The way I earn the vast majority of my affiliate marketing revenue is through blogging. I find a niche, develop a site, and then I simply start writing, and writing, and writing, and writing. By creating a blog, I’m able to add a ton of content and start getting traffic from search engines. The best way to attract search engine traffic is by having lots and lots of content. Think of each blog post as a doorway into your site. The more doorways you have into your site, the more traffic you’ll end up receiving over a period of time. SEO might seem more complicated than that, but it really isn’t. Creating a site and filling it with content are the two most important things you can do. Here are some additional tips on how to create an affiliate marketing blog that actually earns.
Here Is The Biggest Barrier To Entry For Affiliate Marketing Bloggers
When you’re first starting out with affiliate marketing or even blogging in general, it can seem extremely overwhelming. It’s true, you have a ton to learn and you really don’t even know what you need to know yet. With that said, there is really only one major barrier to entry for affiliate marketing bloggers and that is PATIENCE!
There are so many get-rich-quick scammers out there simply trying to sell you some crap that can earn them a commission. If you’re looking at blogging for a quick payday or replacement for your full-time job, you’ll need to have an insane amount of patience.
Most of what you need to learn as an affiliate marketing blogger will be learned as you go along. The first step you’ll need to take is how to develop a website. With platforms like WordPress, you can learn how to put together a fantastic looking and functioning site in a weekend, or if you’re a slow learner, over the course of a week. After that, your main focus will simply be writing as much quality content for your site as possible. Your main job as an affiliate marketing blogger isn’t SEO or social media or networking or anything like that. You will be a writer, plain and simple.
That might sound well and good to most people just starting out, but with 99% of new bloggers, the same thing happens. The first week they feel overwhelmed, but they get through it and get started. The first month they feel confident and feel like they will never give up. In the 3rd month, something happens and they start to write fewer and fewer articles. By the 6th month, they are having writers block and are sick of writing about the same topic over and over again. By 1 year, their blog is abandoned with no new content and no revenue. They give up and pronounce that affiliate marketing is dead and blogging doesn’t work!
The truth is, affiliate marketing is better than ever, but it takes time to succeed. How long will it take to earn revenue through your new affiliate marketing blog? It will probably take 1 to 2 years before you start earning much revenue at all. You could expect a minimum of 2 years before you are earning enough to replace your full time job, but possibly longer than that.
Is that longer than you expected? You’re not alone. There are many misconceptions about affiliate marketing due to all of the misleading “guru’s” out there. So, be honest with yourself. Do you have the patience to work on a blog part-time while you still maintain your full-time job for 2 years, just in the hopes that you MIGHT be able to replace your full-time job eventually? It’s a tall order, and most new affiliate marketing bloggers never make it past 6 months to 1 year, let alone 2 years.
Selling Is Only Part Of Your Job
When you create an affiliate marketing blog, you need to create a high quality resource for people in your niche. For example, I earn revenue on this very blog you’re reading by promoting a service called Affilorama. However, if you look around through various posts on this site, you’ll hardly see any hard selling for that course. It is all very passive.
Too many affiliate marketers make the mistake of filling up their blog with sales copy and sales pitches. This will turn your audience right off and it will not help you gain traffic in the search engines. Instead, you must write high quality articles that are actually helpful to people. It’s ok to have some review pages and pages on your site that promote products and services – I certainly do that on my blogs. But at least 80% of your posts should be helpful articles such as “how to” articles and resources that contain information people need. Within’ those helpful articles you can have some mentions of your affiliate partners or subtly recommend a product or service, but the main focus should be to provide a helpful resource for others.
The Basic Process Of Any Successful Affiliate Marketing Blog
Way back when I was first getting started with affiliate marketing, I learned one of the most important “formulas” of my life. I put “formulas” in quotes because I don’t want it to sound like this is some secret system that only the pros know. It’s actually rather simple. The formula is this…
C –> T –> P –> M
C = Content
T = Traffic
P = Pre-sell
M = MONETIZE!
Let me explain this in a bit more detail…
Content – By far the most important thing for any affiliate marketing blog is CONTENT. There is nothing more important than that. Most successful bloggers are very familiar with the industry term “content is king”, because it is! You could be the best programmer or web developer in the world and have the nicest looking and functioning website ever built, but without quality content, it doesn’t matter. If you can write, you can succeed in this industry. Content is the FIRST step in the formula and should be your main focus as a new affiliate marketing blogger.
Traffic – When you create high quality content on your blog, traffic will follow. It will be excruciatingly slow at first, especially in your first year. You’ll spend a ton of time researching, writing, and waiting for all that traffic to come, but you’ll only be rewarded with a small handful of visitors to your site and no sales. Keep going! After about the first year and when you get out of the Google sandbox, you’ll start to see more and more visitors coming in from search engines. Then, the snowball will begin. Not only will you get more visitors from search engines, but if your content is awesome, you’ll start to get shared on social media and people will naturally link to your awesome content, which will only result in even MORE visitors and HIGHER search engine rankings. Create the content, and they will come, even if it’s not as soon as you feel is deserved. This is where the patience is really needed.
Pre-sell – Now that you are getting a solid stream of visitors to your site each day, it is your job to pre-sell them. In other words, by the time you send them to your promotion or send them off to your affiliate partner site, you want your visitors to already be ready to purchase what you are promoting. When you send them to your affiliate partner site, all they’ll have to do is close the deal, which will be much easier to do when you send them pre-sold visitors. So, how do you pre-sell? You build trust and you only promote worthwhile products and services. You can easily establish trust through your high quality and helpful content. As you gain a following and people can see that you truly care about helping others (and not just making a sale), you’ll be able to “recommend” just about anything and a large amount of people will take your recommendation seriously. This is why you don’t want to just create a site full of sales ads and promotions. In order to truly build that trust, you have to be helpful and have the best interests of your readers in mind. When you do promote something, make 100% sure it is something you would buy yourself or would recommend to your own friends and family. If you do that, you can sleep well at night, make some money, AND help other people (not to mention the business you’re promoting) all at the same time. It’s truly a win-win-win situation.
MONETIZE! – Did you notice that monetizing your blog is the last step in the process? The problem most new affiliate marketing bloggers have is that they want to monetize right away. Without first building a high quality resource that people love, you will have a very difficult time monetizing. First, you need high quality content. That content will, in time, bring you traffic. When you pre-sell that traffic through your awesome content, monetizing actually becomes quite simple. If you have a blog that is bringing in 1,000+ visitors per day, I don’t care what niche it is in, you’ll be able to monetize that traffic. The trick is, creating a high enough quality resource that will attract that amount of traffic. That can only be done through creating content and creating all of that content will take time. Once you are able to monetize, the money comes in 24/7/365 and residually. As someone earning 5 figures per month from my affiliate marketing blogs, I can say that the wait has ben 100% worth it every time.
Successful Affiliate Marketing Bloggers Re-Invest Into Their Businesses
From the moment my very first blog started making me money, I began re-investing. Most new affiliate marketers enjoy taking their first commission checks and going on vacation, paying off a debt, or spending it on themselves. That’s all well and good, but if you’re truly interested in creating a sustainable and long-term business, you’ll need to reinvest.
Most of my blogs are now written by freelance writers from Constant-Content.com. I’ve also hired writers and web developers on Upwork.com. The point is, what I’ve been able to do is focus on not only creating content for my blogs by myself, but also essentially hiring a virtual team to help write even more articles and create even more blogs. This has caused exponential growth within’ my company. Just about every year, my revenue doubles, and so does my investment back into my business.
When I first started earning some revenue, all I could afford was to have about 1 article written per week. From there, as my revenue continued to increase, I was able to buy more and more articles. These days, I purchase multiple articles daily sometimes costing hundreds or even over $1,000 in a single day. That might seem crazy to newer affiliate marketers, but I am happy to spend that much money on my business because I know the return on that investment is well worth it. Do you have a plan for outsourcing work once you find success as an affiliate marketing blogger? You should!
Some Final Thoughts
In the end, there is no secret formula or “right way” to build an affiliate marketing business. I’ve met many successful affiliate marketers in the past, many of whom are way more successful than I am, and the main takeaway from meeting all those people is that everyone has their own formula for success. Some affiliate marketers prefer paid advertising over SEO or blog based traffic. Some are masters at social media. It really just depends. I can tell you for certain, however, that the advice I gave above is what I personally use when I develop any of my blogs. It has worked for me for years now with my business getting better and better each year.
The main thing you need to do as a new affiliate marketer is just START. The tools and resources you need will be found along the way. Just start today, because this industry isn’t getting any easier to break into.
