Making money while you sleep is a dream for most of us, but with affiliate blogs, you can actually make it happen! Even though affiliate blogs have been around for more than a decade, they can still be highly profitable when you do it right.
Want to get started on your path to making big money online through affiliate blogging? Here’s what you need to know.
What Is an Affiliate Blog?
Affiliate blogs are websites that post content centered around a specific niche topic. The content is usually informative, with tagged links to products or services sold by an ecommerce business. Every time someone makes a purchase after clicking those links, the blog owner will receive a small commission on everything the person buys.
With an affiliate blog, you don’t have to sell anything of your own. You’re simply recommending products and services from other companies in exchange for a commission. This makes it distinct from dropshipping or selling PLR products, which you can learn more about here.
hen you get enough traffic to your website, a well-run affiliate blog can be a lucrative source of passive income.
What Can You Expect to Make from an Affiliate Blog?
What you can earn from an affiliate blog will largely depend on how much effort you put into creating and maintaining it plus the niche you enter.
Beginners
At the very start, you can expect to make absolutely nothing. When you’re just starting out and you don’t have any significant traffic, you may actually lose money on your affiliate blog if you’re outsourcing any of the work to keep it running.
Over the first 3-6 months of posting regularly and being active on your blog, you can expect to start picking up traffic slowly but steadily. Once you’re getting between 10-100 views per day, you might start to see a little money trickling in from your affiliate links. It will likely be less than $100 per month at this point.
As your numbers increase, your blog can start making around $1000 per month within the first 12 months if you’re running it well in a good niche.
Intermediate
After your first year, things really get moving. Once traffic is coming in at a fairly consistent rate, it’s actually easier to grow both your traffic and your earnings faster, meaning you can see a faster acceleration of your earnings after the first year.
By keeping up posting and managing your blog, you could easily be earning $10,000 per month within your second year of blogging!
Top-Earners
Not everyone becomes a top earner, but if you do manage to push your affiliate blog far enough you could be looking at 6-figure income every month. This is a great aspirational goal for you to look forward to once you’ve been going for a while!
But first, let’s talk about how to get your blog off the ground so you can start working towards your first $10,000/month.
Related: Is Your Side Hustle Worth It? Let’s Find Out!
How to Start an Affiliate Blog
How do you take your first step towards passive income? Before you can make anything, you need to get your blog up and running. Here’s how you can do that:
Choosing Your Niche
Planning is always the first stage in creating something new. With an affiliate blog, you have to plan ahead on what you want to create content about and what you’ll be basing your whole blog around.
Finding your niche is a top priority. Your whole blog revolves around it! Luckily, it’s a one-time thing that you’ll never have to do again after the blog is started.
The process for choosing an affiliate blog niche is very similar to finding an ecommerce niche.
A niche for an affiliate blog should be 3 things:
- Desirable: People should be actively looking for products, services, and information related to that niche. It’s difficult to bring traffic into undesirable niches when no one is searching for your keywords, looking up niche products, or interested in learning about your niche.
Note: You don’t need to choose a huge, competitive, mainstream topic. A niche can be small as long as there’s enough interest in it to sustain your business.
- Viable: Make sure there are enough products and services you can sell as an affiliate in your niche. If you leave yourself with few options for content and products, it will be difficult to keep your website going for the long term without repeating content constantly.
- Profitable: With affiliate marketing you earn very small commissions. Because of this, you need to be able to sell products that will earn you a high enough commission to make it worth your while. Check the products in your niche to see what average prices are like, making sure you’ll be earning enough to keep your site going.
Also, check out specific commission rates for products you’re interested in recommending. Some products will have varying commission rates from different affiliate programs, giving you some wiggle room to increase your earnings.
Note: Remember that higher margins mean you can reach your goal with fewer sales. It will take a lot more traffic to reach $10,000/month if you make $0.50 per sale than if you make $5 per sale.
If your niche satisfies these 3 criteria, it’s probably okay to move forward with it for your affiliate blog. Take your time and do your research until you find a good niche. It’s better to spend more time qualifying a niche instead of regretting your decision later when you encounter monetization issues.
Getting a Domain Name & Hosting Plan
How do people actually find your blog? It all starts with your domain name. This is your actual website address, like: www.example.com.
Pick a domain name that’s related to your niche in some way. It can be abstract, as long as there’s some kind of connection. While there used to be some SEO value in picking domain names with your main niche keywords in them, that’s not really the case anymore.
Choose a domain name that feels trustworthy and clickable. People finding you without any previous exposure to your content need to be able to trust you from the first impression. Look for a .com address because these are far more trusted for blog content.
Domain names are rented on a yearly basis. You can check availability and rent your domain name for a competitive rate from NameCheap.
Domain Name Registration through NameCheap
Find domain name avilability and register your domain name in an instant.
After your domain name is settled, you’ll need website hosting.
Hosting is essentially renting server space to keep your website up and running 24/7. Without hosting, no one would be able to see your website when they visit your domain name.
A good hosting plan offers as close as possible to 100% uptime, meaning it’s active and working nearly every second of the day with few outages. The more reliable, the better.
For hosting, you can go with an affordable self-managed, shared hosting plan or a premium managed hosting plan. The affordable option is great for when you’re starting out, but you may spend more time on setting up and managing your website. With managed hosting, you won’t have to deal with any of the server setup and maintenance, and you can get direct assistance if your website encounters any serious issues.
Both types of hosting have their pros and cons, but there’s value in each one depending on what you need!
For self-managed hosting, we recommend HostGator.
Website hosting with HostGator
Keep your blog up and running with shared hosting and 99.9% uptime.
For managed hosting, we recommend Pressable.
Managed WordPress hosting with Pressable
Fully managed hosting with 100% uptime guarantee for your website.
Setting Up Your Blog
With your WordPress and hosting done, the last step is to do is to put the actual content on your site. You’ll start with the actual design of the website and the main page content. Blog posts can be added gradually as you create content for your site.
The simplest way to get your blog set up is to use a template. It’s quick, easy, and very affordable. Envato has a ton of themes specifically made for affiliate blogs, which can help you get your blog started in a matter of minutes.
WordPress templates on Envato Marketplace
Find a functional, stunning WordPress website template to make your affiliate blog stand out.
Go through the templates and find one that matches what you want your site to look and feel like. Pay a one-time fee to use that template, then you can just upload it to your WordPress dashboard, install the template, and get going putting your own content into the pages.
It’s as simple as that.
Have you got it all up and running? You’re ready to start posting content and bringing people to your blog!
How to Make Money from an Affiliate Blog
Once your blog is up and running… How do you actually make money from it?
There’s a big difference between a blog that just posts content and a moneymaking affiliate blog. That difference is your monetization strategy.
How are you planning to make money with your affiliate blog? It’s not enough to say you want to do affiliate marketing. You need to lay out how you plan to manage your affiliate marketing, including what affiliate programs you want to enroll in, which products or services you’ll link to, and how you’ll bring people to your website.
Choosing Affiliate Programs
The simplest affiliate program to enroll in and use is the Amazon Associates Program. This affiliate program includes every product sold on Amazon, giving you a nearly infinite range of products you can link to. While there’s some variance in how much you can earn from the Amazon Associates Program, the average rate for commissions is around 3-4%.
While Amazon is the most popular affiliate program to sign up for, it’s not your only option. Almost every ecommerce company and online business has its own affiliate program, giving you a ton of options for monetization. You can even find some hidden gem affiliate programs if you know where to look.
Affiliate marketing programs are not exclusive. You can sign up to as many as you want.
There’s no reason to limit yourself. Look for products and services in your niche that make sense, then enroll in as many affiliate programs as you can to provide a wide array of options. Find the best products and services that you feel good about recommending, and that will provide you with good commissions.
Start with at least 3 affiliate programs that match your niche. Then, expand your links whenever you find another program that works well for your blog.
Bringing in Traffic
Even with all the content and affiliate links, you’ll never earn your first dollar until you get people visiting your website.
There are so many different ways to get your site in front of more eyes, but here are some of the most effective strategies:
- SEO: Short for Search Engine Optimization, SEO is a strategy for getting your content higher up on search engine results pages. The higher your site ranks on a search page, the more people will click over to your content. SEO is a more passive, long-term strategy that you can implement in all your content while you work with other more active strategies to get attention.
- Social Media: Where else can you access so many people from around the world? Social media is one of the best places to tap into a new audience, even if you don’t use sponsored content or advertisements. Keeping up a consistent presence on at least 1 or 2 social media platforms can help you reach new people, grow your following, and bring more regular traffic to your website.
- Advertisements: If you’ve got some budget to spare to get traffic, advertising online can bring in a lot of new people who may be more interested in your content. You can earn a good ROI on paid ads through Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other major ad providers.
- Guest Posting: Guest posts are content you write for other blogs. Search out opportunities to post on other people’s blogs in exchange for a link somewhere in the content or in your author bio. Guest posting helps you build up a collection of backlinks to your site, which can make you easier to find online the more you get. You’ll also be put in front of other communities you may not have reached yet, helping boost your traffic.
- Collaborations: If you’re posting on social media, making collaborative content has a similar impact to guest posting. Collaborations with other creators help you expand your reach and get your content in front of more eyes, leading to a traffic boost.
- Reddit: While most subreddits don’t allow you to post a lot of promotional content, you can join subreddits related to your niche and jump into different conversations to offer opinions, recommendations, and help whenever possible. Being active on Reddit can provide you with unique opportunities to mention your website and bring people in over the long-term.
- Quora: Answering questions on Quora helps you to build authority and put your name out in front of more people. The more you answer, the more you grow your perceived expertise online, helping people to trust your recommendations more. Quora answers can also be indexed by Google, meaning you could show up on search results pages for great Quora answers!
When it comes to getting people to your blog, creativity and consistency are key. There are a lot of different things trying to grab people’s attention today. Make an effort to stand out for all the right reasons.
Affiliate blogs won’t make you rich overnight, but if you stick with it you can start earning some serious cash within your first year. Go find a niche and launch your own affiliate blog today, so you can set yourself up for success tomorrow!
