I may get a paid commission for purchases made after clicking a link in this post, click here to read my disclosure.
What’s Affiliate Marketing for bloggers? and why does it mean so much in the blogging industry?
It’s no new news that so many established bloggers attribute a huge percentage of their blog earnings to affiliate marketing,
It has become such a huge way of making money online especially for bloggers as nearly 65% of affiliate marketers generate traffic by blogging (Awin, BloggingX).
The reason is that they can easily add links to products that they have used to their audience and get a reasonable amount of commission from purchasing products because their audience trusts what they have to say.
As of 2022,
Affiliate marketing is estimated to be currently worth a whopping $17 billion globally and more than 94% of publishers use multiple affiliate networks
Over 80% of brands have an affiliate marketing program that bloggers and influencers can now promote on their blogs in exchange for affiliate commissions.
Alex and Lauren, owners of the website “create and go” made a whopping $445,457.72 from Affiliate marketing in 2021.
How Affiliate Marketing Works
The affiliate marketing business model is quite simple and easy to understand,
You as a blogger create content targeted to a specific audience and become an authority in your niche,
Companies creating products or providing services in that niche are then recommended by you to your audience of loyal readers and email subscribers,
This way, When they make a purchase from any of your affiliate partners,
You get a special commission for a specific action your referrals take.
This action can be anything from a user clicking on an affiliate link to a user filling a form (generating a lead),
Sending users to a website to increase website traffic, downloading an app or an eBook, or even making a purchase like buying a product or paying for a service.
Commissions gotten from an affiliate product vary for different companies and commission payout amounts can range from a minimum of about 5% to about 50%,
Sometimes you might even be lucky to find products or services that pay a specific amount instead of a percentage.
Types of Affiliate Marketing
Depending on the blogger or influencer promoting the product,
You will find different types of affiliate marketing methods.
These methods of classifying affiliate marketing were created by Pat Flynn in 2009,
The reason is that it became difficult to know which people were marketing products they had used and trusted as opposed to those who were just marketing any product they saw online just to make money.
Due to this reason, Pat Flynn classified affiliate marketing into 4 major categories;
1. Related:
Related affiliate marketing is where bloggers or influencers promote products or services that are related to their niche to an audience they have acquired through blogging, TikTok or YouTube, Instagram, etc.,
But that you haven’t used before and so you probably have no idea about the quality of the product or service.
This type of affiliate marketing is problematic because you will be recommending a product or service that you have personally never used.
If it turns out to be of awful quality, you could lose the trust of your audience.
2. Unattached:
Unattached affiliate marketing is a type of affiliate marketing specifically for people who don’t want to spend time growing an audience online.
They simply want to promote their affiliate links and earn an affiliate commission online.
Usually, these types of people don’t own a blog, a YouTube channel, or even an IG account,
They have no authority in the niche in which they are recommending products or services,
They usually create Ad campaigns on Google, Facebook, or other platforms and add affiliate links to them with the hopes that people will be interested enough to click on the link and make a purchase.
3. Involved:
This is the best method of affiliate marketing and is the best way to start affiliate marketing for beginners.
Bloggers and influencers can recommend products in niches in which they are already experts
They only promote products that they have used or services that they have personally tried out and have a good idea about the quality.
This way, their audience gets the best products available in their niche,
They also make a good commission from the sale of their affiliate products.
Pros and Cons of Affiliate Marketing
Pros
1. Its Easy To Start
Learning how to start with affiliate marketing can be quite easy to do,
It isn’t like a new startup business where you need to get a physical office,
A warehouse, and create physical products to sell or even bother yourself about how to deliver the products to the customers.
All these have already been taken for you as a blogger,
All you need to get started is to choose a good affiliate marketing niche after doing your research and choose a method of promotion,
It could be blogging, YouTube, Influencing, etc.
Grow your online presence and authority with marketing and outreach and then monetize by adding affiliate links from any affiliate marketplace of your choice.
2. There Are Lower Risks
Unlike a physical business where you have to suffer a great loss if the products are not being sold,
You don’t have to worry about that,
There are lesser risks involved as you are only promoting the product,
The only thing is to make sure you are promoting the right products to avoid losing the trust of your audience.
3. Easy To Scale To A Full-Time Business
In the event that your product or service recommendations are going really well and people trust your reviews and authority,
Affiliate marketing can be a really easy business to scale to a full-time business,
You can monetize further by marketing only premium products and services that offer a higher commission rate in comparison to the others.
Cons
1. Requires Patience
Succeeding in affiliate marketing requires a lot of patience,
You need to practice involved affiliate marketing which takes some time to build a relationship with your audience depending on the promotion method you choose,
Things like blogging, YouTube, or influencing take anywhere from 6 months to 1 year of consistent content creation and link building to start seeing results or traffic.
2. It’s Commission Based
Since the income made from products promoted by affiliate marketers is mostly commission-based,
that means you only get paid when you make a commission,
It isn’t like a full-time job where you expect to get a cheque at the end of the month for a job well done,
No successful product promotion or sale means no affiliate income.
3. No Control Over Affiliate Programs
Companies can decide to change their affiliate commission percentages overnight without any notice or warning and as an affiliate marketer,
If most of your income or livelihood depended on the sale of only one affiliate product, this could affect you a lot more.
How Do Affiliate Marketers Make Money?
1. Pay Per Click
In this type of affiliate marketing program,
You get paid an average amount or percentage for the number of times people clicked on your affiliate link and were sent to the website of the merchant.
In this case, the merchant usually wants to create more brand awareness, not necessarily make a product sale.
2. Pay Per Sale
This is where an affiliate marketer gets paid for successfully recommending a customer to a product or service who then makes a sale using their affiliate link.
It is the most common method of payment affiliate marketers use to make a commission on every sale.
3. Pay Per Lead
Here affiliate companies pay you for successfully referring someone to their website who then shows their interest in the product or service by signing up on the merchant website, filling out a form, etc
This is called a lead,
As beginners in affiliate marketer, this can be one of the easiest ways to make money with affiliate marketing because you don’t have to convince the customer to buy anything.
4. Pay Per Action
In this method of payment, affiliate partners are paid for a specific action done using their affiliate link,
This could be anything from signing up on the merchants’ website, filling out a form, clicking on a particular link, or even contacting the merchant.
5. Pay Per Install
This type of payment method is mostly done when affiliate marketers successfully get a customer to download or install a product,
It could be software or a mobile app, etc from the merchants’ website using their affiliate link.
How To Start Affiliate Marketing In 5 Steps
1. Choose A Blog Niche
To get started with affiliate marketing as a blogger,
You want to go ahead and choose a blog niche,
The blog niche should be one that you have good knowledge about, is profitable, and are willing to learn more about.
I compiled a list of the best blog niches available for bloggers this you, you can download them here.
2. Define Your Target Audience & Perform Competitor Analysis
The next step is to go ahead and define a target audience for your blog,
Take a look at what you want your blog to focus more on and define the characteristics of people who you would like your content and engage more with it,
You want to find out where they spend most of their time, what their major problems are and how to successfully recommend products that solve those problems.
You also want to scope out your competition and find out what they are currently doing to be successful in that blog niche,
Go ahead and make a list of your top competitors and go ahead studying them one by one to find gaps you need to fill with your own blog,
Take this opportunity to get keywords in your niche that are low-hanging fruits and make a list of them.
3. Register A Domain Name, Hosting & Design Your Blog
Next, you want to go ahead and choose a name for your blog,
This is called your domain name, go ahead and register your domain name on any domain registration service of your choice,
After that, you want to choose a hosting plan for your blog and register for at least a year.
Think of a hosting plan as a way of putting your blog online so that people can find it,
Go ahead and design your blog, you can make things easier by designing your blog on wordpress.org,
This way you can just install a blog theme and customize it to fit your blogging needs.
For a more in-depth tutorial guide, read how to start a blog in wordpress.
4. Grow Your Audience By Creating High-Quality Content
More than 88% of consumers have been inspired to buy something by an influencer or blogger,
More than 59% of companies use bloggers and influencers for affiliate marketing,
This is where high-quality content comes to play,
You want to make sure that you are consistently creating helpful and resourceful blog posts and articles in your niche on a daily basis,
This helps your audience trust you enough to buy from you, especially because you are an expert in that field and they trust your expert recommendations.
5. Find Products To Promote
After you have established a blog and built up an online presence,
You want to go ahead and find products that you would like to promote on your blog,
Make sure that you are recommending products and services that you have personally used or tried before and one that resonates with your audience,
You don’t want to go promoting products and services that have nothing to do with your niche and that your readers don’t care about,
some of the biggest market places to find affiliate products include,
- ShareASale
- CJ Affiliate
- Click Bank
- Svorn
- Skim Links
- Link Connector
- Flex Offers
- Avant Link
- Affiliate Future
As of 2022,
ShareAsale holds the largest share (55.7%) of the global affiliate marketing market with affiliate marketers earning up to $89,162 a year on average.
More than 86% of affiliate marketers expect their affiliate marketing revenue to stay consistent or increase in the future.
To get started,
All you have to do is to sign up on the Affiliate website as a publisher,
Once you are approved,
You can start adding affiliate links to your blog.
6. Add Links To Blog Posts
The next step is to add links to affiliate products in your blog posts, or web pages,
Depending on the product or services that you are promoting,
You can choose where you would like to add your affiliate link, and it can be embedded into your blog posts that readers can click while reading a post,
Or it can be added to the head section of your website to display before your navigation or in the sidebar of your blog where the user can always see it regardless of the page they are on.
Make sure that your blog posts and other pages on your website are responsive and optimized for mobile
This is because more than 50% of all affiliate-related traffic on the web is done on mobile devices.
If your blog isn’t optimized for mobile, you could be losing a lot of money without evening knowing it.
Tips for Affiliate Marketing Success
1. Build An Email List
It is especially important to focus on building your email list as a blogger.
Your email list is a group of people who have signed up to see your content and receive information from you.
They believe in what you have to say and are willing to listen and so are the best people to promote affiliate products to.
To get started, you want to make sure that you continue building your email list by creating helpful content for your subscribers,
Provide them with really helpful tools and resources in your niche,
This could be anything from cheat sheets to templates, discount coupons to products, case studies, reports, deals, and current news in your niche.
One very important thing to note when marketing affiliate products to your email list is to make sure that you are not spamming the account of your readers,
This can cause them to unsubscribe from your account at any time.
2. Create A Product Tutorial
Product tutorials and reviews are a really great way to sell affiliate products,
The reason is that you are teaching your audience how to use a product,
In such a way that it benefits their business and has a huge contributing factor to their goals.
Instead of telling people about the affiliate product,
Focus on telling them how to use it and how it will make their life a lot easier,
That is the selling point of the product or service itself.
You can make videos of yourself showing how you used the product,
What it did for you and why you like it,
This way your audience trusts you more because they can see that you are recommending to them something that you have personally used that worked for you.
3. Make Sure It’s Legal
Affiliate marketing is great,
but it is important to make sure that you are legally practicing affiliate marketing by abiding by the rules of the country in which you reside.
This can include you adding a privacy policy that discloses the use of affiliate links on your website,
or even adding an affiliate disclaimer notice at the top of every affiliate post,
This is to let your readers know that you will make a commission for purchases made through the links on your website,
They can then use this information to determine how seriously they take your reviews or product recommendations.
Make yourself aware of legal privacy policy protection legislation like CalOPPA (California Online Privacy Protection Act), GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), and PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act).
It is also very important to let your readers know what kind of information you collect from them for affiliate marketing purposes and what you do with the information that you collect from them.
4. Offer A Freebie Or Bonus
Another way to make affiliate marketing successful is to offer a freebie or a bonus in addition to purchasing a product or service using your affiliate link,
It could be anything from templates or ebooks that you usually sell at a specific price,
This way your audience feels like they are getting real value for their money and are spending a lot less than they would’ve actually spent if they were purchasing each product or service individually.
5. Choose The Perfect Angle
Depending on the type of affiliate product or service that you are promoting,
You want to go ahead and choose the type of content to create that will bring out the best features of your affiliate product,
For example, for a software affiliate product,
then a video tutorial that walks the user through the installation and implementation process step by step might be the best way to go.
Some other affiliate products might be products that you need to be seen wearing like clothing or jewelry,
This type of product can be promoted to beautiful images on social media.
Considering the product, think of a way that highlights its best features to your audience and promote it that way.
Affiliate Marketing FAQ
Can Beginners Do Affiliate Marketing?
Yes, even beginners can start marketing affiliate products, just like any other business model, it might take some time to see a huge spike or growth in affiliate income but it is totally worth it and anyone can do it, all big affiliate marketers were once beginners.
Can You Start Affiliate Marketing With No Money?
Anyone can start affiliate marketing online without any money, it really depends on the method of marketing that you choose, platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are really great for marketing affiliate products as you do not need to pay a fee on these platforms, for blogging, you can start blogging on free platforms like Blogger and add affiliate links once you have a huge following or number of readers.
How Do I Become an Affiliate Marketer?
To become an affiliate marketer, all you need to do is to create and grow your authority in a specific niche online by becoming an expert or resource for that niche online, this can take some time to achieve, but once it is done, you can start marketing affiliate products to your audience.
How Much Money Can You Make As an Affiliate Marketer?
As an affiliate marketer, you can make anywhere from $12,000 to $120,000 per year, marketers like Ryan Robinson make over $17,000 dollars per month through affiliate marketing alone.
What are the top affiliate networks?
The top affiliate networks include;
ShareASale
CJ Affiliate
Click Bank
Svorn
Skim Links
Link Connector
Flex Offers
Avant Link
Affiliate Future
Is affiliate marketing worth it?
Affiliate marketing is definitely worth it, Advertisers generate between 15% to 30% of all sales from affiliate programs and affiliate marketing itself is responsible for more than 16% of all global e-commerce sales online, what’s more? 81.2% of affiliate marketers say that they make more than $20,000 manually and this amount is expected to keep rising.
How do I start affiliate marketing?
To get started with affiliate marketing, you need to;
- Choose your platform for affiliate marketing, it can be a blog, YouTube, or Influencing.
- Decide on a niche after proper research.
- Create your blog, youtube channel, or Instagram account.
- Start creating content for your audience and building your authority
- Choose your affiliate platform and add links to affiliate products
- Drive traffic to your affiliate pages
- Get people to make a purchase by clicking on your affiliate links.
