Affiliate marketing is one of the biggest ways to make money blogging.
In this article, we are going to talk about what is affiliate marketing, and we will explain the ways for you to succeed with affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is a lucrative industry. In 2019, the affiliate marketing industry was estimated to have a worth of $17 billion.
The number climbs each year.
Many of you came to this article because you are looking to use affiliate marketing to achieve returns on your profitable blog.
After searching through dozens of blog income reports, we have found that affiliate marketing usually makes up around 40-60% of a profitable blogger’s revenue.
You can certainly earn plenty of income with affiliate marketing, but you might not know how to do it.
Let us explore how.
An Introduction to Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a relationship between you, the blogger, and a company – known as a merchant.
The blogger signs up for affiliate programs one by one, and the merchant decides if the blogger is accepted into the affiliate program.
If you are accepted then you get a referral link, which is a custom URL that tracks the clicks from your profitable blog to the merchant’s site.
When a blog reader clicks your affiliate link, and buys from the merchant, then you make a sales commission for each referred sale.
For merchants, we find that affiliate marketing can be a lucrative way to add sales to your bottom line, with no extra marketing effort.
In a 2016 survey by Rakuten/Forrester, more than 80% of merchants ran some form of affiliate program to cause an increase in sales and traffic.
So many merchants have bought into affiliate marketing because they do not need to spend marketing budget to get more sales.
Instead, they simply create an affiliate program, and the affiliate marketers take the brunt of the marketing, earning a sales commission only when there is a sale.
Who Does Affiliate Marketing?
The people that do affiliate marketing for brands are called publishers.
A publisher could be a blogger, or a small business website, or a video blogger.
If you are publishing content that refers to people for affiliate sales, then you are a publisher.
On the other hand, many merchants like to try their hand with affiliate marketing to earn additional sales.
These merchants are known as advertisers.
There are also third-party companies that gather affiliate programs all with one brand.
When you sign up for the brand, you get access to hundreds or thousands of affiliate programs.
An excellent example is Shareasale, and this is called an affiliate network.
So, you have publishers, advertisers, and affiliate networks, and each of these play a role in affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing for Brands, Businesses, and Merchants
If you are a company seeking to add an affiliate program to your company’s sales strategy, then there are many tools available for you to use.
Here is a list of some companies that help you add affiliate marketing for your business as a merchant.
- AffiliateWP
- Post Affiliate Pro
- TapFiliate
- FlexOffers
- Shareasale
- Impact
These programs all help you start your own affiliate program as a merchant.
Then, you get affiliates to promote your products, and you only pay commission when a sale is made.
Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers, Small Business Websites, and Publishers
If you are a blogger or a small business owner, otherwise known as a publisher, then affiliate marketing is certainly for you.
Affiliate marketing lets you promote dozens of affiliate programs from your blog or small business website.
When your affiliate marketing leads to a sale, then you earn an affiliate commission for the sale.
Many thousands of bloggers have minted a fortune by referring their readers to powerful products that make their business succeed better.
Still other bloggers rely on pay-per-click advertising to generate revenues very quickly, though this requires some budget.
If you want to get started with affiliate marketing, then here is a list of companies for you to sign up with to begin your affiliate marketing career.
In addition, you can also sign up for affiliate programs through individual companies.
Here is a list of companies we think you should be an affiliate for:
The above companies are recommended because they cover the web hosting, email marketing, and search engine optimization categories.
If you are serious about blogging, you will want to have many articles about the above topics, such as “how to start a blog,” “how to make money with email marketing,” and “beginner’s guide to SEO.”
These articles tend to get plenty of traffic, especially if you already have a high-traffic, profitable blog.
How To Make Money with Affiliate Marketing: Product Market Fit
Making money with affiliate marketing is all about getting prospects in front of offers.
Prospects is a marketing term that refers to people that are potential customers.
If you want to make money with affiliate marketing, then it is all about product-market fit.
Product-market fit is a marketing concept.
It teaches that you will want to promote a product to a certain market of people.
To some people, the market is the entire United States, and even international – such as Coca-Cola.
To other businesspeople, the market might be mothers in their 60s – weight loss products.
It is all about fitting the product to the market.
So, let us take ConvertKit as an example.
ConvertKit, as we mentioned above, is an email marketing platform.
So, the product is an email marketing tool.
Now, what is the market?
For most of you, the market could be fellow bloggers, affiliate publishers, and small business owners.
If you want to make money with affiliate marketing, then you will want to fit the product to the relevant market, and then you will be able to write blog content that appeals to those consumers.
How To Make Money with Affiliate Marketing: SEO & PPC
There are two key ways to make money with affiliate marketing – slowly, or quickly.
The slow way to make money with affiliate marketing is with SEO-driven content that drives profitable traffic to your profitable blog.
Over time, as your blog gains traction, you build your traffic and more people read your blog posts.
Then, you post affiliate offers on your content, and you start making money.
After 3 years of blogging regularly – I am thinking 2 posts or more per day – you should expect to be making between $5,000 to $10,000 a month.
I have seen profitable bloggers perform well above the average written, mostly because they gain significant traffic through blog posts that are interesting, relevant, and trendy.
If you want to make money this way, then writing slow and steady is the name of the game.
The quick way to make money with affiliate marketing revolves around posting ads, mostly through Google AdWords, for your affiliate offers.
There are many ways to do this, but beginners will have the most success with studying landing pages that they see on searches for the relevant keywords.
Obviously, you will need to re-design and have your own content.
I have heard of many people who make a few hundred dollars a day in profit this way, and they spend around $100-$200 a day on advertising to make their money.
Some of you will be more successful.
You will see the offers that make sales, and you will develop highly interesting and well-designed landing pages.
These readers can make $1,000-$3,000 a day in profit, and usually spend around $1,000 a day on advertising to achieve this result.
Which approach is better for you?
We will cover that right now.
SEO vs PPC Affiliate Marketing: Which Is Better?
As we previously described, you can make money with affiliate marketing through the slow or quick approach, the slow being SEO and the quick being PPC.
Which approach is better?
Well, it all has to do with your monthly budget.
If you are an affluent blogger, then you can certainly make money from the PPC approach.
If you are more of a budget blogger, then you can make money from the SEO approach, though not necessarily right away.
Most of you are in the middle of this and will do well to have both approaches as part of your marketing mix.
Blogging for profit involves, first, writing blog posts that will make you money blogging.
So, you will want to think about high-traffic blog posts, that answer your readers’ questions, and drive them in the direction of commerce – making a purchase.
If you are a smart blogger, you will be writing “Top 10” articles, especially after you have a certain amount of traffic – say, 5,000 pageviews a month.
You will also want to write reviews, such as ConvertKit In-Depth Review, as well as tutorials (ConvertKit Tutorial), and comparison posts such as ConvertKit vs Keap.
You could build an entire profitable blog from product reviews, product tutorials, and comparison posts – as well as beginner’s guides, buyer’s guides, and ultimate guides.
When you write top 10 articles, you have an opportunity to make money from either an SEO or PPC approach.
Here is an example:
“Top 10 Best Email Marketing Platforms for 2023”
That is an excellent title for a blog post.
Now, the smart thing to do is author the article, and then join the affiliate programs of those email marketing platforms – all 10.
Then, when accepted, you add your affiliate links to the article.
When you do this, you can certainly work to get this article ranked on Google – the SEO method – through building backlinks as usual.
However, you can also post this blog post as an advertisement on Google AdWords.
Now, you do not need to rely on organic search engine traffic to make money blogging.
Rather, you can rely on paid search traffic, which usually costs around $1 a click.
So, if you have a $100 a day advertising budget, you can turn this blog post into $200-$500 in revenue, and $100 to $400 a day in profit.
That is an excellent method for making money with affiliate marketing by leveraging both SEO and PPC approaches.
All said, both sides have merit, and we think that implementing an SEO strategy makes sense if you do not have budget.
But, if you do – hint: credit cards – then, you can profitably build your ad, landing page, and blog post and advertise it to earn hundreds a day very quickly.
Using Email Marketing for Affiliate Marketing Promotions
Email marketing has proven to be a successful method for building affiliate marketing earnings.
The #1 approach to email marketing is building a large email list.
This can take months or years, and the bigger the list, the bigger the profit potential.
Then, you send emails to your list that link to articles promoting affiliate products.
When your readers click on your blog post, they will see various affiliate offers that they can then buy.
When they buy, you earn your affiliate commission.
Quick Blog Profit recommends that for your email marketing, you use ConvertKit as your #1 platform.
We use ConvertKit, and we like its versatility as well as its low entry price point.
For only $10 a month, you can get started with ConvertKit, and we recommend you test it today.
Using SEO / PPC Tools for Affiliate Marketing Success
There are so many tools that you can use to improve your affiliate marketing success.
These days, SEO tools such as Serpstat are the most valuable tools on the market, whether you are doing SEO or PPC.
What you can do with Serpstat is track your keywords.
Keywords become blog posts, so you will want to do your ongoing keyword research, and Serpstat is excellent for this.
The idea here is that when you sign up for Serpstat, you get access to a platform of SEO and keyword research tools – as well as content writing tools – that make your job as a profitable blogger so much easier.
You can research topics, explore your backlink profile, and identify profitable keywords with the right traffic that you think can help you rank #1 on Google.
Serpstat features a 7-day free trial, and then it goes to $119 a month.
How To Succeed with Affiliate Marketing?
If you want to succeed with affiliate marketing, it is all about consistency.
As we said before, blogging consistency is the key to blogging success.
In addition, you will want to find the blog posts and content that has made you money and add more to it.
Such as reviews, tutorials, guides, list posts, and comparison posts.
Those are the money posts!
Have you found an article that makes you plenty of money in affiliate earnings?
If so, then write 20 more articles about the same topic.
Continuing the track of success will net you more earnings, and you will be incredibly happy you did.
Be sure to win plenty of new email subscribers, as having a large and balanced email list can encourage your success even further.
For that, we recommend ConvertKit.
In general, hard work gets you there.
In addition, a large budget for PPC ads can really make an enormous difference.
Especially, with “Top 10” articles.
Or Reviews, Tutorials, Lists, Guides, and Comparison Posts.
Mostly, you will want to identify articles to write that you have seen win on other blogs and add your unique tone to the content.
When you see success with affiliate marketing, note that success and replicate it in the future.
Overall, affiliate marketing can make you a healthy income as a profitable blogger, and we wish you all your success.
Summary
We have now introduced you to affiliate marketing, and explained how it works.
Affiliate marketing has publishers, advertisers, and affiliate networks.
The affiliate strategy is excellent for businesses seeking to reach a larger customer base with minimal marketing effort – you only pay when there is a sale.
For publishers, affiliate marketing can help increase revenues while building a blog business, a brand, and a website or series of websites.
We have covered how to make money with affiliate marketing, focusing first on product-market fit, and later SEO and PPC.
We talked about whether SEO or PPC made more sense for your profitable blog, and we think that doing both responsibly can be an excellent approach to making money with affiliate marketing.
Email marketing is a critical tool for success with affiliate marketing, and we recommend ConvertKit as our #1 email marketing platform.
In addition, SEO tools are becoming increasingly invaluable, and we recommend the 7-day free trial of Serpstat, which is by far the best SEO platform on the market.
Finally, you will succeed with affiliate marketing through consistent effort, and profitable advertising.
Affiliate marketing can be a profitable career path, and the key to longevity in this industry is by having income-generating properties – websites and blogs – that bring in money for years and decades.
Get started with your affiliate marketing today!
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