How to Monetize Your Blog with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a win-win strategy for everyone involved. The advertiser thus significantly reduces the cost of advertising and is only concerned with the control and processing of orders. Partners, on the other hand, earn very good money by attracting customers to the advertiser’s website – they receive up to 70% of the cost of the goods as a reward.

It is not so difficult to become a partner – it is enough to have a desire, some funds for an advertising campaign and skills in online advertising. But it is even easier for bloggers to make money with affiliate marketing – they have a ready source of traffic in the form of their blog. In our article, we will talk about how to turn your blog into a source of income.

What is affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is the process of attracting customers to an advertiser company. You attract visitors to the target site and make sales, and the advertiser pays you a certain commission-reward. It doesn’t matter how you sell the product, the main thing is the fact of the sale.

For a blogger, in this way, his blog becomes the main source of sales – a website, a Facebook group, a YouTube channel or a Telegram channel. With the help of a blog, you can talk about a product and thereby attract buyers to it.

Features of affiliate marketing bloggers

Bloggers are highly specialized. The traffic manager can work with any traffic source and any vertical. A blogger, on the other hand, has to stick to one topic. One that is in contact with the blog. That is, you cannot switch to advertising cryptocurrency products if you have previously written about dietary supplements and health. If it looks doubtful – the reader will not appreciate it.

On the issue of readers of the blog, you need to be very scrupulous about advertising and the product being promoted. People don’t like advertising as for them it looks like “sucking in” a product. The review should be natural and impartial, otherwise the reader will be suspected that you are blogging only and exclusively for the sake of making money on advertising. And then the performance indicators will be greatly reduced.

Also, affiliate marketing doesn’t work without a unique link. The blogger’s identifier is sewn into it and with its help, the advertiser captures the transitions and actions of the user. You can write arbitrarily good and cited materials about the product, but you won’t get a reward for it without this very link.

How to Start Affiliate Marketing as a Blogger

Choose a Niche

Choosing a niche is perhaps the most important thing to get started in affiliate marketing. It will determine what you will write about in the future on your site.

Try to find out in advance if there are affiliate programs in your chosen niche. For example, there are plenty of them in the product vertical, as well as in gambling with betting.

Sign up for an affiliate program

Carefully study the terms of the affiliate program as this will help to avoid misunderstandings later.

The amount of remuneration. It varies greatly from program to program – in some cases it reaches 70% of the cost of the goods.

Minimum payment. Typically, affiliate programs set a minimum payment for withdrawals. It varies from $50 to $100. If you have earned less than this amount, you cannot withdraw money to your account.

Payment schedule. Affiliate programs do not involve the withdrawal of earned funds at any time. Usually, the application is processed within a day, and the money itself is paid 1-2 times a month. The exception is large bloggers with millions of views, in whose work advertisers are especially interested.

Restrictions. At this point, they talk about prohibitions for a partner, for example, cheating bots. Here are the possible penalties for the blogger.

Create content

After signing up for the affiliate program, you will receive a unique link to use when creating content. Such a link is sewn directly into the text, and on YouTube it is placed in the description of the video. The next task of the blogger is to create content and put an affiliate link.

Usually, content that helps sell is all sorts of reviews and unboxings. They help to evaluate the product from different angles, to determine its pros and cons. A good review is a detailed and, as far as possible, impartial account of the product, its use cases, and your own experience. For example, when talking about various dietary supplements, it is worth telling how this particular one differs from others and how it should be taken.

It’s also worth thinking about how users will find your reviews. Well, if you have a multi-million audience, then they will read everything, no matter what you write. But if the audience is small, then you should rely on SEO. You must use the Google Keyword Planner in advance and use the collected keywords in the headlines and the material itself.

The Best Affiliate Marketing Programs for Bloggers

Rakuten Advertising

Rakuten Advertising is one of the best affiliate marketing platforms out there. It contains offers from Lego, New Balance, Microsoft and many other world famous brands – more than 1000 offers in total. Most of them are goods and installs.

Rakuten Advertising is good for its user-friendly interface and detailed guide. A beginner does not have to rummage through hundreds of different pages of the site in order to understand the features of work and receive remuneration.

CJ Affiliate

CJ Affiliate is another big platform in this area. It also has well-known brand offers, although less than Rakuten Advertising. The platform is used, for example, by GoPro, Verizon and Travelocity.

The main feature of CJ Affiliate is a convenient widget creator. With it, you can create a collage or slideshow of clickable banners and embed it on your site. Compared to creating a full-fledged review, this is somewhat less effective, but it will take much less effort. In addition, banners can be “hung” on the site with any theme.

ShareASale

ShareASale is not the most famous affiliate marketing platform. Major brands are not represented on it but there are 4,000 lesser-known companies. And some of them pay up to $300 per sale.

The main feature of ShareASale is convenient offer search filters. For example, you can set a minimum CPC or choose a program with auto-validation of traffic. There are quite a few such metrics, which allows you to narrow the choice as much as possible.

Creative market

Creative Market is a specialized platform. She handles everything related to images – design, photography and WordPress themes. You can work with such a platform if you write about website development, SEO or IT. Also, Creative Market is notable for the fact that it pays 15% from the first purchase of the client.

Blog Improvement Tips

Pay attention to competitors

Blogging is a highly competitive industry. In one topic, you compete for a subscriber and an advertiser. And both at the same time choose the most effective.

Typically, influencers don’t talk about how they advertise. At best, they will tell it in their course. But common patterns and features can be noticed even while browsing the blog.

Find the best blogs in your niche. Surely, someone has already compiled the top 10 health or car blogs. Then study what products they advertise and how they do it – banners on websites, big reviews. Some also use short social media posts or email newsletters. If you have a similar audience, then the same style of blogging and advertising integration will work for you.

Mask affiliate links

Without a unique link, you will not be able to earn rewards – the advertiser simply will not find users who have bought their product after your review. The problem is that the unique link is long and ugly.

The way out is to mask your links. You can simply hide them in the text – then individual words on the page will be clickable. Another option is to use a link shortening service like PrettyLinks. Then a link of 100+ characters will look like something short and simple.

Short links are more trustworthy, while long links seem like a scammer’s tool.

Moreover, some link shortening services allow you to replace them in one click. This is useful when an advertiser has changed a unique link for some reason. With the help of such services, you can replace them everywhere in one click.

Think about a special Niche

Not every topic and audience is equally solvent and this must be taken into account when working with affiliate marketing. For example, a weight loss blog involves the sale of relatively cheap products, people are rarely willing to pay more than $50 for dietary supplements or courses. Conversely, a blog about investments or cryptocurrencies can sell very expensive products. It is read by people who are ready to invest money for their earnings.

Thus, even the approach to content differs depending on the niche. If you sell expensive products, materials don’t come out that often. It takes time to prepare and bring them to the ideal, the user needs to be convinced to spend a large amount. But if the product is relatively cheap, it is better to generate a lot of content. Create simple reviews and notes daily and this approach will bring traffic and sales.

Remember the advertiser

The main problem and at the same time advantage in affiliate marketing is that you do not own the products. You are only helping to spread it.

This looks like a problem because the advertiser is unilaterally changing the price of the product and your reward. If the advertiser wants to lower the payout from 25% of the check to 15%, you have to either accept a drop in your earnings or say goodbye to the advertiser. Of course, this happens quite rarely, but it still needs to be borne in mind.

On the other hand, you are not responsible for the product. Other people are engaged in its logistics, acceptance of payments, and other issues. You have one, fairly simple task – to sell. The advertiser does the rest.

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