Wondering how to become an affiliate blogger? Well you can start either by using a free blogging platform such as Hubpages, or building your own website and blogging on that! See Get Paid For Advertising Online Without A Website.
There’s a few things you should know before you decide on your route though. For starters, free blogging platforms have some limitations which can limit your earning power. Ideally use your own blog platform by creating your own website. A free blog platform seldom gets picked up by the free search engines like Google. This can severely limit your traffic. Ideally, as a blogger you’ll get found on the free search engines and get free traffic. If this doesn’t happen, you can still get traffic but it’s a lot harder and more time consuming.
How To Become An Affiliate Blogger: – Choose Your Topic
Some bloggers start out with their topic and others with their products. If you have a passion or interest already, it’s a good idea to build a site around that! A blogger will need to create regular content and keep blogging for a long time before they can make any money! Some blogs even start out without the intention to make money at all! Bloggers create content around their passion and, over time they generate traffic (visitors) to their content.
You can also build a niche website around your topic. This can have an effect on traffic if you do it well. See my article on this, and a step by step about how I built this niche website: Create Free Website And Earn Money.
If you’re unsure of a topic, access the workshop series, and learn more about the kinds of products you’d like to promote first. Then, when you know your topic better, or what you’d like to write about, you can create appropriate content to market your products or services.
Understanding Affiliate Marketing – Becoming An Affiliate Blogger
Bloggers blog about all and any topic whatsoever. That doesn’t necessarily translate to sales of affiliate products though. The best bloggers lead with value through their blogs and create appropriate content to lead their visitors to products which will give value and help their visitors. If you get this wrong, you can be blogging for years without actually making any affiliate sales.
Some of my best sales came for free from blogging. When the content is a good match for your products, and it gets found on the search engines for free, you’ve got a great business model. Keep doing that! If this doesn’t happen immediately, just keep learning and keep blogging. I blogged for a long time before I broke through and started making regular sales.
Choose The Right Affiliate Products
Affiliate marketing is a great business model which can allow you to blog and make money – if you get it right! Affiliate products are available in many different areas. If you’ve already got a subject area you’re passionate about, look for affiliate products which fulfil a need in that particular subject area.
If you’re passionate about motorcycles, there’s no point in recommending affiliate products which relate to photography on your motorcycle blog. It’s a bad match. It’s an obvious example but get this wrong and you’ve got your work cut out. Ideally find affiliate products which suit your niche. Search for “{your niche} affiliate programs” to find products which relate to your interest. Then, you can blog around your passion and sell those products which are right fir your audience.
Ideally choose products which are digital. Digital products pay much more than physical products. (40-50% compared with 3-10% commissions). You should also look at products which offer recurring affiliate commissions.
Blogging – How Long Does It Take?
So, how long does it take blogging before you see any kind of results? See How Long Does It Take To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing. This will vary wildly depending on a number of factors:
- Your niche you pick and how competitive it is
- How often you write a blog post and publish it
- Your ability to share you posts on social media and generate back links to them
- Your blog quality and post length
- Your strategies for sharing and marketing your blog posts
There’s a saying that content is King. While this is true, content marketing is important too – perhaps content marketing is therefore “Queen”!
If your niche is very competitive, it will take considerably longer to get your content noticed than with a very uncompetitive niche. Again, see my article on building a niche website.
Why Is Content King?
Content is king, particularly if you’re a blogger. If you run an affiliate marketing business with paid adverts, it’s a different story. But if you’re a blogger, your content is everything. Your content will determine a lot:
- Your shares, likes and comments
- Your click-away rate – the rate at which people read your full content, or click away after the first sentence.
- The open rate of your articles when people see your title
- Whether people sign up to your email list
- Your ability to make sales through your list
These factors will also determine to an extent your ranking and authority on Google, which will determine how often your content gets seen! And on it goes, round and round!
So you want your content to go down well with visitors and for them to share it.
Writing great content which gives value is therefore massively important to a blogger. You also should use an SEO (search engine optimisation) tool like Yoast SEO. This helps you write content which clues up Google to the intended keywords you want it to rank for.
How To Market Your Content
Time should be taken to share and link to your content as you write it. You can use a plugin which shares your content throughout your social media platforms. You can also link to your content by blog commenting, article writing (on free blogging and article writing platforms), and through forum posting and social media.
You can also place a number of social media share buttons to help your visitors share your content quickly and easily should they like it!
Back-linking takes time and effort. You can write articles on other bloggers sites to help generate backlinks too. This is a time consuming activity but worth the effort. Ezinearticles.com is a site which lets you write content which other bloggers can use. If they use your content, they must share a link back to your website too.
You can also use YouTube to create and upload videos which link back to your content too. Once you start generating some traction with your content, you should start to see which posts bring the best results. You can then use some paid marketing if you choose. Ideally start with a small budget and build up gently! Otherwise you can find you’ll burn through a lot of cash really quickly!
How To Become An Affiliate Blogger – Keep Going!
Blogging as the sole means of generating traffic can be tough. You need to keep going long enough to make a break through. If you succeed, it can mean free traffic and sales to your affiliate products. If you give up too soon, you might see nothing for all your hard work!
If you want to know what it takes and learn how to become an affiliate blogger, download my ebook Niche Blogging For Profit and get blogging!
You can gain an advantage too by building a niche website in the first place. A niche website is a website built around certain keywords which you want to rank for. See how I built this website and How To Build A Niche Website And Get Free Traffic.