Making money is one of the objectives of building a blog. When a blogger strives to create content and spend money on hosting services he expects something in return [ROI] return on investment.
If you want to make real money from your blog then affiliate marketing is one of the right methods to dive into.
Based on my experience I have seen many professional bloggers making it big from the affiliate marketing method and it works for most people.
I will be giving examples of professional bloggers who make huge money from affiliate marketing.
Here are renowned bloggers making it with affiliate marketing
Ryan Robinson (ryrob.com)
Harsh Agarwal (shoutmeloud.com)
Ryan Biddulph (bloggingfromparadise.com)
and others
This post will guide you on how to start making money from affiliate marketing with a breakdown:
- How to start as an affiliate marketer
- How to select products to promote
- How to promote your products
- How to overcome issues with affiliate marketing
- How to start generating sales
Let’s start with the basic:
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the act of working on the promotion of a company’s products or services while doing this exchange for a commission on the amount of the sale.
People that work as a body in affiliate marketing are known as affiliate marketers.
These people build an audience and then start with strategies to promote products or services to their audience to start generating sales.
Working as a body in affiliate marketing is easy when compared to generating products or services.
You don’t have to go through the process of stressing yourself to create products or rendering services
Affiliate marketing makes it easier for you, by giving you products and services to start promoting.
I have mentioned this as one of the methods by which bloggers make their money when they start their blog.
Bloggers who join the affiliate marketing scheme start to build an active audience and then start to offer products and services they will find helpful.
When these audiences then go to the length of buying products or services, you then earn a fixed commission depending on the amount of each sale.
How does Affiliate marketing work?
Although affiliate marketing is somewhat easy, yet it can get pretty rough with the technical issues surrounding it.
This is how it really works, you just have to work.
However, you don’t have to be a guru before you get started.
Each affiliate program has background software or bots working seamlessly to make it easier for affiliate marketers, so they don’t have to worry.
Here is how it works in the background process:
When an affiliate marketer or a blogger joins the affiliate program, he or she will be assigned a unique ID and a special URL to use as a gateway to a specific product or service when doing the company’s products promotion
Now that the affiliate marketer has his or her own link, it is time to add the link to their blog post or make use of an email marketing scheme to make users click through for more information.
Once you have a user click on the unique URL given to you and visit the merchant’s site then a cookie that matches that you referred the buyer will be activated.
This stays on the user computer or mobile phone browser to make sure you get the credit when the user later buys the product or service you referred them to even when they come back to buy after days or weeks.
As soon as you have the user you referred to complete the purchase transaction, the merchant site checks the sale record using the cookie to find out who referred the buyer.
When the merchant sees that the buyer was referred or bought the product using your unique URL then you will be credited for referring the buyer based on the sale amount.
Now you will get access to reports or statistics showing you how many clicks you had on your unique link and how many sales were generated using your link.
Now to the rewarding part, this is where you get paid for the affiliate commission depending on the payment method.
It may be 30 days or 45 days payment interval.
The affiliate marketing process is easy as the merchant handles most of the technical process; all you need to do is write content, place your link, then start promoting to get sales.
It doesn’t matter which affiliate merchant you work with or promote their product, you’ll be able to cope with it since every process has been made easy.
Steps to start Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is not that hard if you do it the right way. It is one of the best monetization methods you‘ll ever see.
It works in a simple way, you create a blog, have it set up, submit great content, promote your chosen product or service.
Now that you have started promoting the product and services of the merchant you signed up with.
You’ll start getting sales will start generating income. You get paid when the reader starts buying through your link, this is the chain of affiliate marketing.
1. Choose product or service to promote [Acc. Niche]
This is the first method or should I say the first step you have to take as an affiliate marketer.
It is part of the most confusing steps to take as an affiliate marketer in the affiliate marketing process.
To make sure you don’t fall into the confusing part totally you must know that you’ll go through these:
- You will come across a product which you have limited knowledge about, this is a sure step you’ll come across, that’s why you must strive and be willing to learn when you come across such a product.
- The urge to promote products or services that you have access to or the one you have their free trials or sample will come to you. You have to take a big decision to choose which of them will be good for you.
- You will get attracted to affiliate companies that offer huge commission rates. This is the tricky part; don’t be swayed by the commission rate, always go for the best product. Only choose products that will work best with your blog niche.
- You will be tempted to over-hype some products in order to drive more sales. This has wreck some bloggers and it can only avoid or solved with self-contentment and patience. Never hype any product or you will end up breaking the trust your blog reader has in you.
Whenever you are tempted to do this, you should think about your blog reader on how they’ll feel when they realize you lied to them and sold them out.
To solve the entire above problem you should follow these:
Select product and service you know about
This is essential to do if you really want to make it with affiliate marketing.
This is important because you have to be knowledgeable about a product in order to be able to explain the hidden parts and provide complete solutions. This is essential for convincing users to buy products.
Make sure you’re promoting the right product
Choosing the right product for your blog users is the best thing to do if you want them to buy it.
When you choose the wrong product you’ll find out that no one will buy it. Relevancy is the key to unlimited sales.
Stop choosing products to promote because of the commission.
This doesn’t end well most of the time, when you promote products because of the commission rate you tend to forget your blog user’s attention and set aside your goal.
Not every product worth promoting.
Finally,
Stop overhyping products because of sales’ sake.
Things come out pretty bad and out of control when your blog users notice you over-hype products, this shows that you are selling them not helping them.
Once you lose their trust, it’ll be hard for you to sell products smoothly as before.
[These above steps will keep you out of trouble when it comes to affiliate marketing]
2. Get yourself ready as an affiliate marketer
To work in the affiliate marketing way you have to work through a network or directly with a merchant.
When you sign up and submit the application you then wait to get approved.
After this, you’ll have to provide some information and others to get your payment.
Basically, you’ll need to provide these:
- Personal or business information and contact
- Tax and reporting information
- Your payment information such as bank account details, PayPal email, or Payoneer.
When you sign up and provide the above information you’ll get these in return:
Affiliate ID– You always get an affiliate link that has your account ID to verify when someone buys through your link.
You can use this link in your post to make people buy through it.
Affiliate tips are also provided to you once your application is approved.
These tips and assets are provided to help you know more about ways to market these products you’ll find on the merchant’s website.
Here are some of the welcome packages you’ll receive:
- An email containing guides and instructions to make your affiliate marketing go smoothly.
- Newsletters including merchant new products, promotions, ongoing discounts, etc.
- Effective online marketing tools such as graphics, banners, and widgets for products promotion
- Guides containing instruction on how to promote, work with the platform, and payment processing information.
Some affiliate merchants provide a link for each of the products you want to promote, we have merchants like Amazon.
Always reach out to merchant’s affiliates’ live support and pages or community for more information.
3. Start promoting chosen products
Now it’s time to start promoting products you’ve chosen to get commission coming in for you.
The only way to make money promoting products is when having your blog users buying products you are promoting; convincing them to buy through your blog is the way.
Affiliate marketing isn’t always about putting up product banners and links before making money, it requires intensive work before getting your blog users’ trust.
To make users buy your recommended products you need to help them in order to receive some help.
The only way to make sales is to help people by solving their problems with your ultimate solution; this will make people know you are truly helping them.
A. Create a page that contains resourceful products
One of the ways to get products shown and across to your users is by creating a resource page.
This page can contain lots of products you find helpful to your blog visitors, it is effective because they will trust as you recommend and tested these products before recommending them to people.
That page contains helpful content regarding each product and why they must use it, you should also provide products you currently use or you’ve used in the past and how they helped you.
This page is best used to gather products and showcasing them to visitors to choose from depending on their needs.
This kind of page does rank in search engines (Google) and can help you get traffic which will later result in sales and more sales mean more money.
B. Promote products through your content
We already know content is king and the backbone of every blog, it is the strongest foundation of blogging.
You can’t blog without content and also you can make money without content, making money as an affiliate marketer requires killer content to start with.
To skyrocket your affiliate earnings you need to start creating content that deals with or refer to products you are promoting, that way readers will find them easy and necessary to buy through your link.
Solving problems through your content usually works best rather than just placing banners or graphics on your blog.
We have a series of ways through which you can use content to sell your products.
C. Construct comprehensive content (related to the product)
One way to start affiliate marketing promotion is by writing comprehensive content, these kinds of contents are usually written in full details and always explanative to the core with visual and instruction making it easier to understand.
Comprehensive content is created with the aim of educating visitors so they will get satisfied with the content on your blog and then get convinced to buy products you refer to them.
When you create comprehensive content, you provide full details about products on how they work, how to use them, and finally the benefits they’ll get using those products.
Comprehensive contents tend to rank in search engines like Google cause it is normally created to give knowledge about actual topic and solves people’s problem concerning such topic.
To use comprehensive content for affiliate marketing purposes you need to refer to your products and other related content that contain your affiliate links.
For example, you can write a comprehensive guide on the best SEO tools to use and then you insert your affiliate links that link to SEO products.
To make your sale promotion continue, you must strive to make your content ever-green so people can always find them relevant, and also you must make sure you get them updated regularly to avoid outdated solutions being presented to newer problems.
To make your content killer content make sure you add message conveying images and other infographics to make it more interesting to read.
After this, you should do the needful by optimizing SEO, focusing on authority in your niche, build more trust, and then go for the right keywords alongside quality links.
The only thing to avoid if you don’t want to flop is by making your content totally sell page, this isn’t good for trust and readers.
D. Write contents that review
Another way to use the content as an affiliate promoting strategy is by writing reviews.
You can do this by creating well-detailed reviews for those products, services, courses, or books you are promoting as an affiliate marketer.
Product reviews can focus on a specific product or competition between two or more products.
To make the review method work for you, you need readers who have much trust in you and your blog. It does confuse people when you start comparing different product recommendations continuously.
One piece of advice is to stop comparing different products from all angles, start making those reviews in plain view.
E. Create content for bonus or discounted products
People love discounts a lot, merchants do offer promotional, or product discount sales most of the time for some reason.
One way to make money during this period is by creating content on that particular product you are trying to promote stating the benefits, how to use it, and overall how to get the product at a discounted price.
This method help speeds up sales, most people will buy when you let them know the true value of the product you are advertising to them and why they must buy before the offer ends.
However, you should never hide anything from visitors for the sake of making a sale; once trust is broken it can’t be repaired.
F. Offer free services
Help your blog readers to receive the same in return, when you offer to help readers understand the product you are referring to them you need to help them work on the technical part or less.
You can start by helping set up an account after they have registered with your affiliate links.
For example, you can help people build a blog once they buy a hosting service using your affiliate ID.
This will make things pretty easy and helpful, it will make people want to buy through your blog knowing you will help in some ways.
4. Follow legal requirements
It is highly important that you follow or comply with legal requirements to avoid unnecessary disturbance.
This is a must; you need to abide by rules and regulations guiding affiliate marketing. FTC now requires you to be transparent when you receive payment or commission from promoting products or services.
This is to make sure readers know about the affiliate or commission process to prevent the risk of seeing themselves as being sold.
To solve this you need to create a page that contains information passed along to readers concerning your commission process for products bought through your affiliate link.
You need a disclaimer page to provide adequate information about the affiliate process and how you make money when they buy products through your blog.
5. Drive traffic to your blog
Now that you have successfully joined a merchant and started posting great content, it’s time to start promoting your blog to potential buyers out there.
I have added the three main traffic strategies to use:
Search traffic using (SEO)
Search traffic is one most important sources of traffic you can always count on.
It is free depending on perspective; SEO is the practice of your having your blog pages optimized for search engines such as Google and Bing.
The traffic you get from search is mostly from serious readers looking for a solution to their problem, you might get them to buy products if you solve their problem with the help of the products you are promoting.
You shouldn’t overlook the power of search traffic and should optimize your cornerstone content ideally to enjoy the benefit of free traffic.
Never forget to include your keywords, build healthy and quality links toward your posts to rank high in search engines.
Basic SEO set up:
- Focus on creating helpful and comprehensive contents that solve people’s problems
- Construct post that contains guides on products you are promoting
- Follow other SEO methods like building links, improving blog speed, and using proper keywords in headings
Paid traffic
I understand traffic is hard to generate to blogs unless you really know your way around it, the only fast way to get traffic coming to your blog is by paying for traffic which is known as paid traffic.
You can use this traffic-generating method if you have the money to invest, nothing goes for anything.
You can use this method to generate more sales but it will take some time since you are doing a promotion.
You get instant traffic once you start paying for traffic; it’s 100 percent faster than other traffic-generating methods.
This will cut some of your affiliate gains since you are paying for traffic.
Paid traffic works best when you know your way around paid traffic optimization for proper conversion.
It pays you well if you are part of an affiliate that pays a relatively high amount of commission for each sale you make, this will help cover paid traffic charges and bring in some money for you.
Email listing
Another way to build an audience is by building an email list; this can help you convert readers to the buyer more efficiently.
You can use this medium to triple your sale rate, pop them with new content, and offers to consider.
This method helps you drive recurring traffic to your blog, this being said to help increase conversion rate.
Convince your blog reader to opt-in for hot newsletters and then they will be able to receive post updates from your blog directly to their email box.
It is even allowed to send affiliate email promotions, discounts products, or offers directly to subscribers’ emails.
There are lots of ways to convince readers to subscribe, ways such as free email courses, free E-book, personal contact with guides, and others.
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing is not a fast process type; it literally takes some time before you start to see actual results.
To succeed with affiliate marketing you need to follow the necessary steps to make it fruitful.
Once you get your first sale, you will need to improvise, find out methods that work for you and those that don’t.
Keep improvising every day to keep the ball rolling, try other strategies, and never put all your eggs in one basket while trying out these methods.
You don’t have to be a guru before you make it with affiliate marketing, persistency and consistency do the trick for you.
The only thing you must keep in mind is that you need to help people to receive the same treatment in return,
If you are not providing any resourceful content then you might find it hard to generate any sales.
Grow patiently, and learn from your mistake to keep rocking on in the affiliate marketing journey.
