Affiliate Blogging For Beginners: How To Get Started

 I’ve been an affiliate blogger for about 2 years now, and I love it! As I’ve learned more about affiliate blogging, I’ve noticed that there are some misconceptions out there about how affiliate blogging works, how to find great products to promote, and how to track everything you need to make it a success. Today, I want to share my best tips with you on how to get started with affiliate blogging of your own.

What is an affiliate?

You are likely familiar with affiliate marketing by now. You see them on TV and online, but what is an affiliate? An affiliate is a special type of partner for a business or product. As an affiliate, you’re promoting their product or service to your audience (that means readers/viewers). That audience then goes on to purchase your recommended products and services using a special link that identifies your blog as its traffic source. In return, you earn a commission—typically between 1%-50% of each sale—as well as recurring commissions based on how long someone continues to buy something from your recommendations. This can be great residual income if you blog regularly!

How does it work?

Affiliate marketing is a popular form of internet marketing. It works as a great way to generate extra revenue from your blog. How does it work? You get paid for every visitor you send to another website, and you can use your blog content to do that. 

How can you benefit from affiliate blogging? 

If you have readers who are interested in your niche or industry, then if they click on an affiliate link and make a purchase, you’ll get a commission (usually between 5-20% depending on how much traffic your site sends). And don’t worry; these people aren’t getting tracked by cookies or anything like that—your visitors won’t know they’re being tracked as affiliates until they make their first purchase! 

Best Practices

You might think that you need to know how to write code, design web pages, or install plugins and apps, but in reality, affiliate blogging is a simple process. 

Affiliate marketing for beginners means understanding three basic concepts. 

First, your blog should address a niche market that’s looking for specific solutions and recommendations; second, when your readers click on an affiliate link or banner ad from your site and make a purchase from an affiliated website, you earn a commission on every sale; third (and finally), you need to track and monitor your leads through conversion tracking links (also known as conversion pixels). Several platforms enable you to do so – including Facebook Ads Manager – but most bloggers simply use Google Analytics. 

Affiliate blogging can be lucrative if you choose affiliate products wisely, provide useful information and optimize your website to drive more traffic. But it takes time and effort to build a successful affiliate blog, so don't expect instant results. Start small with one product or service category, then gradually expand into other areas of interest once you've established yourself as an authority in your niche. The good news is that affiliate blogging can help you create multiple income streams while doing something you love!   

Just follow these affiliate blogging tips to get started...

Budgeting & Scheduling Time: The first step in creating an affiliate blog is determining what you want to achieve with it. Are you planning to generate passive income by promoting various affiliate offers? Or do you plan to monetize your blog by driving traffic directly to affiliated websites? Either way, remember that there's no quick fix for affiliate blogging success. You need to commit the necessary amount of work and give it enough time to work. So, before launching your blog, take some time to identify goals and set milestones along the way so that you'll stay motivated during those long hours on your computer screen. Don't forget about budgeting either! 

Bloggers often overlook basic business expenses like domain names, hosting fees, and premium themes which add up quickly. Consider starting small with a free WordPress theme, then gradually upgrade as needed. 

Keyword Research: Once you've identified your niche market, it's time to think about keywords and phrases related to your topic area. Your goal is to find a keyword or phrase that has a lot of search volume but not too much competition from other bloggers (or even bigger brands). If you're having trouble finding quality keywords within your niche market, consider expanding into new topics or niches until you find something that works well for you. Remember, though, that Google's algorithm favors established blogs with high-quality content and regular updates. So don't expect immediate results. 

Creating Content: Before writing any posts for your affiliate marketing blog, create a detailed outline and schedule in advance. This will help ensure that you have enough content on hand to keep readers coming back for more – especially if you're working full-time or have other commitments outside of blogging. You might also want to consider outsourcing certain tasks like product research, SEO optimization, and web design. That said, be sure to review all of your affiliate products yourself before recommending them to readers. There are plenty of scams out there! 

Promoting Your Affiliate Products: Now that you've created a solid foundation for your affiliate marketing website, it's time to promote it through social media channels and paid advertising platforms such as Facebook Ads Manager. 

Keep in mind that affiliate marketing isn't easy, so don't get discouraged if things aren’t moving fast. Instead, focus on building a loyal following of engaged readers who trust your opinion and recommendations. 

Account Setup

A good affiliate marketing blog gets you at least one affiliate account, but you should have more than one. A good affiliate blogger will have multiple accounts in every niche. This gives you some flexibility as to which companies you're promoting and allows you to explore new niches by seeing what different companies are doing in your desired market. You can even diversify by having an account or two that track small business startups instead of products (though if there is enough demand for it, I'm sure many companies would love to offer a coupon code just for their blogs!) 

Regardless of your niche, picking up a few accounts to get started is easy with most popular networks offering free membership options. The hardest part about affiliate blogging is not so much finding affiliate programs, but rather creating content around them.  If you've never written about something before, chances are high that writing about it now will be difficult. But don't worry! There's help out there for beginners who want to make money blogging through affiliate marketing.  It might take some time to get used to writing product reviews and other forms of advertising copy, but once you do...you'll be making bank!

Paid vs Free Accounts

Affiliate marketing is available in two varieties. 

The first, which we’ll call paid affiliate marketing, involves paying a fee to an affiliate management company (the middleman) and using its technology platform to serve ads when you blog about any of its clients' products or services. 

The second, which we’ll call free affiliate marketing, don't require you to pay an upfront fee to use third-party software or a management service; instead, it lets you take responsibility for tracking down appropriate companies on your own. 

Free affiliate marketing can be more efficient and cost-effective for bloggers since it eliminates commission fees that get tacked onto payments made by affiliates who have signed up through paid affiliate programs. However, it's important to note that many affiliate networks don't accept free affiliates at all—or if they do, they place restrictions on how many affiliates from each blog are allowed to participate.  So even though you might not need to pay anything to join an affiliate network, that network may not allow your blog's readership access to their full list of affiliates. That means you could end up missing out on commissions from businesses whose products or services would appeal directly to your audience. 

Also, keep in mind that some affiliate networks offer different rates depending on whether a blogger signs up as a free affiliate vs. a paid affiliate. Some affiliate programs also forbid affiliates from promoting competing brands within one post. If you're working with a limited number of affiliates, those kinds of rules can make it difficult to diversify your blog's content without sacrificing traffic volume or revenue potential. 

Making Money

Affiliate marketing isn’t for everyone—it can be a pain to set up, and it requires you to learn about different affiliate networks. But once you get started, it’s one of the easiest ways to earn money while blogging. If you have a website or blog that gets at least 250 views per day, then you could make an extra $1,000 per month by promoting certain products. It’s also pretty easy to start up an affiliate blog. Once your site gets established (with viewers or readers), several companies will help you get your blog set up as an affiliate shop. You can even find pre-made banners for many different products so that all you have to do is add them to your blog posts. The hard part is finding products that sell well in your niche. 

The good news is that affiliate marketing has its subreddit where people discuss what they’re selling and how much they’re making with affiliate links. The bad news? There are a lot of people trying to make money from their blogs using affiliate links, which means there's lots of competition. 

A quick Google search should tell you if affiliate blogging is right for you. This guide will walk you through setting up your blog as an affiliate website or blog. Keep in mind that affiliate blogging does require some time and effort on your end; but if done correctly, it can pay off big time! Take a subject that interests you and make your first post!

Increasing Income through A/B Testing

The way affiliate marketing works is that bloggers are paid for each visitor that clicks through to a company’s website. However, sometimes products don’t resonate with readers and bloggers may find their traffic increasing slowly. This is where A/B testing comes in.  A/B testing allows bloggers to send 50% of their traffic to one page and 50% of their traffic to another page. From there, they can watch which pages perform better and then optimize those pages based on what seems to be getting people more interested. The result is an increase in clicks and affiliate income over time as you learn how to start a new business with your blog. 

There are many types of tests you can run, including offering different prices or splitting up parts of a blog post among different pages. 

Conclusion  

Affiliate blogging is a great way to make money blogging, but it’s also a great way to bring in new readers. If you blog about something like affiliate marketing and take special care to include links to affiliate products (but only if they are relevant!), you’ll likely end up bringing in more readers who are interested in that topic. This works much better than focusing on old-fashioned banner ads for a few reasons: 

1.  Your readers trust your opinion; 
2.  You get them hooked into reading other posts on your blog about that topic; 
3.  It doesn’t cost anything extra for you (other than time and possibly additional hosting fees).

So give affiliate blogging a try!