The best times to start affiliating marketing on a blog is when you have grown and established a blog audience and when you want to monetize it. Blogging is one of the great ways to start affiliate marketing. If you have a large following, your blog is a potential channel to make money from it. I will walk you through the process of how to achieve them.
How to Build a Blog Audience
To start affiliate marketing on your blog, you need to grow your audience first. Without this first crucial step, making an income out of it would be impossible. You need to build a trusted audience and generate traffic volume to your blog.
If you have just started blogging, you need to realize that to build enough traffic to make money out of your site takes considerable time and effort. While you do this, simultaneously search for affiliate products, you would want to promote as part of your content strategy.
I listed some techniques on how to build your audience:
- Post superior and exceptional content. Your content is the backbone of your blog and, potentially, your affiliate marketing business. If your content is not relevant to your target audience or does not resonate with them, your blog will fail. Try to post something that your audience might deem valuable in their daily life, something that can solve their problems and use to make their life more comfortable. To do this, the following are some tips:
- Check on content that is trending. Monitor it to stay abreast of what things are searched and discussed in the online community. In this way, you can learn what users want and write about it.
- Use tools like Google Alerts to give you what online users search for and consume.
- Utilize online tools such as Buzzsumo to know what content is trending and famous, which could positively affect your niche.
If you can understand your competitors’ strategies and tactics, it will give you the advantage of staying in the forefront. SEMRush and Ahrefs are tools you can use to gain insight into the keyword ranking of your competitors.
1. Engage and interact with other bloggers in the online community.
Reach out and engage with other bloggers on email, social media, or, if possible, even communication in person to form mutual connections. Establish your value to them. In this way, if these bloggers find that you are a useful resource, they might offer help in the future.
2. Work on becoming a contributor.
Become a guest blogger in top blogs that are within your niche. Create a relationship with other bloggers, so when you submit your write-ups, you increase the likelihood of getting picked. Several cold templates are available to kick off your blogger outreach and initiate engaging conversations. When you guest blog, it helps your blog to attract attention.
3. Optimize keyword research.
You need to optimize your keyword research if your goal is to drive traffic to your site. You need to know how your articles rank on Google. Tools like Google Keyword Planner can check on your monthly keyword search volume and metrics when creating headlines for your blog. Keep in mind that the target keyword should be used in the META title and all over your content.
4. Become social.
Make your content, social media-friendly by providing social media icons on your blog. When you have built a trusted audience who are loyal to you through your social content and blog, you become more credible and trustworthy with merchants. Remember that Facebook alone has billions of active users across the globe, making social media a very powerful tool to generate and drive targeted traffic to your site. It is a huge potential for monetization.
How to Monetize Your Blog Through Affiliate Marketing
There are millions of blogs across the world, and about 60 million are run by WordPress. Even with this vast number, there are still many bloggers who have not yet monetized their sites. The best way to do it is through affiliate marketing. Below are four ways you can earn income from your blog via affiliate marketing:
1. Choose affiliate programs that are relevant.
You will increase the likelihood of visitors clicking on ads if they are relevant to your content. The more relevant the ad is the better chances of generating actual sales. However, you don’t have to limit yourself too much to your niche only. You can think of other products that your audience might potentially find interesting as well.
2. Try to use an “affiliate aggregator.”
If your topics in your blogs are more varied, you can try using VigLink. VigLink is a program that enables automization of access to affiliate programs, hence monetizing the links found in your site. It can also put in new links as an option. If, for example, you mention a product on your site, VigLink will link it for you through their link insertion technology. This optimizes both revenue and user experience.
3. Develop content that has the potential to sell.
Do not put random content or topics that are not relevant to your audience. Take time to make detailed reviews of products or services that have the potential to sell. In this way, you can make trustworthy recommendations and provide affiliate links to them. If you throw out links on your site without reason, your visitors will surely make a quick exit.
4. Appropriately integrate your affiliate links.
Find the balance between user experience and monetization whenever you put in affiliate links on your site. To achieve this, you can remove ads in the majority of your content. For example, you can use maybe 5-10 pages to market your affiliate links relevant to your niche and then link those pages from your sidebar or anywhere that will give them more visibility on your site. Try to maintain the rest of your site free from ads. The aim is to make every page a potential opening for monetization, not to monetize each page.
