The Ultimate Guide to Making Money Blogging with Affiliate Marketing

The Ultimate Guide to Making Money Blogging with Affiliate Marketing

Hey blogger! Are you a newbie wondering how to monetize your blog or an experienced blogger who wants to take their blogging income to the next level? Well, I’ve got a treat for you! You’re going to learn the best way to make money blogging with affiliate marketing!

What’s affiliate marketing?

Here’s how it works in a nutshell:

With affiliate marketing, you earn a commission on the successful sale of a product or service. You refer products and services to your readers and when they buy, you get paid a commission off the sale. There are affiliate products in just about every niche.

Some examples:

• Web hosting
• Domains
• Vitamins and supplements
• Apparel and footwear
• Software
• Ebooks and guides
• Services like ebook hosting, newsletter, etc.
• Magazines
• Books
• Treadmills
• Coffee

The list continues!  So, regardless of your niche, there will likely be a huge list of affiliate products available to you.

Did you know some of the top affiliates earn $50,000 per month (and more)?  If you want to explode your results, with the help of this guide and this training, you’ll be on your way.  Get the full review of the training here.

Affiliate offers can pay a few cents or a few hundred dollars (or more), and every amount in between.  You’re going to learn how to pick AWESOME offers and start earning from day 1!  Ready?

Let’s kick things off!

How to get started with affiliate marketing

There are a handful of important steps you want to follow. Read the following sections carefully and reach out to me at (insert email address) for any questions.

Step 1.) Uncover your audience

First, you want to start with your audience. Do you have a blog? A nice-sized following on social media? An email list?

You want to ask yourself what your audience is all about.  This critical step will be the difference between making a full-time income affiliate income and earning nothing, really.  This step shouldn’t be too difficult. If you’re a blogger, your audience is your readers you write to.  Are they busy moms? Penny pinching college students? Work at home dads? Frugalistas?

After you hone in on your audience, next, you’re going to pick offers!

Step 2.) Picking offers

Offers are the products and services you’re going to refer.  As a rule of thumb, I usually only refer products that I have personally tried myself or have a strong liking for (even if I’m not a customer).

A big success secret: your loyal audience can become your loyal buyers.

What does this mean?  Well, if your audience trusts you, they will trust your advice and be willing to try out or have an open mind about the products you refer.  Once you have trust, you want to keep it.  It can be tempting to offer high commission products that might not be a fit for your readers.  You might make some sales or even a lot of sales but if you selected the offer solely on the commission, you risk losing the trust of your audience. Once trust is lost, it’s super hard to regain it back.

Now, this doesn’t mean you have to personally try out every product you refer like I do but you should have a genuine want to help your audience. It should be aligned with your audience and solve a problem they have. Make sense?

Step 3.) Apply for programs

You can apply for programs through networks or through the merchant directly.  Affiliate networks are huge platforms that host tons and tons of merchant affiliate programs. Once you join, you browse their library of merchants and offers, then apply for offers you’re interested in.

List of affiliate networks:

1. Shareasale
2. Flexoffers
3. CJ
4. Linkshare
5. Affiliate Window
6. Peerfly
7. Max Bounty
8. Clickbank
9. Pepperjam
10. Clickbooth
11. Amazon Associates
12. Avangate
13. Impact Radius

You can join all the programs or just a couple. The 9 programs I’m in are: Shareasale, Flexoffers, CJ, Linkshare, Affiliate Window, Peerfly, Clickbank, Amazon Associates, and Impact Radius.

Going direct through the merchant is another route to join an affiliate program.  It’s generally an easy process. You complete a simple application on the merchant’s website, they review it, and submit their decision (approve or decline).

Once you are an approved affiliate, you will have access to affiliate links and other tools (in some cases) that you can use when you promote the offer.

List of some merchant-direct affiliate programs I belong to:

1. Shopify
2. Bluehost
3. Linqia
4. Izea
5. Survey Savvy
6. Vindale Research

How to Promote Affiliate Offers

After you have picked quality offers for your audience, the next step is to promote, promote, promote! By promoting offers, you are sharing the offer with your audience in hopes that they will purchase so you can earn a commission.

Some ways to promote offers:

• Blogging
• Email newsletter
• Social media posts
• Social media groups or group boards

Blogging

Promotion through blogging happens when you mention an offer in a blog post. You can mention the product one time or multiple times, making sure your affiliate link is inserted in your post.

Success tip: Use link cloaking (if allowed by the affiliate) like Pretty Link from WordPress.

Using cloaking makes your links look more professional. Check out this example:

www.shopifyoffer.com/uxiuieou289498jlkdjf

OR

www.theintrovertedblogger.com/shopify

Both links lead to the same offer. Which one looks better? Link 2, right?

Cloaking can also make it easy for you to remember affiliate links for future use. Instead of heading back to the affiliate portal to copy and paste the link, you’ll remember a Shopify affiliate link is: yourblogname.com/Shopify.

In addition to putting links in the text of your blog post, you can also include them in your images. Plus, you can add banners within your post.

Email Newsletter

When you send your email blast to subscribers, don’t forget your affiliate links. Some ideas:

• Share your latest posts (links within your posts)
• Share your latest, greatest, favorite new product (affiliate link)
• Showcase a case study (affiliate link)
• Talk about how the product has impacted you or helped you personally (affiliate link)

An easy way to include your top affiliate links in every newsletter is to include a “Products You’ll Love” section within your newsletter

What a Products You’ll Love section looks like?

This is at the bottom of every one of my posts on The Introverted Blogger.  Steal this idea from me! Go ahead!

I use a plugin to add this to each of my blog posts as an extra boost for affiliate links. I stand by each product I refer and these are some of my favorite products and tools I showcase to readers.

Add this section to the bottom of your newsletter. Easy!

Social Media Posts

Where allowed, social media posts are a great place to put your links.  Pinterest, Facebook, etc. All great networks to look at it.  Where to put them?

• In your bio or profile
• In your posts
• In your captions

Success tip: Make sure you review your affiliate terms to make sure social media posting is allowed. It is not permitted everywhere.

Social Media Groups/Group Boards

Posting in a group?  Add your affiliate link. Easy as that. Make sure you review the group rules to make sure they allow it.

Where to put them?

• LinkedIn groups
• Facebook groups
• Pinterest group boards

Being consistent with affiliate marketing

This is the secret sauce strategy we use to make money with affiliate marketing month after month.  Once you’ve honed in on your audience, picked your offers, and promoted them, just rinse and repeat.

Related Posts You’ll Love:

• 8 Tips for Earning $1,000 Per Month Working from Home
• Introvert or Extrovert, Make Money Blogging
• How to Work from Home as a Full-Time Blogger

My biggest advice is to be consistent with your affiliate marketing strategy.  Consistency is key if you want to continue growth and earning money long term.  Are you crushing it in affiliate marketing?  What are your best tips you can share? Share down below in comments.

(FYI, this article contains affiliate links. If you purchase something through my links, I’ll receive a commission at no expense to you.)