Beginner’s Guide: How To Use Affiliate Marketing With A Blog

In this beginner’s guide on how to use affiliate marketing with a blog, you will find that you will need certain elements that will make this combination a successful online business.

I didn’t know any of this when I started a blog a few years ago and tried using affiliate marketing to make money from it.

Eventually, I failed because I didn’t properly build my blog right or knew how to write that would get traffic to my blog which is the most important part.

I always thought blogging was easy, you just create one, then write whatever you want, put some affiliate links in it and I should expect to make some money.

But really, if you want to build an online business with affiliate marketing, there is definitely a course of action that needs to be taken.

I finally found the proper way to do it after years of trying other crap that either was a scam or made too little money for the work I put in.

I finally found training that taught me how to use affiliate marketing with a blog properly and I’m forever grateful to be able to share with you what I’ve learned!

There is a definite formula to building this online business and you will see how to use affiliate marketing with a blog below.

 

The main elements you need to build a successful online business are the following:

• Your Niche: The topic of your blog.
• The Blog Itself: How it’s made, where it’s hosted, the nuts & bolts.
• Traffic: Do you know how to make your blog generate its own free traffic?
• Make Money: Joining affiliate programs + choosing the affiliate products to promote.
• Three P’s Of Success: Secret ingredients that will be needed to find success with your blog.

 

 

YOUR NICHE: THE TOPIC

---

I find that a lot of people starting in this business don’t know how to pick a niche actually.  They usually pick a topic that is way to broad.

A niche is a specific group of people looking for stuff.

Your blog should be targeting this specific group of people.

The better you do this, the more targeted traffic you’ll get to your site.

So before you build your blog, you need to choose a niche first.

If you just create a blog to talk about whatever you want, it will take you a lot longer to make money from it.

Also, choose a topic that you like or at least very interested in.  If you don’t, you will quit because you’re so bored of your blog or won’t want to work on it long term.

So if you can choose a topic like this:

1. Gluten Free Muffins In Under 30 Minutes
2. Healing Shoulder Pain For Seniors
3. Basketball For Kids
4. Organizing Closet Spaces For Women with Too Many Shoes
5. Pet Strollers For Senior Dogs

If you can choose your niche with WHAT and WHO in mind or some other criteria like a time limit, then you can have a more narrow niche.

It doesn’t mean that your blog must stay narrow in topic.  Once your blog is a year old and has gained some authority in search engines, then you can expand it more.

Here’s a more detailed look with an explanation on how to pick a niche at a place where I trained to learn how to use affiliate marketing with a blog:

 

You will learn in that video more ways to choose your niche and finally start a blog that will let you work on a topic you will love for many years to come.

Once you find a topic, you may want to look to see if there are any affiliate programs for the products that you can recommend to people in your niche.

For example, you can recommend these products for the niches I suggested above earlier:

• Gluten Free Muffins In Under 30 Minutes – baking pans, baking tools, muffin liners, etc.
• Healing Shoulder Pain For Seniors – massage chairs, electric hand massages, massage pads, heat pads, etc.
• Basketball For Kids – shoes, basket balls, basket nets they can start out using, etc.
• Organizing Closet Spaces For Women with Too Many Shoes – containers, shelving units, rails, etc.
• Pet Strollers For Senior Dogs – dog strollers, dog carriers, etc.

Once you have some products in mind that you can recommend and have affiliate programs you can join for them, then you have a good niche.

There are literally thousands if not millions of products that are available in the affiliate marketing business these days to promote.  You should not have a hard time picking a niche that has products to promote with.

 

 

THE BLOG ITSELF: NUTS & BLOTS

---

Once you have your niche, then it’s time to build your blog but where will you do it at, how will you get it all done, and what do you need to make it right from the start?

All these questions can be answered at Wealthy Affiliate where I’ve been training at since September 2016.

Not only they provide you with the best training like you’ve seen with how to choose a niche above, but they also provide you with a site building platform where you don’t need to know any coding.

You can literally create your blog within a minute, and you can see how it all works here in my video:

 

 

You will be able to build your blog on your own custom domain (if you’re a Premium member) or you can create a free blog on the siterubix.com domain that will have an URL that looks like this yoursitename.siterubix.com.

Free blogs are available to both Free Starter members and Premium members – You only get 2 free blogs with the Starter membership but Premium you get 25 free blogs.

In the video, you can also see that you can seamlessly transfer your free blogs onto your own custom domain with just a click of a few buttons.

I think that’s so awesome!  I really love that feature.

Once you’ve created your blog, you will be taught in the lessons on how to start building it.

There are many pieces of info you should have in your blog like a privacy policy page, contact page, disclaimer page, etc which Wealthy Affiliate will teach you all of it.

You will have no worries hosting your site on their platform because it is hosted on very high quality servers, with very high speeds, as well as total security for your site.

If you’re a Premium member, you will also get SSL Certificates and Private domain registration for free as well, which are extra costs at any other hosting platforms.

Give Wealthy Affiliate a try here for FREE and build your first site!

 

 

GET THE BEST TRAFFIC WITHOUT PAYING A DIME

---

Getting the best traffic without paying a dime is knowing how to write your content that can generate free organic search traffic that are highly targeted.

Meaning the best traffic comes from search engines like Google and it’s highly targeted because you will get people who are searching for exactly what your site is offering.

The more targeted traffic you get, the more money you’ll make.

Now, how do you get this traffic?

By using the words that people in your niche are using to search for things on Google or other search engines.

The words are called keywords or keyword phrase.

But, how do you find those?

There is a definite method and a way to find them, you can check out this video here to find out how:

 

On that lesson page, they suggest to go sign up for the keyword search tool called Jaaxy which you can sign up here for free but you don’t have to because Wealthy Affiliate already has a keyword search tool on their platform with your free membership as well.

Jaaxy, however, is much more powerful and can track how you rank for those keywords as well, so the keyword tool on Wealthy Affiliate is very basic but uses the same principles as Jaaxy.

The lessons at Wealthy Affiliate not only teaches you how to find the keywords to use but also how to write your content that will be helpful to your target audience.

This is another key ingredient to the success to your blog: writing quality content using relevant keywords and knowing how to pick those keywords.

It’s very crucial that these are used properly to provide you with the most chance of success with your blog, and Wealthy Affiliate teaches you all the know-how on this section.

Quality content these days also equals good lengthy posts of 800+ words and if you can publish content on a consistently schedule, this will also add to your success.

If you can have a schedule where you can publish 3 – 5 times a week consistently, you will see your traffic climb and see results much faster than a blog that writes only once or twice a month.

The more content you can produce, the faster your results and I’ve seen this first hand with my own blog here.

 

WHAT KIND OF CONTENT?

Besides using keywords in your content, you’d want to write content that will help your audience with something, especially solving a problem.

In the examples above, you may want to help your audience how to make very moist gluten-free muffins because dryness can be a problem with gluten-free products.

Or another example would be helping dog owners how to make long walks possible for their senior dogs and suggest using a dog stroller plus other remedies that would make their dog comfortable.

If you can help your audience fix a problem, you can then build more trust in them.

The more valuable the information is to your readers, the better relationship you can build with them, the more likely they will click on your links and buy from your links.

This is definitely the right way to building an affiliate marketing business.

 

 

MAKE MONEY: AFFILIATE PROGRAMS & AFFILIATE PRODUCTS

---

Now I spoke about links above and you’re wondering how you’re going to make money with all this right?

The links I’m talking about are the affiliate links you’ll receive once you sign up with the affiliate program you’re interested in.

I’ll use an easy example of Amazon.com, their affiliate program is called Amazon Associates and you need to apply to their program to start promoting their products.

 

Sign Up For Your Free Wealthy Affiliate Account Here:

 

Their program has a commission structure of 0 – 10% depending on what you choose to promote.  Most products are in the 4% range while something like Pet Supplies in 8% and their own products are at 10%.

Once you apply to their program, you can start using their affiliate links but this program is a little strange in that they won’t approve or disapprove you until your first sale which needs to be within 180 days of you first applying.

That could mean that you make your first sale and get disapprove which has happened to many people.  As long as you are sticking to their rules, which you should read in detail, then you should be approved.

There are many other affiliate programs out there with different commission rates with some even in the 100% range.

The affiliate programs are all governed by the company offering the program itself or an affiliate network that runs the program for the company.

Course 3 of Wealthy Affiliate main course is dedicated to this section of making money with your blog and I highly recommend it:

 

If you want to see how this main course works and what other topics are taught, you can check out this post that details out this Online Entrepreneur Certification course better here.

Course 3 will teach you how to use affiliate links, how to link them, where to find them, how many to use in each post, etc.

If you want to use affiliate marketing with a blog, this is the course that will teach you how to do that in great detail, step-by-step, that I can’t possibly repeat it all here.

 

WHY TAKE ON TRAINING

If you are serious about this business, it’s important to learn how to do it right the first time or else you’ll be wasting a lot of time and this business does already take time to build so you’ll be wasting even more time if you don’t have something that will teach you properly how to do this.

Remember at the beginning of this post I told you I’ve failed before?  This is because I tried doing it all on my own which I had no clue about any of what I know today.

I was ecstatic when I found Wealthy Affiliate because it was the missing piece of the puzzle I needed to be on the path to success.

You can be on that same path if you learn from the lessons at Wealthy Affiliate.

Remember it’s free to start and it includes more than training like business tools you’ll need like keyword search tool, site builder, web hosting, and most importantly, support.

 

Sign Up For Your Free Wealthy Affiliate Account Here:

 

You will have the support of many entrepreneurs like yourself and you can ask any questions to them if you are ever stuck.

There are many other benefits to the Free Starter membership that I couldn’t explain in full here plus all the other extras about this awesome platform.

So, instead of repeating myself, you can read a detailed Wealthy Affiliate review in my free guide here:

 

 

THREE P’S OF SUCCESS: THE SECRET INGREDIENTS

---

There’s really no secret to success, it’s all about your work effort, your commitment, and your drive but if you can add the three P’s to that, then you’ll be building a fantastic affiliate marketing business with your blog that will be sustainable in the long run.

 

The Three P’s: Patience, Perseverance, & Persistence

 

 

Without these three key elements, you’ll be like the guy on bottom of the picture above, giving up just before your online business breaks through.

With the Three P’s, you can keep working like the guy on top, slowly but surely and not giving up.

In time, he will break through and reap all the reward that’s waiting for him.

That’s how blogging works, it’s very cumulative and the more you write, the more your site gets ranked, the more traffic you’ll have and more sales you’ll get.

 

Now let’s take a look at the three P’s in more detail:

Patience:

• Know that this online business takes time to build.
• This is not a get rich quick scheme, Google doesn’t even rank you til you’re in your 3-4 months and depending how often you publish new content, it can take even longer.

Perseverance:

• Don’t let roadblocks stop you, get through the issue and move on to the next one.
• If you can’t find the answer, keep looking.  You will find a solution.

Persistence:

• DO NOT GIVE UP.
• I’ve seen so many successful members say to keep moving forward, keep writing, keep posting, and you’ll find results.
• You will be able to find success if you follow the training and keep building your site.

If you can practice the three P’s, your blog will succeed in time and will make you the kind of money you’re hoping for and much more from your online business.

 

I hope I have given you valuable information about how to use affiliate marketing with a blog and that you will now start your own!

You will have my full help if you sign up today and you will have personal access to me on the Wealthy Affiliate platform.  I will send you a message as “littlemama” (my handle in there) when you join so you’ll know how to find me!

Create your new FREE account now and get started today:

 

If you have any questions or thoughts regarding any of the above, please do not hesitate to leave me a comment below. I always reply to my readers! 🙂

 

Let’s make money online!