How to Monetize Your Blog with Affiliate Marketing | BloggingPro
- Updated on: 2017-11-27
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How to Monetize Your Blog with Affiliate Marketing
11/24/2017
by BloggingPro Leave a Comment
Now that you’ve created and started your own blog , you might be thinking of generating income from your blog. Whether your blog is intended for fun or getting a little extra income or earning some serious revenue, there are varieties of option available to monetize your blog. However, it is important to be skeptic and bright in selecting appropriate monetizing program because choosing one can be a little tricky.
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How Do You Earn Money Online Through Blogging?
Aside from affiliate marketing, there are numerous ways of generating revenue for your blog. We recommend that you focus on one technique than applying these all to your blog. Here are the other ways on how you can earn from your blog:
Accepting sponsored posts – perhaps this is the most popular way of earning through your blog. Guest posting is popular even today, so blogs use this opportunity to earn money from bloggers who want to feature themselves or their products. It’s time-consuming; as the blog owner, you have to screen every submission for duplicates, grammar errors, etc.
Using targeted pay-per-click adverts like AdSense interspersed between your blog posts and sidebars – there are other pay-per-click advert programs but AdSense is the primary
Adding a “donations” button to your blog – fans of your blog will be happy to oblige to your plea for donations.
Selling your own merchandise on your blog – once you’re blogging, you can start selling your own merchandise. If you started out as a guide to DIY crafts, you can actually sell your premium guides for a fee.
For bloggers whose main intention is to earn and maximize revenue, selecting a good quality affiliate marketing scheme is a must. One of the most common and best ways to monetize your blog is by using affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission when others buy from the embedded links on your blog when you advertise other people’s product. Furthermore, it provides a one-stop shop for bloggers, offering access to a large resource of different affiliate partners and links that can easily be integrated into a regular content organically.
If done correctly, this could be one way of presenting right products for the right person in the right way. If you want to find out how to monetize a blog and give yourself the best chance of success when it comes to earning real money from it through affiliate marketing, this article will surely help you.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Looking further on how affiliate marketing works, let’s take for example big companies like Apple, Amazon, Disney, and Walmart who offer bloggers or anyone which aim is to get cash to promote their product or services offered by giving them a link; this embedded link will serve as a way of explaining and recommending their products to your audience.
There are also some links that when clicked will forward you to the website of these companies allowing buyers to learn more by giving an opportunity of availing their product and services. Each of the links is tracked via a special link so that the company will be advised when to pay. For every click and purchase, they get from you, you earn little commission or sometimes compensation, depending on the company.
It is salient to choose an affiliate partnership that is suitable for your blog and even with your audience target.
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
All you should do is to promote and recommend the product you love, it is also a passive income stream which you can earn repeatedly with just a single post given that many people will read your post. The more post you have, the more chances you have to gain a higher commission in form of either a flat fee or a percentage of the sale.
Aside from these facts, here’s what you can benefit from affiliate marketing:
No investment needed to join an affiliate marketing program. Yes, you don’t need any setup fees to join an affiliate marketing program. All you need to spend on is your website and your time to create stunning content that will convert your readers into customers for your affiliates.
Passive income just rolling for your blog. Who doesn’t want to generate passive income for their websites? Affiliate marketing makes it possible for your website to generate income that will continue to earn even when you’re asleep.
The world is your audience. Do you live in Africa? Or in the Philippines? No problem at all! You can still reach anyone and everyone around the globe with your content. As long as your blog is in English, you can always step up your game and even have different ranges of customers coming into your blog.
So, you just know what is affiliate marketing and how you can benefit from it, let us now understand these terms.
Affiliate Marketing Terms
Before jumping on the bandwagon, here are some terminologies that you might want to familiarize yourself with if you decide to monetize your blog through affiliate marketing:
Affiliate link – these are embedded links on the blogger’s site that are provided by the company which will forward the user to the company’s website where their products are posted. Aside from the website, this can also be a search page or a category. These affiliate links track the users going from your website to their website so your commission can be traced back to you.
Affiliate products – products or services promoted and advertised in blogger’s page which in turn earns you a commission. Products may be based on your choice or depending on the target client.
Affiliate Program – before considering the product to be promoted, find first companies with affiliate programs that allow promotion of their products and in return pay the blogger with the commission or free for their referral.
Affiliate Networks – There are websites that bring together website publishers and advertisers (companies that offer affiliate programs) in one place. This network runs the entire affiliate program for the companies in the network. Publishers can visit these networks to discover a variety of companies that offer affiliate products.
Commissions – are the revenue you get every time someone clicks on your affiliate link. This can be either in the form of flat fee or a percentage of the sale. This is usually pre-recognized and should be known beforehand before joining affiliate programs.
Where to Find Affiliate Marketing Programs
Affiliate marketing programs can be found at affiliate networks like CJ Affiliate by Conversant (previously known as Commission Junction), LinkShare, Clickbank, ShareASale, Amazon Associates, and eBay. Depending on their requirements, you can apply to these affiliate networks.
For example, in CJ Affiliate by Conversant, you can set up easily your account but after you have found the companies or product of desire, you will have to apply to the individual companies in the network.
In Amazon Associates, the application is not reviewed until you have made your first commission, which also means they can disapprove you and will not earn that first commission. However, once your application is approved, it is not necessary to apply further to promote Nike products, Disney and anything they carry.
Private affiliate programs are companies which offer own affiliate programs like HostGator, Fiverr, Nike, Apple, Disney, and etc. There are different types of affiliate programs out there and knowing the different types of these will give you best options in selecting which program is best for you.
How to Create Content that Converts
Hard-selling or “selling the product directly” is not the best way to attract your customer, recommending the product is more promising. Keep in mind that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Remember that no one will buy your product basically because they don’t know you. Building rapport with your clients is vital in terms of gaining their trust. This is done by satisfying what your customer wants and presenting all the helpful things to them. And the process of creating content that converts includes:
Identify the dilemma of your client
Present a solution to solving their dilemma
Recommend products from your affiliate program which suits best for the need of your client.
If interested, client clicks the affiliate link and buys it on the recommended site you linked them
You make a commission or compensation.
If you need inspiration on how to create awesome content for your blog, here are some of the best examples we can find online:
BloggingPro’s very own How to Start a Blog and Make Money – Aside from the premise that it’ll only take 20 minutes to get your blog up and running, Blogging Pro has done a great job in building this page. We all know that there are thousands of guides on the Internet teaching ways on how to start your own blog, but Blogging Pro stands out with its easy-to-read structure, easy to skip through the content, and its no-frills write up. Simple, straight to the point content.
Choosing the Right Platform for your Online Shop – what we love about this article is its personal touch and review on each ecommerce platform. We already know where to look for certain features but when searching for a review online, we’re always looking for those who have already tried the platform itself. It’s succinct and easy to follow through. It eliminates all that technical mumbo-jumbo that can baffle anyone who’s not familiar with technical terms.
Where to Get Started
To get started in affiliate marketing, you have to prepare your blog, your time, budget, and anything in between in order to deliver the best experience and information to your readers. While there are different affiliate marketing training programs found all over the Internet, here’s a blueprint on how to get started with your journey to affiliate marketing bliss:
Make sure that you’re ready to accommodate more traffic. If your website’s performing poorly in the speed department, maybe it’s time to boost up your page’s loading times. There are faster ways of improving your page speed , but perhaps the first step to take is to find the best hosting for your website.
Make your blog look like a website, not your personal journal. While personal touch can win the hearts of some types of audiences, like mom blog readers, there are some readers who would want to feel the authenticity of the review on a website. If a website looks outdated, they may not rely on the review so heavily and may look for another website to read another review from.
With that being said, you should make sure that your content is visible and accessible across all devices . Don’t expect that your readers are just desktop users or mobile users only. People tend to use multi-platforms to browse the Internet, with mobile as the leading choice of medium.
Create an editorial calendar for your blog. Yes, you still need to keep on writing! So as not to lose track on creating topic ideas, it’s better to plan out which content goes out on a specific date. News articles can always be integrated on the blog, like phone releases, but do-it-yourself guides, how-to guides — you can plan these ahead. As much as possible, maintain a consistent schedule all throughout the year. It helps get your site indexed faster and better, thus getting you more readers and potential customers, too.
One important thing you need to consider in monetizing your blog is the right time. Identify the time when you are ready to earn revenue, check if the population of your clients is good enough. You can put your affiliate links at early stages naturally without overcrowding your readers with adverts or sponsored posts that often can be off-putting.
Learn to adapt new technology and features. Content publishers nowadays can harness faster loading speed through various formats with the help of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP, and Facebook’s Instant Articles. To know more on how to set up these two, here’s a WordPress guide to adding Google AMP Pages and how to set up Instant Articles for Facebook .
Pursue your passion. If you’re really passionate about budgeting and money-saving, invest time in creating an affiliate blog that focuses on what you’re passionate about. It’s easier to create everything from scratch as long as you’re knowledgeable on the topic. Continuously keep yourself abreast with the current best practices on blogging, especially when it comes to search engines.
Keep on blogging. The key here is consistency — establish your blog as your brand. If you want people to trust you, to believe in your reviews and reel them in to get a commission, you have to do your part. Build a persona that people can “talk” to, create blog posts that help people save time deciding on what they want, and care for your readers by responding and engaging through discussions or comments.
Affiliate marketing and blogging aren’t a walk in the park. There are a lot of considerations to ponder on, but the result of passive income is truly rewarding when done right.
Do you have any comments or suggestions on how to monetize your blog through affiliate marketing? Let us know in the comments!
Author Bio:
Erin Feldman is an e-commerce business owner somewhere in California. Her past experience as a writer started when she was in college and her career, apart from covering technology, also includes active lifestyle and social media.
Author: BloggingPro
