4 Best Affiliate Marketing Tips for New Bloggers

Are you a new blogger looking to boost your income while generating more traffic? Then, including affiliate links in your blog posts can be an effective way of doing just that!

I recently dedicated an entire month to mastering the art of affiliate marketing. After a few months of implementing what I learned, I can confidently say that it has paid off.

We now earn over $4,000 monthly from affiliate sales, and I want to share my best tips with you.

I’ve been blogging at Miss Millennia Magazine for over 10 years and launched my second blog, Blogging Money Life, in August of 2021. Until lately, most of our income at MissMillMag has come from product sales and sponsored posts, but that all changed in a month.

At the beginning of 2021, I didn’t have an excellent strategy to promote my affiliates, and we only earned about $200/month in affiliate sales. Fast forward to April 2021, and our monthly affiliate income has grown by 2,000% and is over $4,000!

It’s been such a meteoric rise for my business, and it all came down to these 4 steps:

• Step 1: Pick an affiliate program that fits your brand.
• Step 2: Writing quality content that includes an excellent product review.
• Step 3: Implement a strong SEO strategy to drive traffic to your article.
• Step 4: Routinely optimize and update your content after it’s been published.

Within only a few weeks of applying these new strategies, I noticed exponential growth in our blog traffic and revenue. Within a couple of months, new affiliate partners noticed our recent successes.

They began reaching out to us across our social media platforms and even sending emails to my personal inbox. Finally, these brands are ready to enroll us in their affiliate programs and send us their products to review and promote from our blog.

Pick a Good Affiliate Marketing Program

Selecting a good affiliate marketing program is an excellent first step to monetizing your blog with affiliate marketing.

Cool! But what exactly is affiliate marketing?

Well, it’s a process by which a blogger can earn a commission for promoting another brand’s product or service.

Simply join a few affiliate networks and search for a specific product that you enjoy and that will fit your brand. Next, create a quality blog post that includes a detailed product review.

Being authentic and honest in promoting any product under your brand is essential. Remember that you are putting your reputation on the line, so only choose products you would buy yourself. Plus, it’s much easier to sell something when you believe in it.

You will earn a commission from affiliate marketing sales you help bring in. These sales are tracked through unique affiliate links you embed in your article. As a tip, I like to embed an affiliate link into every mention of the product in the post.

There are a few channels that I can recommend when it comes to finding a good affiliate program. My favorites are Commission Junction, Impact Radius, Awin, and ShareASale. 

Write a Good Product Review

When creating good affiliate content, you want to make sure you’re writing to a specific type of person. You should target those who want to purchase but are still searching for reviews.

Your review should give them reassurance that their purchase is a good decision. They put a lot of trust in your words, and your honesty will build your reputation.

How do you find this person?

By doing this well, they will actually find you! Writing to a very targeted audience makes your article more searchable. This is why I set an emphasis on product reviews. 

Over 60% of online shoppers read 3rd party reviews before making an online purchase. You want to capture these researchers. Writing product review articles explicitly targets people at the bottom of the funnel who are ready to buy now.

When writing your review article, include these essential elements.

• Describe your experience before owning the product.
• Talk about what led you to your purchase.
• Clearly explain what the product is and what it does.
• What makes this product stand out from its competitors (list its unique features). 
• Share both the positive and negative experiences you had with that product.
• Create a call to action. Eg: “Use my affiliate link for a 20% discount.”

Lastly, you want to make it easy for your reader to buy the affiliate product. I typically add hyperlinks to every mention of the product in my articles.

I also let them know if any promo codes are available to save them money. In addition, you can request unique promo codes from the brands you are working with.

SEO the Crap Out of Your Article

You must ensure that your product review article reaches your target audience through Google search.

I start with keyword research using the Keywords Everywhere tool. Then, I type in the affiliate product’s name and comb through the list of keywords populated for me.

When researching with this tool, I typically want keywords with a “search volume” of more than 70 and a “competition score” of less than .20.

After putting together an extensive list of keywords, I pick the one that best describes my article AKA my main keyword. From there, I plug that keyword into my SEMRush tool.

If you have never used SEMRush before, you should check it out because of this incredible tool. This tool helps bloggers:

• Boost their organic traffic growth.
• Optimize new and existing blog posts.
• Earn more money with affiliate advertising.
• Increase site loading speed.
• Monitor blog and specific article traffic.

For more info on this game-changing tool for bloggers, Check out my review of the SEMRush tool here.

My favorite element of this tool is the SEO WordPress writing assistant plugin. After inserting my main keyword in the SEMRush writing assistant tool, it provides a complete list of keywords that need to be added to my article to rank for my desired search term on Google.

If you want to know more about doing keyword research, watch my video, where I share my exact strategy here.

Optimize Along the Way

When it comes to Google, it is constantly changing. 1.145 trillion MB of new data is added every single day.

That means you must stay current regarding search terms in your affiliate articles. So make it a point to monitor your traffic report and revisit your article every few weeks to update content and keywords.  

Repeat the same processes from Step 3. Use the Keywords Everywhere tool to see if you can boost your ranking for new keywords that have not yet been added to your article. Review SEMrush’s organic insights tool to monitor your article’s traffic, keywords, and ranking.

Keep Learning

The rules seem to constantly be changing, so continued education is essential. Check out my list of The 25 Best Books About Blogging to learn even more than what I have been able to cover here.

Since I’m continually striving to make more money with affiliates and boost my SEO, I am consistently learning new tricks I can implement to help grow my blogs. 

For example, did you know that you are more likely to appear in the Google search engine if you add a YouTube video to your blog post? Surprisingly, it doesn’t even have to be your own video.

If you are interested in learning even more about making money blogging, I created an in-depth program to show bloggers how to start generating significant income through their blogs. It’s called Blogging Money Formula!

Blogging Money Formula is an online course that shows motivated bloggers how to go from making a few (or no) dollars to making consistent money with their blogs every month. In addition, I offer you how to set up the foundation you need to make REAL income with your blog to make a difference for you and your family in the long run.

Through our program, I will teach you how to:

• Establish yourself as a professional blogger: I’ll show you everything your blog needs to be recognized as a professional blogger.
• Properly apply for sponsored posts, so you get selected for more opportunities: I will show you step-by-step how to apply so that brands choose you more often!
• Get brands to reach out to you: I’ll show you what you need to set up on your blog so that brands reach out to you and where to go to put yourself on their radar.
• Build long-term relationships with brands: This way, you can get recurring business with brands instead of pitching new ones all the time.
• Write content that appeals to your audience and the brand: Great content does not need to be either-or!
• Drive traffic to your blog posts: Great results produce repeat customers, and I will show you how to make that happen.

Learn more about Blogging Money Formula here.

There you have it; now you know the basics of earning money with your blog. Blogging can be a lot of work, but it can pay off if you do it right.

Do you have more questions on how to do this? Leave your questions in the comments below, and I’ll be happy to get some answers.

Don’t forget to check out the Blogging Money Formula for further in-depth training on making money blogging.

At the end of the day, growing a blog is just one giant experiment. What’s important is that we are not afraid to try new things because you won’t grow if you are not open to change.