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Have you recently started a blog?
Congratulations! How exciting that you’ve taken the first leap into the blogging world. It can be exciting and a little overwhelming in the beginning. Now that you’ve successfully started your blog the next step is learning exactly how you can monetize it and generate money from it.
A good way to make money through your blog is by using affiliate marketing. You can start making money within the first few months of blogging using affiliate marketing.
To be completely honest, your first sale isn’t going to be much but it will excite you and show you the potential that surrounds affiliate marketing.
Haven’t quite started a blog yet? No worries! I have a step-by-step breakdown of how to start your blog today.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Since starting my own blog I’ve been looking for the best resources and information out there to start making money and monetizing.
As bloggers who want to make an income online, we must look for creative ways to add affiliate marketing tactics to our blog.
If you are new to the concept of affiliate marketing, let’s start by explaining what exactly it is and how you can use it on your own blog or social media platform.
First thing is first you are going to need to join some affiliate programs. There are many different affiliate networks out there that partner with thousands on merchants. For example Share A Sale or Ultimate Bundles. So finding something to promote relating to your content, there are so many products to choose from so shouldn’t be hard.
Amazon has it’s own affiliate program and it’s great for new bloggers.
Almost every company has an affiliate program. You can usually find it by searching for the product or company and adding “affiliate program” to the end of the search.
For example, you could google search “target affiliate program”.
How it works:
- Find an affiliate program that works with your content and your readers
- Sign up for the affiliate program that you feel best fits your blog
- Share your affiliate link through your blog and other social media platforms
- Create blog posts that you can easily plug your affiliate links to
- Share your post to your audience
- Wait for someone to click on your link
- You get commission when someone purchases through your link
Every affiliate product has a different commission percentage rate.
That’s the basic break down of how it works
Why you should use affiliate marketing to monetize your blog
Affiliate marketing is the best way to monetize your blog when you’ve just started. Why? Because you don’t need much traffic in order to start profiting.
Other opportunities for bloggers to make money like through sponsored posts or ads you usually need a decent following/page views in order to join these programs.
Affiliate marketing is the best way to start learning how to strategize selling to your following. You’ll learn how to provide your audience with the products they need.
Amazon Affiliate Program
Amazon is the the #1 ranked store in sells. The best thing about the amazon affiliate program is that the variety of products they sell. So no matter what your niche is you are able to find products that correlate to your blog’s content.
I use amazon products in my other blog post, Survival Guide For Being Alone With a Toddler and a Newborn, that’s is where I gained my first commission-Which is great!
Every affiliate program has a different cookie. The cookie is what tracks someone’s click for a certain amount of time. For example with Amazon affiliate program the cookie tracked for 24 hours. This means that when someone clicks on your link if they purchase something within 24 hours you receive a commission from their purchase.
How to make your first sale
The goal with affiliate marketing is to gain commission but in order for this to work you must find products your audience is looking for. To generate a sale you need to be honest and genuine.
Placing links all over your blog isn’t going to benefit anybody. It’s going to come off as spammy and look as though you don’t have the best interest for your readers.
In order to create a trusting relationship with your audience you are going to have to be honest and only recommend products that you know they would benefit from. Recommend products that you’ve used yourself. Brainstorm solutions for your readers problems, these are the products that are going to have the best chance at selling.
When it comes down to it, if you’re just trying to make a quick buck, blogging is not the way to do it. Blogging is hard work and takes dedicated time. So to see results, you must put in the effort. If this is something you really want- YOU CAN DO IT!
