Wordless Wednesday Blog Hop: Tips for Better Affiliate Marketing
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s products on your blog. When a reader clicks on an affiliate link and makes a purchase, you earn a commission.
This edition of the BlogPaws Wordless Wednesday blog hop is dedicated to affiliate marketing. Some examples of affiliates include: Amazon, Share a Sale, and Only Natural Pet.
BlogPaws’ Director of Community Education, Aimee Beltran, says, “More traffic equates to more eyes on your content. This means more opportunities to build trust with your readers. When your readers trust you that means you’re an influencer in their eyes. What do people do when they trust you? They listen when you make recommendations and ultimately they end up purchasing from you.
So, back to getting rich from affiliate marketing: You can not just drop an affiliate link and expect to get rich quick. You have to work continuously on creating a brand and a community. You can’t have one without the other!”
How You Get Paid
In most cases, you, the affiliate, get paid when an actual sale is made by the merchant. For example, in the case of Amazon, I embed an affiliate link into a blog post. Someone clicks through that link. If said person buys that product and/or any other product as a result of using my affiliate link, I receive a commission.
Each affiliate program has their own set of payment schedules and terms, so read each carefully.
“I Tried Affiliate Marketing and It Tanked”
This can and does happen to bloggers and influencers. Some reasons are:
- Not enough traffic to expect a commission.
- Not working the commission program enough: Are you promoting the posts? How often? Where? Is the affiliate link something that makes sense for your blog?
- Poorly written content and/or use of the affiliate links.
- Too many affiliate programs.
Better Affiliate Marketing Tips
- Determine one or two affiliates with which you want to work. Let’s use Amazon as an example. You read through Amazon Affiliate terms and decide you are a fit. Like social media networks, soar with the ones that make sense. You need not be in a ton of affiliate programs.
- Make a plan around how you will incorporate affiliate links and images into your blog posts and social shares.
- Take the Affiliate Marketing challenge in the BlogPaws Social Learning Community.
- Full disclosure that satisfies the requirement of the affiliate and the Federal Trade Commission are mandatory. Know them, use them, and be sure you are following the rules.
- Determine how many pieces of content you want to blog in order to include affiliate links. Many different types of posts are worthy of affiliate inclusion. For example, here is a post I recently wrote that focuses on dog shampoos and their dangers. I am able to include dog shampoos that are safer for dogs in the post, as I am an Only Natural Pet affiliate through Share a Sale. I’ve built a level of trust with my audience and I use these products, so it made sense for me to do a post about them.
- Focus on growing your blog traffic. If you build it, they will come, holds true to blogging, too. I did not start affiliate marketing until years and years into blogging. Looking back, I am glad I waited…I did not have the numbers, the trust, nor the solid targeted readership I needed for a solid affiliate program commission.
- Set time aside every week or month and determine the products you are going to include in your posts. Use affiliate links for photos, too.
Affiliate Marketing FAQs
Read more about affiliate marketing and get answers.
Take the Boost Your Blog 10K Challenge, which includes a section on Affiliate Marketing.
Set yourself up for success with a doable plan knowing that it takes time to get the content ready and optimized for success.
Treat Yourself With A Ticket to the BlogPaws 2018 Conference
Discover your tribe and connect with social media influencers and experts. Get early bird pricing ticket for the BlogPaws 2018 Conference today.
The Wordless Wednesday Blog Hop
BlogPaws offers year-round interaction, activity, community and more to learn, earn, and connect. Visit and leave comments on other blogs to make some new buddies and maybe some new followers. You can add the button to your post and/or to your blog sidebar, either by cutting and pasting the image or using the HTML code below. Need help? Here it is:
How to Join a Blog Hop – BlogPaws Tutorial Video: Step by step help to get you started:
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Images: Moshbidon / the goatman / Shutterstock
