With millions upon millions of active bloggers around the globe, the majority of which (approaching 440 million blogs) are actually affiliate marketing with a blog. By using the world famous free WordPress website platform, all you need to run a blog is reliable WordPress hosting and basic WordPress knowledge, and you’re good to go.
** see the epic ‘State of the Blogging Industry’ infographic below.
Affiliate Marketing with a Blog
Yet, despite all this activity, a great number of these bloggers haven’t taken any steps towards monetizing their blogs and profiting from them. Did you know that one of the, if not the most profitable way to make money online is strictly blogging. Not e-commerce, and not drop-shipping. With a blog , you essentially guide your readers to a product/service that you, as an authority figure, are recommending.
This will result in a commission if your referral to a relevant product/service results in a sale. This is done by placing an affiliate link within your blog post. We’ll expand on this below.
Affiliate Marketing with a Free Website
The most successful affiliate marketers and bloggers are using the WordPress.org platform because of it’s simplicity of use, fantastic template design (better user experience for their visitors), the ability to add-on plugins that help the site run more efficiently and capture more leads or sales, depending on the publishers objective.
It has been shown that Google ranks WordPress sites quite high in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page) due to their ease of crawling and indexing. Also, WordPress site design and layout gives precedent to SEO through the use of free plugins such as All in One SEO and Yoast SEO.
Becoming an Authority in Your Niche
Blogs with up to date, pertinent, and interesting articles attract a reader base that subscribes and revisits the site. If you can manage to increase your audience by finding an affiliate marketing niche and becoming an authority figure in a given subject matter; then your readers will become fans and will follow your advice and recommendations. This includes which products to purchase through your affiliate links.
Because your visitors can identify with you and you are a real person (rather than a corporation) and they benefit from the first-hand knowledge that you’re providing, they’ll trust you – the author, and consequently will be willing to make even repeat purchases.
So whatever you do, be yourself, be genuine and do not compromise on the originality and quality of the blog’s content. Always remember to never be too pushy and only advocate products/services that you actually have or would use.
To begin setting up your blog with affiliate marketing in mind, these tips can be done quite easily:
1) Affiliate Program Selection…Relevance is Key
There are many great affiliate programs out there, but not all will be relevant to you. As an affiliate you’ll most likely only be getting paid a commission if your reader clicks on your affiliate link and actually registers to the site or makes an actual purchase.
Therefore, from a strategic standpoint the better your content matches up to the products/services that you recommend, the higher the chances are of you profiting from it. This is pretty much common sense but if you can keep this in the back of your mind while choosing what to promote, your conversion rate will be much higher.
A lot of bloggers begin their affiliate careers using this free training community (full company review) and start earning money within months.
Amazon Associates, because Amazon itself sells a vast range of products which covers virtually any and all niches and industries. Amazon pays up to 15% commission on its affiliate sales, depending on the type of product and volume of sales you generate.
When selecting vendors to promote, yes a majority should be related to your content, but this does not mean you need to restrict yourself to only one product type. Just think up articles (topics) that your audience would be interested in, and then (naturally within the article) mention the related products and services that you believe they’d find beneficial.
2) Create Emotive Content Which Sells
Lots of bloggers write product reviews with affiliate marketing in mind, and for a good reason. Writing product reviews is a great way to easily plug products to your readers. Anything that helps them cut through the noise and compare why a certain product is useful or better will build trust and lead them to follow through by clicking your offer.
Blogs can easily aggregate pros and cons, recommendations, best of’s, top 10 products, etc. and visitors will reward you because you made what they were looking for easier to find regarding niche topics. This way you’ll easily be able to suggest products without it being obvious that your ultimate goal is to profit from it.
Be careful, though; if you are too obvious this will warp your readers and will make them disinterested. You should always keep your blog focused on delivering free, helpful and original high quality content which does not just blatantly sell products, but rather engages your readers and keeps them happy because they found the exact information they were searching for in the first place.
3) Efficient Use of Affiliate Links
When getting started affiliate marketing with a blog, it’d be best to make an effort to keep in mind the experience of the user and be subtle when it comes to promoting your links. Every blog post you make should not be trying to sell a product. One good tactic is to have outstanding five to ten high quality posts with affiliate links, and then create some other high quality blog posts which link back to these articles.
This balances everything out and stops your blog from becoming overly monetized looking, which is a turn off. The goal of affiliate marketing with wordpress for your blog is to be a gateway to quality information mixed in with other subtly monetized yet helpful articles.
To get even more insight about blogging, scroll through this outstanding info graphic below. Learn about the history and fun facts and figures. It’s packed full of them and some handy tips and tricks to get your blogging career off to the best start.
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