Organic affiliate marketing works through creating lots of content. Over time, as your content grows so does your audience. Through using SEO (search engine optimisation), sharing content through social media profiles and other tactics, an organic marketer can build a huge audience. If they’re lucky they can also go viral with some of their content. If this happens, they can experience a dramatic rise in their traffic suddenly.
But for most organic marketers progress is slow and steady, and traffic can rise exponentially once they reach a certain point. As their content grows and gets more exposure, traffic can rise more quickly. But this can take months or even years.
A good an analogy I like is that of the Chinese Bamboo tree. With the Chinese bamboo tree, there’s a gestation period of 4-5 years before the shoots appear above the surface of the soil. This is similar to organic marketing, and it can take a long time for an organic marketer to see the results of their activities.
Once a Chinese Bamboo starts growing beyond the surface of the soil, it can grow to 90 feet tall within 5-6 weeks! The same is true of organic affiliate marketing. Most affiliates who go down this route will quit because they don’t see any results. But for those who stick at it, there’s exciting news if they maintain their activities over the longer term.
Organic Affiliate Marketing – Blogging
One organic affiliate marketing method is blogging. Bloggers create written content on a website; known as a blog (web log). Bloggers can often write content for several years before they see the fruits of their labour. Looking at the image above you can see how most affiliate marketers earn under $20,000 a year from their efforts. Only the top 2.16% earn over $40k a year. Often this tiny minority of affiliates have been at it for years!
Not all affiliates use organic affiliate marketing methods though. See also affiliate marketing with paid ads. Paid advertising can make affiliate marketing more attainable in a short time span. See how long does it take to make money with affiliate marketing. But organic affiliate marketing offers a more affordable strategy, even though it means a longer journey.
I’m a blogger and have been blogging for several years. Blogging is definitely a long term strategy and it’s take a while to build a consistent affiliate business out of blogging. You can speed up your success though through using recurring commission affiliate programs and high ticket affiliate programs.
My Blogging Strategy
Many bloggers choose a topic and continue to write in that area for several years. This is great if you pick a topic you love, but pretty difficult if you have chosen something which is unfamiliar to you. For that reason, I would always advise new affiliates to choose a topic they at least have an interest in. That way, you can continue writing content for long enough to gain traction from.
I find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty and write articles based on my keyword research. I’ve also built a few niche websites which gain the attention of the search engines due to keywords within their domain names. Whatever strategy you use, be prepared to work hard at your blogging for some time. A small amount of traffic will only bring in a small number of subscribers and sales. You should always build an email list from a blog. This helps you to build a relationship with your subscribers over the longer term. See the power of email marketing.
Writing content is just one part of the story too. You also need to promote your content so it gets the coverage it deserves! You can do this through using SEO – (search engine optimisation), sharing on social media sites, using plugins and through syndicating out to various platforms. See best free blog plugins for WordPress for some of the plugins I use.
Organic Affiliate Marketing – YouTube
You can use many other platforms for organic affiliate marketing too. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and YouTube are just a few. See also unpaid social media marketing. Many organic affiliate marketers use YouTube and build video content in much the same way bloggers do.
By titling and tagging your videos with relevant keywords, you can attract free search traffic from the site’s visitors. However, like Google search, YouTube is pretty competitive and there’s thousands of marketers doing the same. So you need to create a lot of content in order to generate enough visits to earn a good income.
You can also pay to use platforms like YouTube and Facebook, but organic affiliate marketing involves creating content and getting free traffic over the longer term.
Organic Affiliate Marketing – Quora
Quora is a question and answer website which can be used by affiliate marketers to build up a back log of answers and links.
By finding questions which are relevant to your website content (or YouTube content), you can provide useful content and link out to your resource as part of your answers. Over time, if you provide value in your answers (and your links are permitted by Quora), you can build a source of visitors who visit your content.
Quora doesn’t like spamming though so your answers will have to be valuable. You can’t simply spam your links because you’ll likely get flagged up as a spammer. But if you provide some good content on Quora, you are allowed to link to resources which are relevant and useful for the answers you provide. Do this often and you will build up a history of content which leads people to your affiliate website. Again this is a “slow burner” and you should expect to make this a habit if you are to benefit from it. See also affiliate marketing on Quora.
Summary
Organic affiliate marketing takes time and dedication. Expect to make habits out of creating content, sharing it and linking back to it from other websites and online resources. Over time, if you dedicate yourself to it, you’ll improve and older content can generate website traffic as well as new content.
With consistency, the traffic your content draws to your affiliate products can compound and grow exponentially. Like the Chinese Bamboo tree, this is likely to happen over a long period of time. You need to get through the hard work and see some small “shoots” peaking above the “soil” – using the analogy of the Chinese Bamboo tree. When you see results, it can give you a massive motivational boost. Before this happens, maintaining your directly can be tough, especially when no results are showing. James Clear explains this in his book Atomic Habits perfectly with this illustration:
