There is no doubt the best way to make money with your blog is using affiliate marketing. You may want to add other ways over time but your confidence and success will come faster by focusing on affiliate marketing.
Period. Hands down. Close the door.
This advice comes from personal experience. We tried a number of ways to make money with our first blog, but success only came after we went all in with affiliate marketing.
It allowed us to escape the corporate rat race and live a location independent lifestyle all over this wonderful world for the past six years.
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How affiliate marketing works
In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is the act of promoting and recommending products or services provided by others in exchange for a commission.
That’s it. Simple, right?
Affiliate marketing has earned a mixed reputation over the years, but that has more to do with people who are willing to lie or over promise for a sale. They are in the minority.
The concept isn’t really a new one, but the growth of the internet has helped it take off on steroids. It's actually a straight-forward process for the most part and it still offers a lot of opportunity for savvy bloggers.
The beauty of affiliate marketing is you don't have to invest time to create products of interest to your audience. The products you promote already exist and are already out there being marketed.
The keys to a successful affiliate marketing program:
- An audience or niche with specific needs, wants, problems, pains and desires.
- Your blog which communicates and builds trust with this audience
- Good products or services that already exist that can fulfill your audience’s needs, wants, desires and help solve problems.
You are smack dab in the middle, ready to connect the two parties together. That's what a successful affiliate marketer does.
You connect the audience to the products that make sense for them, and you earn a commission when you make that connection.
3 steps needed to make money with your blog
- You're going to help your audience understand these products or services exist. If you are truly looking to build a long-term business with your blog, you will have already started providing them with some good information and value with your content.
- You're going to help this audience understand how these products can help them. Then you introduce those products and show them how they can help your audience.
- Finally, you will make it easy for them to make the buying decision.
As a result, you will earn a commission when people go through your special affiliate link provided by the product or service company. That's their way of knowing how to reward you for helping refer this customer to them for a sale.
How affiliate marketing helps you make money with your blog
Affiliate programs are also known as referral programs and partnership programs, and that's essentially how they work most of the time. In most cases, the sale must actually go through before you earn your commission.
You are provided an affiliate link to the company offering a service, product or even a set of products. If you can send traffic through that link, this they will reward you by paying an agreed upon commission.
There is no extra cost to the customer in this process. Your affiliate commission is essentially part of the cost of doing business for the product or service owner, much like advertising and attending a trade show.
The percentage you get paid depends on the product being promoted and whatever the company’s affiliate program says the percentage is. It can be anywhere between a low of 3% to 50% or even higher.
If you share the right products to promote and do it the right way, affiliate marketing can deliver a healthy income for you.
Treat your audience and blog with care
The people who grow a profitable blog over the years do it in a way that provides a service to their audience. Do it right and you’ll help provide benefits for everybody involved.
Like any business system, there are pluses and minuses. One issue that can happen is when bloggers promote products with a great commission but provide a bad experience for their audience. Doing this on purpose limits your long-term income and erodes consumer trust in your blog.
Choose your affiliate choices wisely, Obi Wan
Sorry about the Star Wars reference, but this is a critical point: Don’t forget an audience member upset with product quality or delivery service will blame you as the person who recommended the product.
So, it is so important to accurately represent the products you promote and believe they can provide a benefit to your audience.
It is pretty easy to sign up for affiliate programs on the internet and recommend products to an audience. I’m sure you can imagine there are a huge number of people checking it out.
Most of them will push any product they can for fast cash, whether or not there is a benefit to their audience. Don’t be that person.
Grow trust and provide value to make money with your blog
Here’s the most important thing… in order to earn long-term income, you’ll need to develop trust and share knowledge with your audience.
Don’t waste your time and theirs by promoting any thing available to you on the internet.
Don’t worry about those negative marketers – they won’t be around very long and you’ll still be providing good value and succeeding with your blog and affiliate marketing.
In closing, there is more to learn if you are interested in earning affiliate income through your blog. Don’t worry though, the process is easy, your investment is essentially just your time and out-of-pocket costs are minimal.
We hope you gained some value from this post about how to make money with your blog. We have more valuable information coming your way soon, so stick around so you don’t miss a thing.
