How To Create An Affiliate Marketing Blog

You want to make money blogging? I cannot think of a better way than affiliate marketing.

What is affiliate marketing?

In simple terms, affiliate marketing is promoting someone else's products and receiving a commission (percentage of the sale) for doing so.

Choose a product
Obtain your affiliate links
Share your link

If you're a blogger and you aren't doing affiliate marketing, you are leaving money on the table.

What is needed to start making money with affiliate marketing?

First Step: Start a niche blog.

Note: If you already have a blog, then skip this and go right ahead with the guide.

It doesn't require an initial investment to start your own blog, you can start your blog with Bluehost for as low as $3.95 per month, and that also comes with a FREE domain name.

Choose a niche (blog topic)
Pick a name for your blog.
Create the blog on WordPress

Here I created a comprehensive step-by-step beginner's guide on how to start a blog, in which I outlined all these steps and more.

Choosing a blog niche

Most successful blogs focus on a rather specific topic that draws a unique set of visitors. Keeping the information on your blog related to a specific topic will go a long way in ensuring that your audience will remain interested in the blog.

These here, are some great blog niches that make excellent earnings in 2020:

Technology
Finance and investments
Traveling
Health and fitness
Parenting
Lifestyle
Survival
Home Décor
Pets
Dating and relationships
Making money online
Beauty and fashion
Personal development
Diet and nutrition

Pick a name for your blog.

Give your blog a name.

It is important to give your blog a short and memorable name.

You can include your niche in the blog name

Example: responsibleparent.com (parenting niche).

You can use your name as your blog name.

Example: munyamutyaso.com

Use .com domain extension
Avoid hyphens in your domain name.
It must be easy to spell and to pronounce.
Make sure the name does not exceed 12 letters.

Create a blog on WordPress

To create a blog, you need:

A blog hosting– is a company that stores your blog content in servers and makes sure that it is available online 24/7 for all users or visitors.

A blogging platform– is where you create, edit, and publish your content on the internet.

I recommend starting your blog on Bluehost, using WordPress as your blogging platform.

These two complement each other very well.

Bluehost has a great deal!

You Get a FREE domain name (which usually costs around $15),
WordPress is automatically installed for you, and
Free SSL certificate
All this for only $3.95 per month

Get started with Bluehost here.

You can use this free guide here to set up your blog on Bluehost in less than 25 minutes.

Second Step: Join affiliate programs and choose products to promote

When joining affiliate programs, I recommend joining them via affiliate networks.

Affiliate network companies have the advantage of containing multiple programs and companies.

This means that you can just join one affiliate network and then join multiple affiliate programs within the network conveniently.

Here I have listed only a few that are best for a beginner.

ShareASale
Amazon Associates
CJ Commission
Flexoffers
Clickbank

When choosing a product to promote, consider:

Commission level
Interest
Include up-sell or high ticket
Recurring income model
Trending products
What the product or service offer to people and how it will benefit them.

Affiliate Marketing regulations

Proper and visible disclosures. Yes, if you being compensated for promoting products, your audience needs to know.

Third Step: Write valuable content for your blog.

The most essential thing for any affiliate marketing blog is CONTENT.

Whether your blog is new or it has been around for some time, to make money with affiliate marketing on your blog, you need to create great content.

Your content should be based on what people are already searching for. This can be; a solution to problems, insights, guides, and many many more other ways to give value in your content.

Write content that people in your niche want to read, not what you want them to read.

When you are writing articles on your blog, you need to empathize with the problems your readers may be facing.

You need to be able to express the problems that your readers are facing more than themselves could, this is easy if you are in a niche that you are well knowledgeable, and have experienced.
Focus on the needs of the people in your niche and educate them about unique solutions and benefits.

These solutions and benefits can be the products or services you are promoting. In this case, they are most likely to click through your affiliate links and purchase whatever you are saying is the solution.

This is called Pre-selling.

Note: The products or the services must be really the solution to the problem, do not promote controversial products, it harms your reputation as a blogger.

Invest time in researching about the product or service you want to promote.

Recommend products do not sell, always remember you are Marketing not selling. Most people, especially beginners they make the mistake of trying to sell the products they are promoting instead of recommending them.

Note the difference in the image this…

You can use this free tool called Answerthepublic, it provides you questions that people are asking.

You can also check question-and-answer forums like Quora to get to know what kind of questions and problems people in your niche have.

Where to put affiliate links

This is a frequently asked question. Where you put links is very crucial in affiliate marketing, you may write great content, but if you misplace your affiliate links, you won't make significant sales.

Include the link as early as possible in the blog post. People very rarely read down to the very end of your posts, so IF POSSIBLE include the link in your first paragraphs.

Include the link at the end, especially if your content is long, as it should be. People are lazy and may not scroll back up to grab the link, so if they made it all the way to the bottom, be sure to place the link there again to encourage that click.

Characteristics of an affiliate marketing blog that earns money

Provides value before anything else
Updated content every time
Influence on their audience
Trusted by its audience
Engage readers
Well-crafted content and original.
Use short paragraphs and short sentences to keep your readers engaged.

Avoid spelling and grammatical errors. Make use of punctuation where appropriate.

I am not a native English speaker, so I use the Grammarly tool, which is a free grammar checker. It also checks spelling, punctuation, plagiarism, and readability of your content.

In short, your blog should be able to:

Satisfy your readers' and visitors' aspirations
Answer their questions
Solve their problems

Fourth Step: Drive traffic to your blog and grow your audience.

This is a crucial step.

You may have the best content in your niche, but if you don't get traffic to it, no one is going to know about your blog, and no one will click on your affiliate links to make purchases and no commission for you.

Not cool, right?

One of the key factors to maximizing the money you earn on your blog with affiliate marketing is driving higher traffic to the blog

It is pretty straightforward; the more the visitors your blog receives, the greater the opportunities that the visitors are going to click through your affiliate links and make a purchase.

As traffic to your blog increases, you'll see continuous returns.

There are a few traffic sources that you can rely on to promote and get traffic to your blog.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

To succeed as an affiliate marketer, you essentially need to send targeted traffic through your affiliate link, and optimizing your content for searches in engines is the best way to go.

You need to write your content around specific keywords that people use to search for answers in search engines like Google and Bing.
Use free tools like Ubersuggest and Google keywords planner for thorough keyword research.
If you are a beginner, I recommend going for less competitive keywords that are easier to rank for.

Niche Forums

Be active in your niche question-and-answer forums like Quora and Reddit. Answer people's questions consistently, leaving links to your blog content, creating your name as an expert in your niche.

Important note: Avoid promoting affiliate products directly in forums. Rather, put links to your blog content.

I have managed to get a significant amount of traffic from Quora by answering questions relevant to my niche.

Social Media

According to Statista, there are an estimated 2.95 billion people using social media. It will be ridiculous not to promote your blog on social media, you will be missing out on large volumes of traffic

There is no point in trying to promote your blog on every social media network. I recommend just picking two that go well with your niche.
For example, if you are in the Fashion and Design niche, promoting your blog on Instagram, and Pinterest will be an excellent idea because these two social networks are great for visuals.
My personal favorite is Twitter because I'm in the making money online niche.

Email marketing

There are more email users than social media users, and people pay more attention to emails than anything else.

Emails are personal, and in affiliate marketing, an email list a diamond. Hence the popular line 'money is in the list!'

When building your email list, you need targeted traffic. Focus on quality traffic over quantity. I would rather have 100 proven buyers on my list than a million freebies.

To build your email list, you need an autoresponder which is a software that collects, stores and automatically sends out
emails based on what you want it to send to your email list.

I personally use Getresponse, and it is free to use for 30 days.

Promoting your blog and growing its audience is not all that hard. You just have to be persistent in creating great and relevant content and driving relevant to your niche traffic.

Always give your audience value in your content, without value, your post will never find its way to your audience. It won't be shared on social media.

Important aspects to focus on when blogging for affiliate marketing

Join profitable Affiliate programs
Promote reputable products
Master keyword research
Understand the competition
Plan content
Post content consistently
Track and optimize
Build strong links
Use proper tools

Frequently asked questions on blogging for affiliate marketing.

How much can you earn with an affiliate marketing blog

The amount of money generated by an affiliate marketing blog depends on several factors;

the amount of traffic your blog receives,
the commission levels of the products,
the method being used to promote the affiliate products, there are correct and wrong ways to do affiliate marketing.

The main thing you need to do as a new affiliate marketer is just START! You'll learn more DOING than just sitting on the sidelines.