Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to monetize your blog as a blogger. Not only will it earn you money passively (while you sleep), but it earns you more money, more than you can imagine (that’s if you play your card well).
If you’re a blogger, and you’re seeking to monetize your blog with affiliate marketing, you’ve definitely made a smart choice and believe me when I say you’re on the right page to gain all the knowledge you need to get started on how to smartly monetize your blog with affiliate marketing. But before we hit the accelerator pump, let’s know what affiliate marketing is all about, shall we?
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a marketing means, which enables an affiliate marketer (or a blogger) to partner with merchants with the intention of leading consumers to the merchant’s site, where they (the consumers) make purchases of products and services, which in return earns the affiliate marketer some commission.
To further explain this, — Affiliate marketing is a business marketing module, which involves three (3) parties, the marchant, the affiliate marketer (which is you, the blogger) and the consumers.
The affiliate marketers (or bloggers) advertises the merchant’s products and services to the consumers through their platform (example: blog) while they insert affiliate links leading the consumers to the merchant’s site where they can purchase products or services which in turn earns the affiliate marketer or blogger some commission in return.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Affiliate marketing system works on grounds of business partnership between the affiliate marketer and the merchant where at the end of the day, both parties earn. It’s a win, win for all.
To further break down how affiliate marketing works. I’m going to explain in a step by step guide on how to monetize your blog with affiliate marketing:
First, the affiliate marketer (blogger) joins the program and receives an ID and URL for promoting the merchant’s product. You can use the Amazon affiliate program, Skimlinks or create a direct relationship with the merchant.
Secondly, the affiliate marketer includes the link in their blog content and invites the reader or visitor to click on it. Once the buyer clicks on the affiliate link, a cookie is created to identify the affiliate’s site and ensure the publisher is credited with the sale if it occurs.
Thirdly, when the buyer completes a sale, the seller checks the sales records to identify the cookie matching the source of the referral. If the sale is related to the affiliate ID, the affiliate’s account is credited with the sale.
Finally, the merchant then sends the report to the affiliate to confirm the referrals. The merchant pays the commissions to the affiliate marketers at the end of the payment period.
What Are The Benefits Of Monetizing A Blog With Affiliate Marketing?
Just like every other thing, affiliate marketing also has its own benefits. In fact, affiliate marketing is a BEAUTY of its own. Below are major benefits associated with monetizing your blog with affiliate marketing:
- Passive Income: First of all, understand what passive means. Passive means inactiveness. So by passive income, it literally means earning without actually doing much, or putting in too much work. Yea, that’s the beauty side of affiliate marketing. It puts you on a platform of earning passively (or while you sleep) for years just by creating meaningful affiliate-related content.
- It’s Cost-Effective: You don’t pay any penny before joining any affiliate program. It’s completely free. All you need to do is sign up and be a member.
- You Can Work From Home: Monetizing your blog with affiliate marketing also creates an avenue for you to work remotely (work from home). This is why many bloggers follow the approach of monetizing their blog with affiliate marketing programs, because they can work and earn from home.
- Performance-Based Results: Affiliate marketing rewards are based on performance. Honing review skills and writing engaging blog posts, translates into increased revenues.
How To Monetize Your Blog With Affiliate Marketing.
The simplest way to monetize your blog with affiliate marketing is to first thing first, sign up with your preferred affiliate program. Like aforementioned, could be Amazon affiliate marketing, skimlinks or a direct relationship with a merchant.
Create quality and well detailed contents about the merchants products or services. It could be in the form of a review or tutorial, while you insert affiliate links or banners of the products which will lead potential consumers to the merchant’s site to make a purchase and in return earn you your commission after a sale is made.
How To Get Started About It?
1. Know Your Targeted Audience.
First thing first, know your targeted audience. This is a marketing approach every business-minded individual should take. And mind you, you’re an affiliate marketer, which also puts you in business, because affiliate marketing is a business of its own.
Know your readers, know what they want, then create content around it, and insert affiliate links leading to the respective product to help solve your audience problem.
How should you go about that? Below is a guide:
- Conduct A Survey: A survey with the relevant questions should help you identify what your audiences are looking for. Plugins and a range of software also help collect this data.
- Join Discussions: Facebook and online communities like Quora and Reddit as well as niche-specific forums, should help you gain insight about your audience interest.
- Observe A Visitor’s Behavior: Tools such as Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, HotJar, and more come in handy when studying readers’ likes, dislikes, patterns, and other insights.
- Go Through Reviews And The Buyer’s Purchase Activity: Customer reviews also come in handy when you want to find out popular products customers buy and why they do it.
2. Do Your “Keyword Research”.
Find that hot-cake product people are searching about. Use keyword research tools like SemRush, Moz, Ahrefs or Ubersuggest to hunt for product keywords. You can use my smart approach to hunt down low competitive keywords.
If you’re new to the term “keyword”, know that keyword is a phrase of words which individuals are searching for on search engines like Google and Bing seeking for information on them.
As a blogger, you have to seek keywords opportunities, by doing keyword research to find those juicy keywords with good search volume, while you write on them, by providing in-depth and informative content about them, thus answering users’ queries and earning commission through affiliate program monetization.
3. Create High Valuable Contents About The Merchant’s Product.
Write EXTENSIVELY about that product keyword, including how to use the product and its pros and cons.
Do well to outline their advantages (pros) and disadvantages (cons). This will help build trust between you and your audiences because they’ll see you as a very transparent individual.
While creating contents for the product keyword ensure they fall under the below mentioned categories:
- Relevance: Ensure your keywords are relevant to the merchant’s product you’re writing about.
- Uniqueness: Ensure your content is authentic and not spun or duplicated.
- Usefulness: Ensure your content is easy to read and also most importantly provide value to the visitors.
4. Find Good Affiliate Offers.
Under this step, you have to dig-deep to find good affiliate programs with high conversation and also pays well. This is a vital approach to take before joining the affiliate marketing game.
Do your research, find a quality affiliate program that will pay you handsomely per product sale and not pennies. Promoting good affiliate offers or products puts your blog on a major advantage as an affiliate marketer, thus driving reasonable returns, while you smile to the bank at the end of the month.
The beauty of affiliate marketing is, there are millions of affiliate offers that have products related to every niche. You have to find affiliate programs related to your niche and suitable to your audience (which also solves your audience problems too).
There are mainly two types of affiliate offers to monetize your blog, suchlike;
Physical Products.
These are tangible products that can be touched or felt. Example, clothes, gadgets like watches, phones, laptops, speakers.
You can advertise on these physical products by creating review content about them.
Amazon Associate is a common example of an affiliate program with this type of product. Buy my Master Guide Book On Amazon Affiliate Marketing For Newbies.
Digital Product/Services.
These are invisible products that can’t be touched or felt, however they still satisfy users’ demands and needs.
Examples of these products are: digital courses, software subscriptions, web hosting and other digital products and services.
The beauty of promoting these kinds of affiliate products is that the commission rates are often much higher than physical products (sometimes well over 50%).
There are tons of these affiliate networks around such as ShareASale, ClickBank and JVZoo, as well as company run programs.
5. Choose Relevant Affiliate Marketing Programs.
While you search for good affiliate offers, also ensure these affiliate marketing programs also befits your niche and solves audiences problems too.
Also ensure they pay reasonable commission. At Least 20-30% commission per sale
Example: a product of $300 can earn you $30 at the spot, when you make a sale. Imagine making 10 more sales daily, 30 x 10 = $300. That’s a profit coming from one content.
Imagine having 10-20 of such content generating steady affiliate commission earnings daily? You’re a big boy bro.!
Also don’t limit yourself to promoting single product affiliate marketing programs, you can as well explore large affiliate marketplace. The sites host thousands of brands offering affiliate programs. Some reliable options include:
- CJ Affiliate: This marketplace hosts more than 3,000 brands hence a ripe platform for finding the right affiliate for your blog.
- ShareASale: The marketplace offers more than 2,500 commission-based affiliates.
- Amazon Associate: It’s the most popular affiliate marketing platform as it hosts millions of brands. The obvious benefit of using Amazon’s platform is that you get a commission on the customer’s purchase, not just the item linked to the merchant’s site. Buy my Master Guide Book On Amazon Affiliate Marketing For Newbies.
- ClickBank: The platform is similar to ShareASale and is very consumer-focused.
- Skimlinks: Similar to ShareASale, CJ Affiliate and ClickBank, skimlinks (a Taboola company) houses 48,500 (and counting) of commission-based affiliate brands that relate to numerous niches for product promotion.
6. Apply For The Affiliate Program.
Whether you’re working directly with the network or the merchant, you need to apply for partnership with the program. You’ll be required to provide:
- Personal information for tax purposes.
- Your bank account for compensation.
In turn, the merchant provides an affiliate link that allows them to track purchases made through your website.
7. Identify The Type Of Affiliate Commissions On The Offer.
Many affiliate programs pay commission in different ways. They use different models, which can make a huge difference in your overall monetization strategy. This depends on the nature of the products you’re promoting. Two modes in which affiliate marketing programs pays publishers are:
- One Time Commissions: This is a means whereby the publisher gets paid one-time by the marchant when a sale is successfully completed.
- Recurring Commissions: Recurring affiliate programs are the ones that allow you to earn a commission on a recurring basis for as long as your referrals convert into actual sales. These programs pay you commission not only on your referral’s first purchase but for every purchase.
8. Add Affiliate Links To Your Contents.
Now over to the last phase and also the fun part.
While creating that well-detailed and informative article of yours, ensure to input or add affiliate links to your content to lead your visitors to merchant’s site to drive sales, thus earning you some bucks.
While you do this, there are some things you need to keep in mind:
- Avoid Stuffing Affiliate Links To The Post: Too many links discourage readers from reading the content or even clicking on the affiliate links.
- Strike A Balance Between Monetization And Providing Valuable Content: You have to strike an equal balance between creating affiliate and valuable contents, so as not to piss your users off your site. That’s to say, while you create affiliate content or write on product reviews, also write on informational contents that will also be of great use or guide to your readers.
9. Track, Analyze, And Adjust To Increase Conversions.
Now you’ve applied for your preferred affiliate marketing program and monetized your blog with it, you don’t have to hang your boots and relax.
You need to monitor your progress to make some adjustments where it’s needed to stay on top of the conversation chart.
Sometimes, generating leads to affiliate sites doesn’t always yield conversions. You need to stay on top of your game by analyzing the leads and conversions to determine if you need to improve your marketing strategies.
Some affiliate programs provide such data allowing you to analyze it, obtain actionable insights, and make adjustments.
You may also use Google Analytics as it tracks every user’s movement on a website while providing useful interests and demographic data.
10. Optimize For Mobile Browsing.
70% of your blog visitors are mobile phone users, thus visiting your blog with their mobile phones. Therefore, you need to optimize your blog, affiliate links, and promote products to adjust to mobile friendliness. Consider using free WordPress plugins like Advanced Ads to target mobile visitors specifically.
Conclusion.
With this detailed guide, you’re definitely ready to monetize your blog with affiliate marketing programs. Do ensure to apply every aforementioned technique towards using affiliate marketing as your monetization means and see yourself grow into a successful affiliate marketer.
