Can you really make money from your blog as an affiliate marketer? While blogging is competitive, plenty of bloggers make a good living through blogging. With over 600 million blogs on the internet, it can be tough getting your blog posts out there.
But if you love blogging, it can be a great way to earn an income if you stick with it for long enough. Many bloggers start off with great intentions and give up on the way; largely because they don’t see the results they want immediately. But if you’re prepared for the difficulties involved in earning from blogging, you’re already ahead. Are you ready to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as Shakespeare’s play Hamlet puts it?
If so blogging could well be the answer as your next venture.
I’m personally a big fan of blogging and for a long time I struggled to make any money from it at all. But over time, your content compounds. You get links and shares, and your content will slowly grow. This puts you on the search engines as an authority over time and your rankings will increase steadily if you continue to provide good quality content.
Initially though it can be hard, to keep going while looking for the prize. The answer is to find a way to keep going for going’s sake, rather than for the income. As a wise mentor of mine said “The man who likes walking will always go further then the man who wants to get somewhere”!
Make Money From Your Blog As An Affiliate – Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest ways to monetise a blog. Simply find a product you would like to promote and which aligns with your blog topic, and promote it! You can promote a product through links in your text, banners and through an email list. It’s advisable to do all of these.
The more ways you have to promote your affiliate product on your blog, the better. You’ll probably see my pop up offers on this blog, for example. My ebook is one of the best ways I build an email list through blogging. Grab your copy of it here.
A good affiliate product can be hard to find so make sure you spend some time finding something you genuinely believe in and which is a good fit for your blog topic. If your product is badly aligned with your topic, your audience won’t see it as valuable, however good it is.
To find an affiliate product within your niche, do an online search for “{your topic/niche/keyword} affiliate program”, so for example if you’re topic is golf, here’s what you might type into the search bar:
Make Money From Your Blog As An Affiliate – List Building
Once you start building an email list from your blog, you can grow your list into the thousands and tens of thousands of subscribers over time. This is important for bloggers because you’re going to be working hard creating content to attract your visitors.
When they leave without taking an action, that visitor is usually gone forever. Offer them a freebie giveaway such as an ebook and it lets you collect their details. You can now email them when you create new content and send them to it.
An email list is one of the best ways to sell affiliate products and build trust with your audience. By building trust with your list, by offering value through your blog content, you gain their trust. When you trust someone, you’re much more likely to buy from them, especially online.
To build a list from a blog you can create an eBook which helps you audience somehow. See my post on ebook lead magnet for more on this topic. Or, join an affiliate program which offers a lead magnet you can use from your blog.
Make Money From Your Blog As An Affiliate – Traffic
We’ve talked about monetising your blog with an affiliate product, and building a list from your blog to increase your website traffic and build trust with your audience. What we haven’t yet discussed is actually attracting traffic with your content.
Without good content you’re going to struggle getting eyes on it. So make it a priority to create content which is of use to your customer avatar / target audience. If you’re unfamiliar with those terms, simply put your target audience is the small sub section of the online marketplace who is going to be most interested in your content and your affiliate product/s.
Once you understand who these people are, you’re in a better position to post content which they can relate to. So spend some time looking through the customer avatar worksheet to get an idea of who you’re talking to.
The next step is to create some content for your blog. With a new website, you’ll likely not be able to rank your content on the search engines very easily. So you can start by finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. (SEO = Search Engine Optimisation). To optimise your blog posts gives them more chance of ranking on the first page of the search results (Google etc.).
Keyword Research
Before writing anything on your blog, it’s a good idea to find the kinds of things that are already being searched for in your topic/niche. You can use Google’s free keyword planner for this job. Type your main keyword into the planner, and look for longer tail derivatives with less competition on the SERPS (Search Engines Results Pages).
The more competition there is on Google for your particular term, the less chance you have of ranking for it. So by finding the “low hanging fruits”, you have a greater chance of ranking your content on them, even if only for long tail keyword terms.
For example, the title to this article for instance is “Make Money From Your Blog As An Affiliate”. That’s 8 words long! Generally speaking the longer “tail” the keyword is the less competition on Google for that particular term.
If I were to choose a more competitive term such as “Affiliate Marketing” for example, I would have a snowball in Hell’s chance of getting a page 1 listing on Google! You can get a general idea about how competitive a term is by doing a simple Google search for the term and then in quotation marks (“like this”), see below:
Article Promotion
Once you’ve published a blog there’s multiple ways you can get your content in front of people. Definitely you shouldn’t rely on Google picking up your content – it might never do so!
But the more you continue to create high quality content (and share it), the more likely this eventuality is. With a new website, you’re probably going to get less of your content ranking on Google’s first page than a seasoned blogger with thousands of articles and high domain authority. But you have to start from somewhere!
So how do you get people to your content if it doesn’t show up on the search engines? You promote it yourself throughout your social media presence. Share your posts on Facebook, Linkedin.com Twitter/X and so on. Ideally set up profiles on multiple social media profiles and build your network of suitable connections (who are likely to show interest in your topic).
You can automate this process with plugins too, such as Revive Old Posts and Postplanner for example. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress. Also, as I’ve mentioned already you should share your new content with your list as you grow it.
Summary
So there’s a fair amount involved if you want to make money blogging. Ideally set up your “stall” by deciding on your particular topic/niche in which you want to create content. Focus on who you are targeting with that content and how you can solve/help people with their problems through your content.
With a carefully aligned product, and a good focus for your content which is aligned with your values, it should be easier to earn an income given you’re working on something meaningful to you.
It is much more difficult making content in which you have no interest, except for the “end product” of the monetary reward. Blogging takes time and effort and is often not rewarded financially for several months. So you need to choose a topic where you can sustain your interest for at least that amount of time and ideally indefinitely.
Once you’ve found your topic, choose carefully a product which offers huge value to your audience and one which you yourself would genuinely subscribe to. The higher the value of your product, the more you can earn from it. Ideally find a affiliate product which pays you recurring commissions. With blogging sales are often sporadic initially while you build momentum. So having subscription products which pay you a recurring commission can give you a much needed faith and momentum.