. Ask yourself what you’re about and what kind of interests you have. Look at products you have bought online and things you’re interested in. You can also find products you’re passionate about and that can inspire your interest. There’s millions of affiliate products you can use to generate an income online. So look at the kind of products you want to promote as a way in to your niche.
It took me a long time to find my niche and even start this website. I built hundreds of websites in various niches before this one came about. But it shouldn’t be so much hard work really. If you can imagine yourself writing about your topic for several years, you’re probably on track for the right topic.
Once you have found your ideal topic to write about, it’s worth looking for an affiliate product you can promote from your blog. There’s other ways you can monetise a blog too, such as with your own products or through advertising (Google Adsense, for example). You can even create your own ebook and sell it from your website.
How To Build An Affiliate Business Through Blogging – Choosing A Product To Sell From Your Blog
Ideally find a good affiliate product to sell from your blog. Adsense is a difficult way to monetise a blog and you’ll need a tonne of traffic even to make tiny amounts with it. Selling your own ebook can be tricky too because most bloggers will offer ebooks for free. So selling one can be difficult. But with the right affiliate product/s it can be much easier to make blogging pay, especially if you find high quality products which pay recurring income.
A recurring income product you can sell from your blog is worth it’s weight in gold! Subscription products which offer high value, such as software and training products are a good idea. They give you more ability to create a sustainable income quite quickly. However, it’s more important to choose a product which aligns with your topic. That way, more of your visitors and followers will be interested in it. Ideally find a product to sell which ticks multiple boxes: high value, subscription, high ticket, aligned with your topic.
See also best affiliate products to sell.
Blogging – An Analogy
Blogging is a long term affair. I like the analogy I often use which is to compare blogging to the Chinese bamboo tree. With the Chinese bamboo tree, the plant has a five year gestation period before it even breaks through the soil. So if you were unaware you have a Chinese bamboo tree, you would likely believe it to be dead, and throw it away before it’s had chance to come to fruition.
The same can be said of many bloggers. You have to put in some time upfront before you can benefit from the fruit of blogging. This is why I started this blog post with the blog topic as being the most important thing. If you don’t love your topic, you’re hardly likely to keep going for long enough to see the benefits.
More likely you’ll quit before anything much happens. But choose a topic you’re passionate about and you’ll enjoy the process. It will be a much more enjoyable journey and you’ll stick with it because you’re enjoying it, not only because you want the “fruits”.
After 5 years of careful watering and fertilising the Chinese Bamboo breaks through the soil. Now I’m not saying it will take 5 years of blogging to earn money from it, it will likely take less time. But it might take several months before you start to see the “shoots” of your “plant”.
After the Chinese Bamboo breaks the soil through it can grow 90 feet in only five weeks. Blogging can be incredibly lucrative if you take the time and keep going with it. The results are linear according to your efforts, but will grow exponentially over time as you keep putting effort in.
Building An Email List From A Blog
The main key to making money from a blog, once you have found your niche and a good product to sell, is to get your blog visitors to join your email list. From a blog post, someone only has a few minutes to sell their product. After that they have left your website, potentially forever.
But if you can capture their email address, by offering something valuable in return, you have a potentially unlimited amount of time to re-engage them with your products and content.
People can buy from you years after joining your email list but the same is simply not true for someone who has landed on your blog and left. So the next step in building an affiliate business from blogging is to build an email list. See also the power of email marketing.
To build your email list from your blog offer something as a giveaway to your visitors. Make sure every visitor can see your offer. I use (an annoying) popup on this website to show people my ebook, for example! While it can be annoying, people can clearly see what’s on offer so if it’s a good fit for them, they will often opt in to your email list.
You can offer free video courses, ebooks, pdf downloads and the like. The main key is that your offer is free and automated to encourage visitors to join your email list. If you don’t have an email autoresponder (used for list building) you can get one here.
Getting Traffic From Blogging
Getting traffic from blogging is one of the major challenges of it. There’s a few ways you can get people to visit your blog posts:
- SEO – Search Engine Optimisation allows Google’s search “spiders” to index your content and rank it (potentially) for certain keywords on the SERPS – Search Engines Results Pages
- Social media – by sharing your posts (and getting visitors to share) you can build quite a following simply from the various social media sites you use
- Paid advertising – if you want to get faster traffic, simply buy some. You can direct traffic based on keywords or even your blog posts (using dynamic advertising which crawls your blog and creates a suitable advert)
- Email list – the email list is vital for the growth of a blog because it allows you to be in control of your traffic. Send new blog posts to your email subscribers.
- Referral traffic – you can get referral links from other websites and people sharing your content. You can also guest post to build links and blog comment on other people’s websites.
Creating Content
But before any of that can happen you need to create content for your website. Blogging is simply writing on a website. Blog comes from WeB Log. It’s a log on the web!
Before you start creating content it’s worth thinking about your product/s that you’re going to sell. Ask yourself what kind of questions your prospective customers might have. What are they looking for and why would they visit your website. Your blog should attract people who are going to show an interest in your product ultimately. Otherwise you won’t make any money from blogging.
So start with the search intent of your “perfect” customers – or customer avatar. A customer “avatar” is the kind of person you want to attract who is likely to buy from you. By creating high quality content (which stands the test of time) and which targets those kinds of people, you have a greater chance of becoming (and staying) profitable with your blogging.
Start by using Google’s keyword planner to “zone” in on long term keywords which might be used by your target audience. There’s more on this strategy in my post finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
Also see my post best free blog plugins for WordPress. SEO plugins help you write SEO friendly content which have more chance of ranking on Google (and other search engines). You can also find plugins which allow visitors to share your posts on social media – giving each post another boost, both for traffic and SEO!
Summary
So that’s a short guide of how to build an affiliate business through blogging. It’s a great way to earn some extra income in the beginning and if you’re serious you can even replace a full time income through blogging if you stick with it for long enough!
For a step by step training and online business course you can check out my recommended course here. I would definitely recommend getting some training and educating yourself about the best products to use to build a profitable affiliate business.
Blogging is just one strategy to do so but there are others too. Paid marketing tactics are a much faster way to build a profitable online business from scratch through using affiliate products and email marketing.
