You’ve created a blog, but now it’s time to make some money from it. Sure, you can sell your ebooks and products on the site directly, but that won’t give you the income you are dreaming of. To make real money from blogging, bloggers use affiliate marketing. The tricky part about affiliate marketing is there are lots of affiliate programs available out there! Some will generate your income, others… not so much. Therefore, it is important for you to ask these 7 questions to Help You Monetize Your Blog Using Affiliate Marketing by choosing the right one for your blog.
First Things First. What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is an online business where bloggers and site owners get a commission each time their audience purchases an affiliate product featured on their site through the affiliate link they have provided.
Often these commissions range from 2% to even 75% percent of the retail price depending on the affiliate program.
However, you must also know that affiliate products and/or programs are not created equal. Some of them will get a lot of traffic but low conversion, others get low conversion but high traffic, etc. This all depends on the quality of the product vs. price as well as how useful it is to your audience.
On top of all of these, you cannot just randomly choose the highest paying affiliate product. The affiliate products that you need to promote MUST be relevant to your audience.
That said, let us now go through the questions you must ask yourself to help you monetize your blog when using affiliate marketing.
Click >> What is Affiliate Marketing and How to Start One << to learn more about affiliate marketing.
7 Questions to Answer to Monetize Your Blog Using Affiliate Marketing
1. Who is your audience?
If you do not know who is reading your blog, then choosing the right affiliate product/program will be hard if not impossible. Sure, you can pick the highest paying and the trendiest affiliate product out there but if it is irrelevant to your audience, then you will for sure not going to make anything.
Thus, the first question you should answer is who is your audience!
Knowing who your audience will give you an idea of what problems you need to solve. Then, you will find affiliate products that solve those problems. Finally, create content with the purpose of helping your audience solve their problem and at the same time recommend to them your affiliate product as the solution to their problem.
2. How do your readers find your blog?
The most efficient way to make money from affiliate marketing is to have a blog because your published content and affiliate product promotions will remain on the internet for the rest of the internet’s history. (yes, sounds morbid but you can still earn money long after you are gone).
Of course, there is one big challenge that you need to overcome to make this work. Bring people to your blog.
There are many solution to this challenge. You can rely on Google or Bing to bring in traffic to your website through search engine optimization (SEO) or search engine marketing (SEM). You can also become an influencer in a social media of your choosing and direct your followers to your blog; this strategy is know as social media marketing. Another strategy is to create a mailing list and every now and then, you send your email list a newsletter to direct them to your blog.
As you can see, there are many ways to drive traffic to your blog. How you do it is irrelevant. What is important is you need to know how your audience finds your blog. Knowing where they come from will help you optimize your traffic strategy. You need to do this so you will not waste your effort on low results while focusing more on what brings in money.
3. Are the affiliate products you are promoting in line with your niche and relevant to your audience?
It is not unusual for those who are just starting to blog to not know who their audience is. If this is you, then you are probably asking, “how would I know what affiliate product I should promote if I don’t know or don’t have an audience yet”
Simple, promote affiliate products that are in line with your niche.
Please, don’t tell me you don’t know what your niche is! Deciding a niche should be the first step you should take if you are serious about monetizing your blog using affiliate marketing.
Assuming you know what your niche is, produce contents that are relevant to your niche. For example, if your blog niche is on financial literacy, then your contents should be about financial literacy. Consequently, promote affiliate products that solves people’s money problems.
4. Where do you place your ads and how many do you display?
Now that you know what your niche is and hopefully who your audience is and you have picked relevant affiliate products to promote, then the next question that you need to answer is where will you will place your affiliate links and banners and how many you need to display.
The answer to this question depends on how long your article is.
Personally, I like to only have at most 2 banners (in the beginning-ish and in the end-ish) if my article is less than 1000 words, and I only use 2 call-to-action with my affiliate links posted. More than those would make my blog look spammy. In addition, search engine algorithms wouldn’t like it as well.
Consequently, the longer the article I write, the more banner I can squeeze in as long as it doesn’t make my article look like I just want money from my readers.
At the end of the day ask yourself, if you visit other blogger’s blog, how much ads can you tolerate without you getting irritated.
Another way to answer this question is to show your article to your friends and ask them if the amount of ads on your blog is hindering their experience.
In terms of posting ad banners on the heading, footer or side-bar, again try not to make your blog look spammy and only post ads that are relevant to your niche and your audience.
PRO-TIP: The number of banners on your site is not proportional to potential income.
5. Are you providing value to your audience?
Now that you’ve read this far, I hope that the 5th question you should answer to help you monetize your blog using affiliate marketing doesn’t surprise you.
I have hinted in the other questions that providing value to your readers is a must!
Great marketers don’t start by asking people to buy their products. They start with earning their customer’s trust so they can build a relationship and they do this by giving solutions to the problems of their customers.
Like it or not, but people tend to buy things from someone or companies they trust.
So may I remind you again that you are not writing to profit from people, rather you are writing to help people. Coincidentally, the by-product of helping others is additional dollars in your pocket. Remember this well and I can assure you that you will indeed make money.
6. Will you use the affiliate product yourself?
Another important thing you should remember is people don’t like fake people and they can smell sham from a distance.
Now, you can convince yourself that you can trick people into buying stuff that you wouldn’t even use yourself but in the end, the tone of your voice (yes even in writing) will betray you (unless you are a good con artist).
That said, make sure to only promote affiliate products that you genuinely believe in and will use yourself!
If you still want to promote a product but don’t like it, then be honest in your content. Provide them the actual benefits of using it and let them know why the product is probably not good to buy. You will be surprise that there are still people who would buy the product. Sometimes, people care more about the transparency of information more than the quality of the product.
One final thing. Passion is contagious. Promote only the products you really care about because your passion for the product will be passed on to others.
7. Are you keeping track of your blog stats?
Alright! I hope first you figured out the answers to the first 6 questions that you should ask if you want to trull monetize your blog using affiliate marketing.
The last question is equally important.
Keeping track of your blog stats is really important because it lets you know what are the things you need to improve, omit, or add from your blogging strategies.
One thing for sure about blogging is things are constantly changing. Your traffic source and the amount of it may vary from season to season. Your audience may change. Your best performing affiliate marketing today will be different tomorrow and so on.
With this in mind, make sure that you are keeping track of your blog stats and you are able to interpret what those numbers means.
Finally, don’t just know the data. Interpret it and use the information to help you be better prepared for tomorrow.
Thoughts?
There you have it, everyone! 7 Questions to Ask to Monetize Your Blog Using Affiliate Marketing.
Quick recap, they are the following,
- Who is your audience?
- How do your readers find your blog?
- Are the affiliate products you are promoting in-line with your niche and relevant to your audience?
- Where do you place your ads and how many do you display?
- Are you providing value to your audience?
- Will you use the affiliate product yourself?
- Are you keeping track of your blog stats?
Wealth Builders,
I hope that this article added value to your life. I hope that you have answers to these questions and if you don’t have yet, be sure to research and investigate to find answers.
I tell you the truth, knowing the answers to these questions will significantly make you more money. Ignoring these is not detrimental, but still it will have a negative impact.
So that is it for me. Now, I just want to ask you. Which of the 7 questions you have answers already. Which of the 7 questions you are still figuring out. Is there anything you want to add to the list? Leave us a comment!