4 Steps to Monetize Your Blog Using Affiliate Marketing

Right now there are millions of blogs worldwide, close to 70 million powered by WordPress, many webmasters and bloggers are not making money from their sites.  If you’re one of these people and you want to monetize your blog, a great place to start is with affiliate marketing: directing your readers or visitors to a product or service in exchange for a commission on the transaction (or sale) when it happens.

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As Josh Waldron says “If an individual is looking to monetize their blog, I would make a strong case for affiliate marketing as the best avenue for doing so.” Blogs with quality content attract loyal readers. Since readers benefit from the content offered, they grow to trust the authors of that content over time. Consequently, an author’s blog posts are a logical place to promote relevant products and services without compromising the integrity of the content.

Knowing that, here you will find four quick steps to start making money from your blog through affiliate marketing.

1. Determine a Relevant Affiliate Programs

Always, affiliate ads pay per action that means readers will need to click and visit the ad and then either register or sign up for something, or buy something before you get paid for the activity. Of course, if the ad is more relevant to your content or blog, the higher the chance visitors will click on the link and complete the desired action.

Then, what kind of affiliate program will give you the most relevant ads for your blog or content? If you are concentrated on a particular subject or topic, you will want to join affiliates specifically linked with your content. For example, if you have a marketing site, you should apply to be an affiliate marketer with a SEO tools.

A lot of bloggers usually start with Amazon Associates since Amazon sells quite a lot of diverse products that are likely to be a fit for most blogs. Amazon pays from 4% to 15% commission, depending on volume and type of product. If you are new in affiliate and you are looking for monetize your blog, Amazon Associates is good way to start.

Amazon is just an example, if you are looking for other targeted affiliate programs, check out popular affiliate sites such as Commission Junction, LinkShare, and ClickBank. All of them offer access to many affiliate programs (you must apply separately to each one).

Don’t forget that you should select programs related to your content, you don’t have to choose and feel restricted to your niche, says the marketer Dennis Duty. You must think about what kind of products your audience is interested.

“Perhaps your Halo audience would enjoy other FPS games as well,” says Duty.

2. Contemplate an Affiliate Aggregator Service

Are your blog topics very diverse? Then you should take a look at programs such as VigLink, which includes the access to more than 40,000 affiliate programs and monetizes the links for you.

Also addition this kind of networks also optionally insert new, ordinary links where none existed before. Let’s see an example, if you as a blogger mention a product, brand or store, you don’t have to worry about linking it in your content: this kind of platforms will take care of that with its link insertion technology, which optimizes for both user experience and conversions.

“For most websites, link insertion lifts VigLink revenue by more than 90%,” adds Deighton.

“Hobbies, fashion, tech gear, deals and savings are all topics that naturally lead to spending; religion, food, raising children are less ideal,” adds Deighton.

3. Generate Content That Sells

Many webmasters and bloggers will actually write reviews of products or services with affiliate marketing in mind.

“The power of a blog is that it’s easy to aggregate a lot of loyal fans for niche topics. This lends itself to making recommendations and providing affiliate links to those recommendations,” like Chris Conrey says. But certainly throwing out links to products with no reason will result in high bounce rate.

You must think of affiliate ads as additional resources that complement your content.  Take some time and write a detailed review, then use the affiliate link to point them in the right direction if they decide to act on your information. Don’t forget that monetize your blog is not going to be easy and fast.

4. Integrate Affiliate Links Appropriately

If you are looking to add affiliate links and monetize your blog, ensure you maintain a balance between user experience and monetization.

One way is to keeping the majority of your content ad-free.

If you want to monetize your blog, what I would recommend to people is to think of 4-8 good pages that you could use to promote affiliate offers related to your niche. Then don’t forget to link to those money pages from your sidebar, footer or somewhere else that will give them a lot of visibility from the other pages on your website or blog. Keep the rest of your site ad-free. There is something very important, the goal is not to monetize every page, but for every page to be a potential gateway to monetization.