How to Monetize Your Blog with Affiliate Marketing

affiliate marketing

Although there are thousands of blogs written daily, only a small percentage is monetized and it is the immediate need of most bloggers to monetize personal blogs before it’s too late. Affiliate marketing is the best approach most bloggers take when they try to monetize their blogs. There are some other blog monetization methods such as banner advertisements and sponsored posts that can provide overwhelming results to some blog writers.

Generating a good income from your online work is important as it is a good full-time career but only the good content in your blog isn’t everything. You can work with a large number of national and international brands using affiliate marketing while making a good profit. Some of the best affiliate marketing blogs may promote the products and services of a company to get a big share in the profit.

If you don’t make smart decisions, you may end up giving all the earnings to the owner and waste your time writing the blog as the earning would not be enough for you. To transform your current website into a profit-generating machine using affiliate marketing, you only need to make some changes in your current setup. You can work with as many companies as you want and can make an unlimited amount of money as an affiliate marketer.

Affiliate marketing and its importance

An arrangement between an affiliate and a company to advertise all the products of a company by writing blogs on the website of the affiliate marketer. In every affiliate marketing blog, there will be a link to the official site of the company so the reader can buy the product after reading the blog. Affiliate marketing is currently in use in a large number of industries all around the globe and the process doesn’t depend on products or services offered by the merchant.

Affiliate marketing is the best way to start your own business without the need for a big amount. You don’t have to stick to your computer screen all the time and you can control the number of hours you invest in your business according to your needs. If you complete your work right on time, affiliate marketing can be an extremely rewarding business.

Blogging and affiliate marketing is the next big thing as it can boost up brand awareness and cost-effectively increase sales of the company. Creating, shipping, and supporting products is none of your concern because your work will be done when you publish a blog.

Benefits of affiliate marketing

Your income is directly related to your reach and it will grow as your reach increases day by day. If the blog is on point and tells the reader about the latest trends, they will thank and there will be a relation of mutual trust between them. There is a chance that all your old blog posts will also generate passive income as people will view them. You only need good blog writing skills and a website to start working on your new project.

A blog post will link the customer directly to the company removing the need for customer support as the customer will ready almost everything about the product. Affiliate marketing features performance-based rewards so writing engaging and informative blog posts should be your first concern. You will be your boss and you can decide whether you want to promote a product or a service by yourself. It is a flexible business model with options to increase or decrease it at any given time without putting too much at stake.

All such benefits are making affiliate marketing the next big marketing strategy used by big companies as it offers benefits like no other marketing strategy. Companies don’t need to focus on other marketing options when they establish a successful affiliate marketing model to cut down costs and make their products better.

Working on Affiliate marketing

If you are wondering about how to monetize your blog and want to start your own business to get some extra bucks at the end of the month. Here are the steps that you can follow to join an affiliate program.

  • Join an Affiliate marketing program
  • Use your ID and URL to start writing blogs about given products
  • Add the link of the product and official site to your blog
  • Post the blog on your website and wait

When a buyer clicks on the link given in your blog to buy a product and make the purchase, you will be credited your fair share according to your contract. A merchant will match the details of each cookie with their sales record to get information about the exact source of referral.

Best programs of Affiliate marketing

Below are some of the best affiliate programs for new bloggers through which they monetize their blogs with any prior knowledge about how things work.

Rakuten Marketing

Rakuten Marketing has more than 1000 different merchants who are ready to give you details about their products so you can write a blog making it one of the best affiliate marketing programs right now. It has merchants from almost all industries and a beginner-friendly program.

CJ Affiliate

CJ affiliate features merchant filters through which you can search for merchants based on industries to write about what you love the most. Adding new products to your blog is easier than ever before by using the drag and drop feature as well as by using an advanced widget creator.

ShareASale

ShareASale offers hundreds of dollars in commission on the sale of some products by letting you secure a deal with some top-tier brands out there. You can filter affiliate marketing programs by applying tier filters on the list of all the available programs on the site.

Creative Market

Creative market is a niche affiliate marketing program that can help you in creating your blog based on the preferences of your audience. It gives commission to bloggers in the percentage of the total sale and encourages you to sell more than one product at the same time using some next-level marketing strategies.

Steps to Monetize Your Blog

Monetize your blog through affiliate marketing is the latest trend and you can follow below key points below to get real results from your campaign in a few days or weeks. These are the best blog ideas for affiliate marketing that even someone with beginner-level skills can try to run a successful business.

Learn about your target audience

Getting a better sense of who is going to read your blog is a key factor in the success of an affiliate marketing campaign. Create a detailed profile of your audience and keep it in mind when you write a blog about a specific product or a service to make it the top money-making blog. Knowing your audience can help you in making the landing page better and better with each survey.

Giving information about the right product or service to the right customer should be your first approach. You can ask questions to your readers or observe their searching patterns. There are a lot of third-party tools and plugin available which can gather necessary information about buyers as doing it by yourself will consume a lot of time.

Keep a history of everyone who reads your blog and buy a product to provide them with blogs in the future according to what they want. Blogs with relevant information have a much higher rate of conversions as compared to other blogs using the same affiliate monetization strategy. Read reviews of customers to find out their experience about all the recent products and services they bought using links from your blogs.

Focus on the value of content

Top affiliate marketing blogs depend on the value of content and the number of blogs on your website doesn’t matter if the content is not according to the industry standards. Uniqueness, usefulness, and relevance of content in the blog can generate more organic traffic than the writer can imagine especially if they are beginner-level bloggers.

Add more keywords and links to the blog to get maximum feedback on all the blogging efforts that you put in each blog. Search engines such as Google love showing blogs with useful content at the top of the search results. The trust and capability between bloggers and readers are built by to-the-point content provided right on time. Your earning will increase as there will be more trust and they will preferably buy products and services using links from your site.

Helping your audience in every possible way can impact your conversion rate in a good way and they won’t hesitate before making a purchase decision on the suggestion from your blog. Readers will never doubt the information given in your blog if you try to take the straight way to reach your goals and never lie to them to earn some extra bucks.

Search for best Affiliate offers

Always search for good affiliate offers when you are new in the market because there is a chance that you may fail when you keep on writing blogs about a single product. Come up with niche affiliate marketing blog ideas to promote as many products as you want in a single blog and the only limit is your thinking. Your favorite brand can offer an affiliate marketing program which can be a once-in-a-lifetime chance for you to hit the jackpot.

No matter what you are trying to sell to your readers, they will buy it if it relevant to their interests and the product is not crap. In some cases, the reader will buy a useless product at first but it will destroy your reputation and they will never buy something on your suggestions in the blog.

There are some affiliate marketing offers through which you can get commission even if there is no sale so try to take these offers if you need money but don’t put your reputation at stake for earning a few more dollars. Commission rates on digital products and services are higher than they are on physical products. You can easily find thousands of affiliate market programs for digital products so choose one and start earning on your terms and conditions.

Make money pages

The main page of your blog on which people press on the link to buy a product and these pages are known as money pages. You need to get as much as traffic as you can on your money pages to increase your earning and all this only require a good marketing strategy. Only show your audience products and services that they find valuable to make them buy everything your blog contains. You can even decide what your readers will buy in the upcoming days and weeks by sending them promotional emails.

Regularly send emails to your valued customers to give them information about new upcoming offers on their favorite products to maximize sales of high commission products. Test as many marketing strategies as you can to find the one that works the best for you. Accomplishing your goals is easier when you have the complete concept of what to do and how to do it.

People love reading review articles about products that they want to buy in the future and your review can make things a lot easier for them because they will learn about all the ups and downs of buying something without spending their money. These review articles are often ranked in the top pages of Google search results.

Add Calls-to-action to your blogs

Writing blogs based on the interests of your audience is a different thing but if you don’t know the art of telling your audience what to do, then affiliate marketing isn’t for you. Most marketers miss a lot of revenue because they don’t add call-to-action to their blog and the reader ends up on another site to purchases the product rather than buying it from the site of the blogger.

Add some calls-to-action according to the type of the product to the sidebar on the webpage or somewhere in the content is effective in most cases. There are a lot of third-party plugins available that you can use to add catchy call-to-action words to your content. Some themes limit the addition of these phrases in blogs so choose the theme of your website according to your future goals so avoid any problems later.

These CTAs can help readers in learning more about the given product or service without reading the full blog and tap on the link to buy the product. The approach to add CTAs in your blog may differ depending on your content and there is no perfect CTA for all the given situations. If you have no experience, add a link and CTA at the end of your blog to promote readers into buying something.

Don’t give too many choices to customers

Too many options and choices can cause distractions leading the customer to change or postponed their decision to buy a product or a service. The layout of your blog is changed when you add more choices for your readers and you may not present your affiliate blog ideas to the full extent in front of your readers. A choices-rich blog can drop down the conversion rate to zero and marketers will not earn anything at all.

Keep pages with important stuff at the start of the blog and the reader only need to click once or twice to access these pages if placing them at the start is not possible. Only add much-needed details and keep the tone of the blog as simple as you can fix any problems this way.

By using this strategy, your audience will only visit the page with important content only making it easy for your website to rank in Google pages. It doesn’t matter that readers are at the first or last page of the website, they can easily move to the relevant page without much of a stretch.

Test and tweak blogs to boost up conversions

The best way to learn something is to do it by yourself and you will learn something new even if you fail in the first few tries. Results of tests show valuable insights about your strategies leading to better results next time or you may succeed on your second try. Some marketers become mentors and share their experiences with beginner marketers to help in making money.

There are various tools such as Google Tag Manager, Facebook Insights, and Google Analytics, etc. through which you can view necessary reports at a glance. Some of the tools mentioned above can track all the activities of your website and show you tips according to the report to improve it. Insights about a site are a valuable asset as they can decide the future of your blogging and marketing.

The data you get about your site depends on your affiliate market program so choose a program wisely as you may not be able to change it later. Past data can also help in starting new campaigns sell something to your audience and earn that extra commission on each item sold using your link. Showing target ads to a specific reader can be effortless as you already know what they like and what don’t like.

Optimize the site for mobile

Most blog writers forget about the experience of mobile visitors on their site and don’t optimize the site to make it load faster on small screen devices. Those who pay attention to this fact generate more revenue as a large majority of the audience buy products and services using their mobile phones. Although optimization of the desktop version of a website is necessary, the mobile version of the site has the same importance to increase conversion rate.

You can test your site using an online tool to improve the loading time for mobile devices and you will get the results of doing this in just a few days. Many new marketers are already prioritizing the optimization of a site in their new strategy. Most web designing tools already offer plugins to track the usage of mobile audiences and show them ads according to their interests.

There is an immense need to optimize a blog post, add new affiliate marketing links, and promote products to mobile phones. You will generate some extra income without making any significant changes in your current marketing strategy. Due to the flow of relevance, achieving higher conversion rates is also possible if you follow all these steps according to the expert’s advice.

Create a good linking strategy

Linking is the most crucial element of all affiliate marketing websites out there because your priority is to share the link of the product with the reader so they can purchase the item. Your earning depends on the number of times a link is used to buy something and your blog will either make the audience go crazy about the product or they will not visit your site ever again.

Creating a new linking strategy is easier than ever before especially when you have cutting-edge tools with step-by-step guides to help you in doing what is important. Don’t add too many links on a single page of the blog or it makes discourages the reader from buying something.

Try to keep a balance between the monetization of your blog and the value of content in your blog. Write the article about the product itself not about the advertisement of the product and add a link to the article of the product.