What is affiliate blogging? Affiliate blogging is combining the business model of affiliate marketing with content creation through a blog. A blog is a web log essentially a written article on a website. Bloggers use affiliate marketing products to monetise their blogging activities online.
Through writing regular content online on a blog, bloggers attract the attention of potential customers. They then advertise products and services on their site and through an email list. When they make a sale (of someone else’s product), they earn a commission.
Affiliate blogging is a cheap method of affiliate marketing because you don’t have to spend much money to build a blog.
What Is Affiliate Blogging? – Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the process of selling other people’s products and services online. Affiliates use many methods to get products and services in front of potential customers. Blogging is just one such strategy. Other strategies used by affiliate marketer include:
- Paid marketing – running paid advertising on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Adwords etc.
- List building – affiliates build large lists of email subscribers and promote products to their lists via email
- Video marketing – many affiliates use YouTube to promote themselves and their affiliate products.
- Social Media marketing – social media sites are a good way for affiliates to find potential customers online too. These strategies can be paid and unpaid. See unpaid social media marketing.
What Is Affiliate Blogging – How It Works
Affiliate blogging works by attracting an audience through multiple methods. Once a blogger has created a blog post, they will share it as much as possible. This can be done via social media platforms, email marketing and through using SEO – search engine optimisation. The biggest “win” for a blogger is to get their content listed highly in the search engines. If they accomplish this, it means their content will be seen on Google in the top few listings.
One strategy for getting blog posts ranking on Google, and other search engines is through keyword research. By finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty, bloggers can target their content towards the less competitive keywords. If this strategy works, their content will be more easily found and they will get traffic (visitors) to their site.
Not every blogger uses this strategy though of course. Some just write content without doing much keyword research. Over time, as the content of a blog grows, it will generally find traffic if the content is well promoted. Google uses a number of algorithms to decide whether to rate content highly and give it a good ranking in the search results. Here are just a few of them:
- How people react to the content – time on the website page etc.
- Back links which have been built to the content from other websites
- Number of shares on social media linking to content
- Length of the content and the relevant keywords within it
- The domain age and authority (domain name is the url of the website. This one is affiliatemarketingcoach.online)
- Plus hundreds of other ranking factors
What Does It Take To Earn Through Blogging?
So how long does it take to make money through blogging and how achievable is it? Blogging is definitely a long term strategy for earning an income from the internet. But if you are passionate about your topic, anyone can use it to generate an income. There’s millions of bloggers on the internet so you will have your work cut out to generate enough traffic (visitors) to make a good living.
Expect to write content regularly for several months before you see any results. You also need to write content for a particular audience if you want to earn from blogging.
Aligning your blog content with a particular niche is pretty important. Unless you do this well, much of the work you put in could be futile! To align your content with your affiliate products, you’ll need to understand the needs of your audience and write for them. If you do this well, you’ll attract the right people to your blog posts. When this happens it’s much easier to make money if you’re selling affiliate products from your blog.
Monetising A Blog
Choose your blog topic carefully because you’ll need to keep creating content over a good, long period of time. If you choose a topic you are unfamiliar with, you’ll have a harder time of it. Each article will need more research and be tougher to write. But choose a topic you love, and it will be a much more enjoyble journey.
You can monetise a blog with affiliate products which you choose. Look for “{insert your niche} affiliate products” in a Google search. Affiliate programs often offer sales pages, banners, images and videos you can use directly on your blog. You can also offer lead magnets which help you to build an email list of subscribers. An email list is a good idea for bloggers because it means they can promote affiliate products over a longer time period.
On a blog or website, visitors only have a few minutes to make a purchasing decision. But once you get them on an email list, you can extend this time period dramatically. See the power of email marketing.
For more on this topic see how to earn through blogging.
What Is Affiliate Blogging? – Summary
Affiliate blogging uses both affiliate marketing and content marketing to attract an audience through a written web log – a “blog”. Blogging is a cheap way to attract an audience from the internet via social media platforms, email marketing and from the search engines through SEO (search engine optimisation). By combining blogging with affiliate marketing, anyone can earn a living from the sale of affiliate products. But this takes some time and dedication to do and many bloggers won’t earn anything from their blog.
Another way to monetise a blog is through using Google’s Adsense program. This program allows you to place code on your content which shows up as advertising. When your visitors click on your adverts, you earn a proportion of the advertising revenue.
See also blogging away debt for more on blogging.