Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways for bloggers to start making money. With affiliate marketing, you can promote different products and services to your audience without investing money and with much less time. Businesses of all sizes also realize that affiliate content can increase brand awareness and drive sales so profitably that they are happy to share a portion of their profits.

If you start a blog, you face strong competition. According to Optinmoster, there are about 70 million posts being published each month by WordPress users. But affiliate marketing, if done well, can be a very interesting source of passive income.

In this article, we will cover what concerns affiliate marketing for bloggers.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is when you earn a commission for selling other people’s products. This commission can be a fixed amount or a percentage of the sale or a fixed amount determined by the company/owner of the affiliate product. These commissions are often between 10-70% of the product sale price.

Because you do most of the work for them by telling people about their products and getting more visitors to their sales page, they reward you for that. As an affiliate, you are responsible not only for attracting additional visitors to the sales page but also for convincing your readers that the product is worth buying.

Many affiliates also have high enough commissions to stay competitive.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Before you can benefit from affiliate revenue, you need to sign up and get approval from the affiliate company. Once you have been approved for an affiliate program, you will receive an affiliate link to the product sales page. This special affiliate link allows you to track your affiliate sales.

When someone clicks on your affiliate link, a cookie is attached to their browser that lets you know whether or not they are buying the product from your link. This means that if someone clicks on your link and buys at any time during the period covered by this cookie, you will receive a commission on that sale.

The sales you make from your affiliate link are tracked and most companies will pay you for sales between 30 and 90 days after the sale is completed to ensure that no returns or refunds are requested. You must also comply with rules and regulations regarding affiliate marketing and disclosures. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission is the agency that regulates the buying behavior of online consumers, and you must also follow its rules regarding online marketing and advertising:

In short, you must disclose affiliate relationships to your readers, and there are certain rules about how this information must be disclosed.

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How to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing as A Blogger

Here are 8 tips to prepare your blog for affiliate marketing.

1-Decide on a platform

In fact, you can do affiliate marketing on any platform. But if you want to build your audience and increase your affiliate sales via a blog, you need to have a site. Creating a blog today is relatively easy and inexpensive. Once your site is online, you need to optimize it for search engines in order to have a better chance of ranking. From there, you are free to add affiliate links to your content.

Note that you will need to disclose the fact that you include affiliate links. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires you to be transparent when you receive revenue from search engine optimization (SEO).

If you use a blog, create a disclosure page, or include it in the footer of your website like this.

2. Choose Your Niche

To have the best chances of success, you have to position yourself in a niche market. Choose a topic that focuses on a specific category. For example, “Healthcare” is a very broad category. Rather than addressing this topic, try something more specific.

That way, you can build a more targeted audience and possibly help you get better search engine rankings. But most importantly, choose a niche that interests you. If you are passionate about a topic, it will be much easier for you to continue creating content over the long term.

Read More: 14 Best Niches for Affiliate Marketing

 3 . Find Affiliate Programs

You can do a simple Google search to find affiliate programs in your niche. This method will allow you to find various affiliate programs and networks. You could then check their program and see how affiliate referrals work, how much they pay, when they pay, what their promotion rules are, etc.

 You can join as many different affiliate programs as you like. Just make sure that the company and products match your needs and those of your audience.

There are many affiliate platforms that allow you to find affiliated companies and products. You can use their programs to search for popular products in your blog niche.

Here are some of the most popular affiliate networks: 

–Amazon Associates

– Shareasale

– Clickbank

– Affiliated with the CJ

Before launching an affiliate program, check the proposed commission structure and read the company evaluations. Different programs offer different commission percentages on sales. But commission percentages are not enough to prove that the sales price is important.

That’s why they also advertise the average CPE, or profit per click, so you can better compare average profits between companies. If a company offers a 70% commission, it also has the lowest profit per click, which means that the selling price of the product(s) must be much lower than other programs.

Basically, there are 6 common types of programs. Their difference lies in the options they offer. So depending on what you are looking for, you can find the programs that are right for you. Let’s go through them.

PPC (pay-per-click)

it is one of the simplest types of affiliate programs. The affiliate is paid when he or she sends visitors back to the website. You will be paid even if the people you referred do not perform any specific actions. But PPC commissions are also low.

PPL (pay-per-lead)

 These programs pay affiliates for each prospect converted. This means that visitors have to fill in a form or register to become a prospect.

PPS (pay-per-sale)

 In PPS programs, affiliates receive commissions when their referrals make a purchase. The commission is equal to a predetermined percentage of the product price.

Site commissions

 some programs paysite commissions to their affiliates. This means that they will be paid for any purchases made by their referrals throughout the site.

One time commissions

 the name itself says it all: commissions are paid to affiliates only once after the referrals have performed the predetermined action.

Recurring commissions 

A recurring affiliate program is a program that pays you commissions for everything your customers buy. In other words, this type of commission is linked to subscription programs. So, Affiliates are paid as long as their referral is signed up.

Some affiliate programs are time-limited, but others like ClickFunnels are lifetime. Make sure you read the affiliate’s terms and conditions before promoting the product, as the rules vary from company to company.

To find products and services to promote on your Site, you can also see what your competitors are doing and how they are doing it. Take a look at some of the best blogs in your niche and it can give you ideas on what might work for your audience.

 4. Create Quality Content

Once you have joined the affiliate programs, it’s time to create your content. Your content can take the form of quality reviews and recommendations.

If you want your affiliate site to succeed, you need to create high-quality content where your affiliate links fit naturally. When you write a review that includes an affiliate promotion, remember to create value for your reader. Good research is necessary to get a solid review.

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In general, there are two types of product or service reviews:

Evaluation of a specific product or service

When looking at a specific product or service, you generally want to include the following:

– the nature of the product or service

– Why it’s useful

– Advantages and Disadvantages

– Possible comparisons with other products

– How to start using the product (with affiliate links)

If you don’t own the product, no problem! Just browse the product reviews and read the use cases to get a good overview of the product.

Make sure that your content is complete and that it presents the advantages and disadvantages of the product. The more you can convince your readers of the need for the product, the more likely they are to buy it. This is your chance to tell your audience why you like it and why you think it’s worth buying.

Product Comparison

If you find affiliate products in the same category, you can create a strong comparison article and guide your readers to choose the product that best suits their needs. Such articles are always very good for getting clicks on the site, which can lead to future sales. You can make an extra effort to make sure that your content solves the visitor’s problem.

So you can create a different type of article that educates the reader on a specific topic and offers a solution in the form of an affiliate link at the end.

5. Add Affiliate Links to Your Blogs

Writing a blog on a product without adding an affiliate link will not earn you any money. One of the most obvious ways to prepare your blog for affiliate marketing is to add your unique and traceable affiliate link to every post on your blog.

Start looking for places where affiliate marketing makes sense. Add your affiliate links to product mentions or include information about new products for comparison purposes. Your affiliate links should be well distributed throughout your content.

The use of text such as buttons, tables, and boxes can help grab the attention of your readers and make the message more readable. In addition to written promotion, compelling affiliate ads in the form of banners are a great way to promote affiliate products on your blog.

Most affiliate programs provide you with promotional materials such as banners of different sizes as part of the affiliate program. When placing affiliate ads, think carefully about the size and position of your blog. Avoid banners that are too big or whose colors clash. Remember those affiliate ads are only a small aspect of your blog and should not take priority over the design of your blog.

Read More: 8 Internal Links Optimization Strategies for SEO & UX

6 – Increase Traffic to Your Site

Once you’ve created quality content, it’s time to get more people to read it, so that they click on your affiliate links.

Here are three traffic strategies to consider:

Paid traffic

This is where you pay for the traffic to your site. You can do this by using PPC ads. The advantage of paid traffic is that the moment you start paying, you get traffic.

In general, ads are a great traffic strategy if you are part of a high-paying affiliate program. But if you are completely new to marketing or working with low commission programs, it may not be such a good idea.

Read More: 

Top 10 Strategies to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Site

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 Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the practice of optimizing pages so that they are well placed in search engines like Google. As long as you can get good search engine rankings for your target keywords, you will get consistent and passive traffic.

At the most basic level, SEO is about:

– Understanding what your target customers are looking for;

– Creating content around these topics (blog posts, product pages, etc.);

– Taking care of the “technical” aspects in order to push these pages higher in the search engines (which includes creating links).

Read More: 

SEO for Beginners: How to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO

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7. Promote Your Content

To be successful in affiliate marketing, it is important to focus on traffic. The more visitors your website has, the more people see your affiliate promotions. This will result in more commissions.

Promoting your content on social media will help you develop your audience and get direct traffic to your blog. So, in addition to the content on your site, you can add affiliate links in social media messages.

You can usually include affiliate links in Facebook messages, YouTube videos, Instagram messages, and Pinterest pins. You can also create entire videos around an affiliate product or service and add affiliate links in video descriptions.

When you specifically refer to affiliate links in YouTube videos, you usually need to disclose the affiliate relationship in the video itself. Affiliate links on other platforms work in a very similar way, in that you must disclose the affiliate relationship either in the video or in the description, depending on how you insert your affiliate links.

8. Create a Mailing List

Email marketing is an effective way to extend your affiliate promotions. To create a mailing list, you need to persuade your site’s readers to subscribe to it. Start creating a mailing list by placing subscription forms on your website. This means that you need to offer them something valuable.

In exchange for an email address, you can offer them something valuable in return, such as an e-book or a checklist that fits your niche. E-mail marketing is also a powerful tool to maintain your relationship with your audience. E-mail lists allow you to communicate with your readers at any time.

Use them to let your fans know about new content and encourage them to come back to your site for more information. This increases clicks and affiliate sales. You can even send email promotions directly to your list.

You can use affiliate links in your e-mails in two different ways:

– unique emails

You can create affiliate links in unique emails that deal with affiliate products or services.

These may be about:

– Flash sales of products or services

– A new product or service that you have tried and think your audience will like

Limited-time sales are very effective because they give the reader a reason to “buy now”.

E-mail sequences (Sales funnels)

You can also create entire sequences of emails to sell an affiliate product or service.

This usually works best with more expensive affiliate products, because you usually have to sell the reader before asking them to make a purchase.

To do this, you must first send a series of emails that add value to the reader and inform him or her why he or she needs the product.

After providing free value initially, you can introduce the affiliate product.

Read our E-mail Marketing: Beginner’s Ultimate Guide for more tips on this topic.

Conclusion

I hope these tips have been helpful in preparing your blog for affiliate marketing. The success of affiliate marketing depends more on the ability of your site to attract visitors with purchase intent than on pure traffic. Successful affiliate sites develop an in-depth knowledge of a specific niche. By focusing on a single niche, you can more easily establish yourself as an authority in your area of expertise.

Even if your site is small, as long as you are focused on a single niche, you can succeed in generating affiliate sales. Try to take advantage of e-mail marketing and also present your own product on your site.