Anyone can start a blog for affiliate marketing and create content to attract their target audience. It’s a good idea to offer a free giveaway of some kind to your visitors. A giveaway, is something you can offer on your site in exchange for your visitors email details. By collecting the emails of your blog visitors, you can follow up with email messages over a much longer timeline than is possible only from a blog.
This is a much more effective way to sell affiliate products. On a blog, most visitors will only stick around a few minutes. After that, they are gone forever. Most visitors won’t buy straight away from a blog either and most online consumers will need several “touch points” on a website before they buy something.
Email marketing is a very effective way to build trust with your subscribers and give them the assurance they need to buy from you. More on this later. Let’s look at starting a blog next!
Start A Blog For Affiliate Marketing – Your Niche
Your product is a good place to start when starting a blog for affiliate marketing. When you know which product you are going to sell, you can decide on what your blog is going to be about. You can also choose your blog niche first too, which is the topic you’re going to be writing about for some time.
Your niche is pretty important and you will want to carefully consider this. If you’re successful with a blog, it is usually because you’re passionate about your topic. If you choose a topic you know nothing about, or have no interest in, it’s much more difficult coming up with new content constantly.
Ideally choose a topic which you align with and in which you can maintain your interest for several months at a time. Blogging does take some time and in certain popular niches, it’s going to take even longer before you can be profitable.
The product or products you promote is pretty important too as a blogger. With low value items, it’s much more difficult to earn from blogging, particularly in a busy niche with a lot of competition. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet which means you’ll be competing with other bloggers in most topics.
So the “ace” up your sleeve should always be that you can sustain your content generation for much longer than the others! When you love your topic, this is much easier and the journey will be a pleasure. If you choose a topic you don’t like, the opposite will be true.
Start A Blog For Affiliate Marketing – Product Choice
The product or products you choose to promote has a great deal to do with whether you will be successful at creating a profitable blog. Choose low value products and even with many sales you can still struggle to make a consistent income from blogging. With recurring commissions on subscription products and high ticket affiliate products, making a profit with blogging can be much more viable.
Many bloggers will tell you to choose a topic you love, and follow your heart. But to make blogging pay, you also need to pick a topic which can be monetised. That can be tough in an obscure niche which doesn’t have many affiliate products.
While an obscure niche will typically have fewer competing websites in it, it may also be difficult to monetise. So if you want to start a blog for affiliate marketing, you need to weigh up your passions and find a good product which you can sell from your blog too. See also the most profitable digital products to sell.
The time you spend investigating your niche and doing research into products you want to sell is well worth it. Should you choose a niche which doesn’t pay, you could have spend months working on it, only for it to fail! Ideally find products and services which are well aligned with your blog topic. You want to attract an audience who loves your products as much as you do!
Start A Blog For Affiliate Marketing – Traffic
Choosing your blog topic and products before you even begin to build your blog. When you know what you’ll be creating content about, you are better armed to create a winning blog. Align yourself with your niche and your products and do some keyword research before building your site. To find keywords within your niche, use Google’s free keyword planner tool (access here). The keywords you build your website around should align with your niche. They should also give you a good monthly volume of search traffic. So if a particular keyword has low search volume, look for another one, ideally with over 50 monthly searches.
Here’s an example. Say your niche is in “costume jewellery”. Type your main keyword into the keyword planner and look for long tail derivatives of your main keyword. Here’s a few keywords which came up for this search:
Choose a long tail derivative of your main keyword. Let’s use the example of “unusual costume jewellery”. Look on Google for the competition – a number you’ll find on a desktop computer or laptop with a quick Google search. You can do this by typing your keywords into Google in quotation marks like so:
You can also do a normal search for the term and look at the results to determine how competitive this niche is. By checking many keyword derivatives, you can eventually find a good long tail keyword with which to build a niche website around.
Start A Blog For Affiliate Marketing – Content
Although you don’t have to build a website for blogging in this way, building a niche website around specific keywords can give you an instant advantage over not doing so. If you’re successful, and have done your research beforehand, you can find your niche website ranking on Google for its keywords. This can give you a quick uptick in traffic and a head start on your traffic generation.
Once your site is up and running, you can start adding more and more content. Over time, that content should attract visitors from a number of places:
- The search engines – Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo.com etc. (depending on the competition)
- Social media websites – if you promote your content and make it easily sharable for others
- Other websites who link to your content – if your content is sharable and of high quality
- Other places where you promote it – through guest posting and blog commenting etc.
However, nobody owes you any free traffic to your blog and it can be a lot of hard work getting traffic to your blog, especially in the early months. A good way to get more out of your content creation is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. You can do this using keyword research (Google keyword planner) in the same way you used to build your niche website.
Content Promotion
Many bloggers create content and publish it, and sit back relying completely on Google, hoping for a ranking in order to get traffic. This is a massive mistake! Most of your content simply won’t rank, especially in a competitive niche. To give yourself more chance of success as a blogger, you’ll need to actively promote all of your blog posts as your publish them. There’s a few tools which can help you with your blog writing and promotion:
- Yoast SEO – is a free blog publishing tool which helps bloggers with the Search Engine Optimisation of their posts, getting the keyword distribution and count right is key.
- Revive Old Posts – is an automated publishing tool which lets you syndicate your content out to social media sites
- Use a social media sharing plugin too, to make it easy for your visitors to share posts on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.
See also the best free blog plugins for WordPress for some of the best plugins for blog post promotion.
James Clear & The Plateau Of Latent Potential
There’s a great book which is perfect for bloggers and highly recommended. It’s by James Clear and called Atomic Habits. In it Clear has this graph which shows the “plateau of latent potential”.
Look at the graph in the picture above. See “the valley of disappointment”? That’s where you’ll spend a lot of time as a blogger! As a blogger, we hope for our progress to be linear, aligned with the effort we put in. But this doesn’t necessarily happen with blogging. It can be months or even years of effort before we start seeing fruits from blogging. When it does happen, those results can be exponential and take off in a rapidly increasing rate. But initially, there’s a lot of hard work before the fruits of your labours can be seen in terms of sales and income.
“The valley of disappointment” is where many bloggers will quit because they don’t see the return on their investment immediately.
