Making Money from Affiliate Marketing

At any given time, there are roughly 600 million blogs on the web. Some of them don’t make a dime. Some of them don’t even want to make money.

But if you’re looking to start a successful website, revenue is an important part of the game. Maintaining a website isn’t free and you deserve to be compensated for your time and hard work. Affiliate marketing is still a viable way to make money online.

If you want to know all about making money from affiliate marketing with your websites, we’ve got the information you’re looking for in today’s post. Let’s get started.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

First, some basics. What is affiliate marketing exactly?

Companies use affiliate marketers as unofficial members of their sales team. Even the biggest companies have limited budgets for sales and marketing. Niche websites help businesses make money without costing them anything.

Here’s how it works:

• The website owner finds a product they want to promote
• They join the affiliate program through a network or the company website
• The program or company provides marketing materials like a link, banner ads, etc…
• When someone goes to the website, clicks on one of the affiliate links, and makes a purchase, the website owner (affiliate) is rewarded with a commission

Finding the right programs for your niche can be a challenge. You want to be sure there is demand for the items you promote but not so much that the entire market is saturated.

This is going to take some testing, mostly the trial and error kind. But it won’t matter how great the products or programs are unless you have people coming to your website to click on your links and purchase these items or services.

Here’s how you can get quality traffic to your website so you can make money with affiliate marketing.

How to Get Traffic to Your Website

You want high-quality traffic for your website. Bots aren’t going to fool anyone. Building a blog is a great way to make money but it’s also a lot of hard work.

Below are the best ways to get traffic to your site. All of these options are completely free. It’ll take a while to build up your tribe using these methods, but they are important for the success of niche and authority websites.

1. Organic Traffic

Organic search traffic is the creme de la creme of website traffic. It’s the reason we get up in the morning. It gives our food more flavor. It makes the grass greener and every day is full of sunshine.

It’s also the rarest and hardest traffic to get to your website.

Organic traffic comes from ranking well on Google and other search engines. To get this traffic, you need to play by Google’s rules, create amazing content, and a bit of luck along the way helps as well.

The reason it’s so great is that it has the best return. You put in the effort one time and you rank well for months or even longer.

To receive organic traffic, you need to build content around keywords. These are phrases that people plug into search engines to find answers, products, and services that solve their problems.

Further efforts will include creating high-quality blog posts, using the best plugins to help your site’s performance, and staying current with Google updates.

2. Social Media

Anyone can and should use social media. But using it to boost your affiliate sales can take a while to master.

When you first start building your website and creating content, use social media to help build your audience. Promote your blog posts, and keep it at that. Talk to people and make new friends.

Many people think they need to jam affiliate links and ads onto their website as soon as it’s built. They assume the website and everything on it is static and they never have to touch it again.

Another common misconception is that you need to be on every social network. If you’re spending all of your time promoting the little bit of content you have on 10 different networks, it’s going to be hard to keep up with any kind of content writing schedule.

Find the 2 to 3 top social platforms that work the best for you, the niche you’re in, and the products you believe in and want to promote.

After you build up an audience and find the content that resonates the most with your audience, you can go back in and place ads, hone your writing, and start to add affiliate links you think people will like.

3. YouTube

YouTube is fantastic for people who are interested in making money from affiliate marketing. It works well as a social platform but it also offers additional revenue streams in the form of ads, affiliate possibilities, brand sponsorships, and memberships to your channel.

One of the coolest possibilities is that you don’t really have to generate fresh content to earn this extra money. You can repurpose blog posts into videos.

Something to keep in mind is YouTube has its own kind of SEO, or search engine optimization, that works a bit differently than the content you create for your blog.

A recent Google update revolves around product reviews. Your content will have higher chances of ranking if it meets Google’s requirements for quality. Use your YouTube channel to show your audience proof of handling the products and services you recommend.

Other Revenue Sources

Affiliate marketing is awesome. There are a ton of opportunities to make money. However, it’s not the end all be all. If you want to make money blogging, you should explore every avenue available to you. Here are a few options.

1. Ads

It takes a lot of traffic to make money from ads. Even the best networks require 50,000-100,000 hits a month to make it worth your while. If you get this much high-quality traffic, it’s definitely something you should try and can bring in around $1,000 a month, possibly a bit more.

One of the main cons of ad networks is they can affect load times and also if you have a niche or website that’s image-heavy, the ads can be distracting to your audience. However, ads and affiliate links are the classic revenue-building duo of niche and authority websites.

2. Course and Product Creation

After you’ve mastered the craft of building niche websites, you can create your own products and courses. This is where the big money comes into play.

You can teach people how to make money from affiliate marketing, how to build their own websites, how to write SEO-friendly content, and so much more. You can sell these courses on your websites.

If you’re a creative person who enjoys making things, you can sell downloadable digital products. Etsy provides a great marketplace for doing this but you can also sell them on your website.

Or you can give them away for free as a thank you for joining an email list, becoming a member on YouTube, or supporting your content through a platform such as Patreon.

3. Build More Websites

You only need to be right one time. That’s all it takes to find success with the affiliate marketing game.

What does this mean? You only need to build one website and then you’re good forever? Not really.

Tastes, products, and services come and go. Companies go out of business all the time and people lose interest in products and services.

You need to be able to flow with your markets and keep an eye on trends. But one thing you really want to do once you’ve realized how to make money is to build more websites.

Success with authority or niche websites revolves around building a formula. Once you have that formula, you can create amazing websites for nearly any niche.

If you start a website and find success with affiliate marketing and make $5,000 a month, what’s keeping you from building ten more?

It’s a good idea to come up with an income goal at this point. Once you make all of the money you want or need, you can start selling off these websites or you can hire writers, social media managers, and content managers to run your business for you. This is how you build an empire.

Making Money From Affiliate Marketing – The Bottom Line

If you’re interested in making money from affiliate marketing, this post is just the tip of the iceberg. We touched on pretty much everything you need to know, but success is going to involve a much deeper dive into each of these topics.

One of the biggest problems is people build one blog, don’t make any money, and then quit. You can’t give up. Keep building, generating better content, and working on your marketing skills.