How To Make Money From A Blog Site – Try Affiliate Marketing!

There are many ways of making money from blogs. If you have traffic, you can pick from a variety of methods. You can place ads for totally passive income. You can advertise your freelance services.

 

Most of these methods have been highlighted on previous posts on this website. Please have a look at them to have a deeper understanding of all the ways you can use to make money using your blog.

 

This article will focus on Affiliate Marketing to answer the popular question of how to make money from a blog site.

 

Affiliate marketing has seen a huge surge of popularity over the last few years. it has gained a certain notoriety for making online millionaires. Unfortunately, it is also known for being the breeding ground of scammers and hucksters.

Both of these opinions are true. The good news is that affiliate marketing is an excellent vehicle for making money from a blog without falling prey to scams and empty promises that will only take your money. More on this later!

 

This post will hopefully clarify things for you and give you actionable steps that you can follow

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WHAT IS AFFILIATE MARKETING

 

Affiliate marketing is a business where you get paid a commission for promoting someone else’s products and giving them referrals.

 

You basically find a great solution to your audience’s problems and recommend it to them through a personalized link. When they purchase through your link, the product owner will credit you with the commission.

 

As an affiliate marketer, you are basically selling products without owning an actual product inventory. It is one of the fastest growing online business opportunity.

 

Through affiliate marketing, you can make an almost limitless amount of money due to its uncapped earning potential.

 

This is just one of the benefits of affiliate marketing. Others include an unmatched level of freedom, where you have the ability to choose your hours and work from anywhere you want. It also allows you to have job and financial security.

However, it is important to note that contrary to popular opinion, affiliate marketing takes a lot of work to attain success. It is not a get-rich-quick scheme as many people would like to believe. You have to invest your time, effort and money to get a good return on investment.

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HOW AFFILIATE MARKETING WORKS

 

Affiliate marketing is a pretty straightforward business model. It only has 4 steps. If you can effectively and correctly complete each one of those steps you will be successful. While the model is fairly simple, the implementation is anything but! It is hard to stick with it and patiently work day in and day out for weeks and months without seeing a lot (if any) income.

Here are the 4 steps:

 

1. Pick a niche

 

Picking the right niche is essential in ensuring the highest level of success in affiliate marketing. You need to make sure you pick something you are good at and passionate about because affiliate marketing will require you to engage in the niche for a very long time. If you like the topic you are covering, you will not tire or get bored.

 

You will also already know a lot about your niche, it will be easy for you to become an authority.

 

Having said that, don’t panic if you don’t have any hobbies or any activities that you feel “passionate” about. You can certainly become one with diligent research and by immersing yourself in all things having to do with your niche.

 

Picking a niche is important for several reasons:

 

– You will be communicating with your niche

– You will be writing tons of content for your niche

– You will be picking products within your niche

– You will be helping your niche

– Your niche is the basis of your business – This is a foundational decision

 

Don’t waste too much time on this step. I don’t believe that any niche is a bad niche. You can make money with any topic you choose. Also know that the first niche you pick, will most likely not be your last…… Don’t over analyze.

 

 

2. Create a site

 

A successful affiliate marketing business needs a site if you want it to thrive. This is where your blog site comes in. You can use your blog site as your business platform, where you promote your products, build a customer base and engage with your clients.

 

Your blog needs to be appealing yet functional. I have seen a lot of affiliate blogs that are so elaborate, they make your head spin. I find that the simpler layouts are the most effective.

 

Make sure that you blog has a comments section and that the ability for readers to comment is enabled. This is crucial! Comments by your customers and your responses to those comments/questions will show a level of engagement that will help your customers as well as improve your authority with the search engines.

 

There are tons of platforms to build your website. Here are two more suggestions for you. Use WordPress and buy your domain name.

 

WordPress has become the gold standard for blogs. It has an almost infinite amount of customization. You can add whatever functionality you need by adding plugins. You can change the layout of your blog in seconds by simply picking a new theme.

 

While there are advanced plugins and professional themes that cost money, I have never had to pay for either. I only use free themes and plugins.

 

You can start with a free domain but I highly suggest you move to your own purchased domain asap. There are many reasons for this. Here are two”

 

First owning a domain is the same as owning real estate, except that it is virtual real estate. If the domain name you are looking for is available, snatch it up because it may not be available 5 minutes from now.

 

Second, your domain age matters. The older a domain, the more trust it gets from the search engines. So buy it ASAP in order to start the age clock. I find that once you get to 6 months domain age, your content starts to rank faster. By this point, you also start to climb in the SERPS, meaning your content has a chance to be read by many more people.

 

There are also many tools out there to help you build a wordpress blog. Check out the video below:

 

3. Attract an audience through good content

 

The importance of high-quality content cannot be overstated. Your blog site needs to be populated with original and high-quality content that is of value to your readers and to the industry as a whole.

 

New people that are just getting into affiliate marketing panic at the idea of having to write content. The first thing they think is “I am not a writer”. The good news is that there is nothing to fear. You don’t need to be Shakespeare.

 

You are communicating with your audience. You should write your content as if you were explaining things to your friend. It is not more complicated than that. Here are a few tidbits that can help. See if you can find the ways I have implemented them in this very blog post:

 

– Use small paragraphs – max of 4 to 5 sentences

– Use simple sentences

– Make sure you have lots of spacing

– Try to address your audience directly by using the words “I” and “you”

 

The best advice I can give you on writing content is to relax and keep it simple. You can do this!

 

 

4. Monetize

 

It is at this stage that your business gets to make money. Traffic is essential if you want to maximize your profits. Once you have the traffic you can start to monetize it.

 

As stated in the intro of this post. There are many ways to monetize your blog site. This article focuses solely on affiliate marketing as a monetizing technique. So how do you go about it?

 

The first thing you do is determine what types of services will best help your readers. Are there physical products that could serve them well? Are there digital solutions that would work? Maybe both.

 

Find the right affiliate networks and join them. Affiliate networks are large marketplaces that put a website owner that want to be an affiliate together with merchants that have products and services to sell. Clickbank, CJ and ShareaSale are three of the largest affiliate networks and should have a good solution for your niche.

 

For physical products, there are thousands of affiliate programs as well. Amazon is the largest and I highly recommend that you check them out.

 

Between Amazon and the 3 affiliate networks listed above, you should have plenty of resources and solutions to recommend to your niche.

 

Please note that there are thousands of affiliate programs and affiliate networks. I am only giving you a suggestion in order to get you started, but please feel free to explore others.

 

Once you find a product or service and sign up to be an affiliate, you will get a dedicated link. You will place this link on your blog posts as a recommendation to your readers. Once they click through your link, they will be taken to the merchant site. When they make a purchase, the merchant will know that it came from you (through cookies in the personalized link your received) and credit you with the sale. Sweet huh?

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WHAT IS YOUR FIRST DUTY?

 

As an affiliate marketer, your first duty is to your readers and your audience.

You need to educate your readers and give them some sort of value. Your content needs to provide solutions to their problems.

 

Every niche has a specific set of problems that need solving. Your content needs to recognize and address these problems and provide solutions for them.

 

When you provide original and helpful content that benefits your readers and is valuable to the industry as a whole, you will gain a loyal readership following.

 

A good way to do this is by creating actionable content in form of how-to articles, e-books, among others.

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PICK GOOD SERVICES AND PRODUCTS

 

When you get into affiliate marketing, it is easy to find yourself making getting money your number one priority. As stated earlier, it is of vital importance to remember that your primary duty is to your users. Help the user and the money will follow.

Aside from high-quality content, you also need to make sure that the services and products you are pushing are actually good.

 

In my experience, poor quality products tend to tempt affiliate marketers with high commissions. Do not focus on the money by offering a low-quality product that has a high commission.

 

What is at stake here is about more than just simply making a sale. You do not want to ruin your reputation and bring down your overall brand quality for a simple commission. Your business suffering, in the long run, is definitely not worth it.

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IN CLOSING

 

If you are resilient, patient, and willing to put in the work, using your blog for affiliate marketing can be a great source of passive income.

 

Affiliate marketing is steadily becoming a more and more popular mainstream online business. You need to jump on the bandwagon and take advantage of this lucrative opportunity.

 

But before I go!

 

Remember how I mentioned that there are ways to succeed in affiliate marketing without falling for the scams?

 

I would like to offer you that way – Don’t worry, its completely FREE! Keep your credit card in your wallet because I really mean free.

 

I belong to an affiliate training community called Wealthy Affiliate. The training there is bar none the best on the net. I encourage you to visit my comprehensive review to learn all the benefits you will gain. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, check out the section focused on the free starter membership.

 

If you liked the video above on how to create a blog in 30 seconds, you will love the rest of the free content at Wealthy Affiliate (that is where the video came from)

 

CLICK HERE TO VISIT MY REVIEW OF WEALTHY AFFILIATE – YOUR BEST RESOURCE FOR AFFILIATE MARKETING

 

I really hope you check it out because I know you will not be disappointed.

 

I hope you found value in this post. Please leave me comments or questions below and I will respond as soon as I can.

 

To your affiliate success!

 

Mike