Blog For Affiliate Marketing (The Reality Without The Fluff)

For those just starting to look into affiliate marketing, and who are feeling overwhelmed by all the information out there, we bring you Blog For Affiliate Marketing (The Reality Without The Fluff). This blog gives an overview of how affiliate marketing works, what it takes to succeed at it, and some of the tips and tricks for getting started.

What’s it all about? That’s a question I get a lot. Really, what it boils down to is how much cash you want to make. The more you read on this blog, the more you’ll know.

But in a nutshell, Blog For Affiliate Marketing (The Reality Without The Fluff) is about affiliate marketing with blogs and the tips and tricks I’ve learned along the way.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a business model that relies on the use of search engines, free or paid offers, and banner ads to market products and services.

It’s attractive to marketers because they don’t have to invest in developing goods or customer service. Instead, they can offer other company’s goods and services through their own site and earn a commission.

You only need to have a website with content (articles, videos, blog posts) for people to visit in order to make money, and that is where affiliate marketing blogs come in.

Why affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is all about promoting and selling other people’s products.

If you already have a website, you can simply promote other company’s products and services through your own site. For example, if you want to promote cake recipes on your site, just link back to sites such as AllRecipes or CakeSpy and you will earn a commission whenever someone buys a product through your link.

You may also want to offer a coupon code for people to use when they make a purchase. This is a tried and true tactic for increasing the conversions from your offers and many companies that you affiliate with will provide you these discount or coupon codes to use.

The company gets a new customer, your visitors get a special deal, and you earn a commission. It’s a win all around.

Starting your affiliate marketing blog

There are many ways to monetize your blog, but affiliate marketing is a great way to get started. Affiliate marketing is where you partner with a company to offer promotions for their products or services.

It can be lucrative because you don’t have to invest anything and the company pays you a commission on any sales you generate.

The first step, assuming you already have a blog, is to join some affiliate networks so that you can pick offers to promote on it. Here are a few affiliate networks that are generally easy for beginners to get into:

• Clickbank
• DigiStore24
• Amazon
• CJ.com (Commission Junction)

Once you have joined one or more of these networks, you can then browse through the companies they represent and pick (or sometimes apply for) whichever offers you feel are good matches to the traffic your blog receives.

What are the best free blogging platforms for affiliate marketing?

There are many free blogging platforms that you can use to make money with affiliate marketing. The most popular free blog sites include WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr. Bloggers enjoy the ease of using these platforms because they do not have to pay anything to start a blog.

What are the pros and cons of free blogs?

The pros of free blogs are that there are no costs or technical setup processes associated with starting one. This means you can focus on using the blog to post content and just grow your business instead of worrying about any fees or maintaining the software that’s running your site.

The cons are that free blogs often come with very few customization options, slow servers, and many other limitations.

Personally, I would never rely on a free platform to host my blog where I was intending to earn money.

How do I start earning from affiliate marketing on blogs?

Do you want to make money online with blog marketing? These days, blogging is used as a great way to reach new audiences and generate new leads.

Blogging is a way to earn a passive income because it’s an ongoing stream of income. Blogging is a way to create content and build relationships that will generate revenue.

I know many believe it sounds too good to be true and is all hype, but you can actually start making money pretty quickly with affiliate programs and blog marketing.

In order to do that, you’ll need to set up a blog–preferably around a passion project–and get your affiliate marketing channels in place, then it’s just a matter of publishing compelling content that contains your affiliate links and attracts visitors who are also interested in the topics you’re writing about.

Which is better for affiliate marketing: a Blog or YouTube?

A blog is the best form of affiliate marketing as it’s cost-effective and easier to maintain, in addition to the amount of exposure it provides. The blog also has a low barrier to entry, which means anyone can start a blog at no cost.

Publishing videos on YouTube has the advantage of instant and sometimes massive traffic potentials, but creating, editing, and polishing videos can be a lot harder and more time-consuming than writing out a blog post on the same topic.

On a side note, after extensive testing on this my personal experience is that despite the potential for massive instant traffic with a video on YouTube, getting viewers to leave YouTube by clicking your link(s) placed into the video description area is much more difficult than getting readers on a blog page to follow a link. So, a blog post with far less traffic than a video can still produce much better for you in the end.

How do I choose a niche?

The general rule of thumb when choosing a niche to write for is to find something that you are interested in. Don’t simply choose a random topic on a whim; see if you have something in common with others in your chosen niche before starting to post about it.

Most people fail in ever making money with affiliate marketing because they spend their time “chasing keywords” or they go into markets and niches they think are more profitable or have heard some other marketer claim were the “good ones”.

Here’s the reality of the situation, you’re not going to be a profitable affiliate marketer by “phoning it in”. You can’t just publish mediocre content, fill it with affiliate links, and expect anyone seeing that to trust you enough to follow your links around the Internet.

A link is a recommendation. Say that out loud to yourself. When you place an affiliate link as a recommendation to your readers, they judge it based on the blog content you’ve given them so far. In other words, if you’re blogging in a niche or to keywords just to make money and not because you have any personal connection or passion to it, that comes through to readers and works against you.

Don’t listen to the hype or gurus out there selling affiliate marketing courses and promising rags to riches overnight. They want you to fail and keep spinning your wheels because that’s how they continue selling you their next course, and the next one after that.

Here is the absolute truth online: if you can get traffic, you can find a monetization method for it.

It doesn’t matter what topic (niche) your blog is about, if there are other people in the world who care about it and you can get their eyeballs onto your postings, there will be a way to convert them into earnings for you, so pick a niche that you care about.

How to generate traffic?

Traffic isn’t as hard as many will make it out to be, you just have to be willing to do the actual work involved in getting it, or paying for it.

Here are my top suggestions for generating traffic to your blog:

1. Publish, publish, publish… great content! Seriously, it takes months for the search engines to start picking up your content and ranking it so that people using them can find it, but the more high-quality, high-value content that you publish the sooner that begins to happen.
2. Make sure to create a Facebook Page for your website and share more than just your blog posts with it. I’m not a big fan of social media, but this is a low-effort with a high-rewards method that’s worth utilizing.
3. While you’re at it, create a Facebook Group for your website too! This is by far way more effective than having a Facebook Page is if you can spend a little time engaging with people in the group. It builds trust in you and your blog which converts into your recommendations (affiliate links) carrying a lot more weight.
4. Meet your competitors and make them your friends. In the past guest blogging was a big thing online, these days it’s much harder to find opportunities for placing guest postings on other’s blogs, with most bloggers privately admitting they don’t even read emails from fellow bloggers reaching out to try. What does work today though, and it works gangbusters, is writing a great review on your blog about a posting some other blogger in your niche published on their site. Make clear you were going to write about the topic the post covers but found this other posting to be so good and in-depth that instead, you felt it best to just praise and link to it for your readers. This is offering value to your readers, and appreciation to your fellow blogger. Then a simple email (that doesn’t ask for anything) to that other blogger letting them know you thought so much of their efforts that you published a raving review of it on your site and linked to it for your readers, along with a link for that blogger to see your post if they want. You’ll be amazed how they’ll share your link in their circles and social media then, driving traffic to your site.

Blog For Affiliate Marketing – That’s The Reality Without The Fluff

After reading this if you’re ready to start a blog for affiliate marketing, or to convert your existing blog into one that earns you revenue through affiliate marketing, then please let me leave you with this one final thought: affiliate marketing is not about making money, that mindset will hold you back, it’s about giving people what they want or need, it’s about helping people, as long as that is your focus in every piece of content you produce and every decision that you make, the money will come from it.