11 Benefits Of Being An Affiliate Blogger

If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume that you’re kicking around the idea of becoming an affiliate blogger. If you were already an affiliate blogger, then you’d already know all the benefits.

So, if you’re new to the game, let me get you really excited and tell you the benefits of being a money making affiliate blogger. Let’s go…

1. It’s So Cheap To Get Started

Most of the time when you start a business you have to have a lot of money to get started. You need inventory, you need to rent a place to sell from, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Even if you’re starting an online business, sometimes you need to put a lot of money into development and a ton of time into creation.

That’s what makes being an affiliate blogger so attractive. If you have $10 for a domain name and $10 a month for hosting, then you can get started right now. Later on, once you’re making money you can invest some of it into a better design for your blog, advertising, or content, but to get started (and maybe for your entire career) you can keep costs under $20 a month!

2. Cash In On What You Love

If you’re smart you’ll start your blog around a topic or niche that you love so that you can get paid to create content about something that you actually love.

Yes, sometimes what we love isn’t profitable, but you can at least find something profitable to create an affiliate blog around that you want to learn about and then you’re getting paid for learning! How cool is that?

3. Create Multiple Streams Of Income

As an affiliate blogger you’re usually not going to just promote one product. If you pick a broad enough niche/topic you can find multiple products to promote and create multiple streams of income.

Some affiliates only promote a few different products, but there are affiliates who promote hundreds of different products. It’s always going to depend on your niche, but most niches will have several different products you can promote as an affiliate so that you can create multiple streams of income.

4. Create Passive Income

The term “passive income” gets thrown around a lot and as an affiliate blogger it’s hard to run your business passively, so creating passive income really isn’t an option.

You’ve always got to be creating content and promoting that content. However, there are some things you can do to work for an income and then have it keep coming in passively.

Two examples:

You could put a lot of work and effort in and get your site getting organic traffic via SEO. If you’re not in too competitive of a niche that traffic will flow without much effort from you.

If you can find affiliate programs that pay you a recurring commission (they charge the customer a monthly fee) then you work to make that first sale, but after that you get paid automatically by the same customer.

5. You Get To Help And Entertain Others

If you’re doing things right, your content on your blog will either help or entertain your readers. Better yet if you can do both. Wouldn’t it be great to get paid to help/entertain others? As an affiliate blogger you have that opportunity!

6. You Don’t Have To Be An Expert

Many people who make a lot of money online create and sell their own products. That requires being an expert on a topic and let’s face it, even when we know a lot about a topic or niche we’re usually not quite experts.

You can get started with being an affiliate blogger be doing other things rather than providing expert content. You can do journal style posts where you’re creating content about your experiences on a journey you’re on. You could create reviews and/or tutorials. You could even pay an expert to create your content for you and take content creation totally out of the equation.

The bottom line is you don’t have to be an expert by any means to get started!

7. Fame! I’m Going To Live Forever!

If you know where that quote came from you get 1000 fake Internet points. I’m kidding!

Seriously, being an affiliate blogger can bring you some serious fame. I mean look at the tens of thousands of people across so many niches that are famous in their own right as bloggers and influencers? They are just every day normal people and they did it. So can you!

8. You Can Fund Other Dreams

Being an affiliate blogger is a great starting point for anyone looking to start an online business. You can learn a lot while making money, and if you do it right you can make a lot of money that you can take and invest in (or live off of) the businesses of your dreams.

I know an affiliate blogger who started making a lot of money and then started investing in real estate. He doesn’t blog much now because he’s made so much money from his investing.

I know another affiliate blogger who sold his blog for millions and went on to start a different blog in a totally different niche. I wonder if he’ll do that again?

9. Almost Anyone Can Do It

Becoming an affiliate blogger and making money with it isn’t that hard if you are focused, and you keep learning as you go. You don’t need any special skills or training or even higher education. This allows just about anyone to be able to start and profit from their own affiliate blog.

10. You Don’t Have To Create Or Support Your Own Products

Yes! You can make a lot of money creating your own products, but there is a lot of hard work, time, and headaches that go with it.

As an affiliate blogger the only thing you’ll have to do is create content that your audience wants and answer questions about that content. And that’s not hard because you know your topic. You wont need a support staff or even a help desk. Put a simple form on your blog that people can contact you through and you can manage everything via email if you keep things simple.

11. You’re The Boss

And the biggest benefit. You get to be the boss! You get to do what you want, when you want. You get to decide what content gets created, how it’s presented, the hours you work, and everything in between.

If you weren’t already super excited about starting your own affiliate blog you should be at this point. I just provided you with 11 benefits of being an affiliate blogger, but believe there are many more.

10 Recommended Tools For Successful Affiliate Bloggers

As an affiliate blogger your costs are going to be pretty low to get you started and to continue running and profiting from your blog. However, there are some things you’re going to need and some things you’re going to want to make creating content and employing marketing strategies.

Here’s a list of the main resources and tools you’ll need as a beginner affiliate blogger and even some that you advanced affiliate bloggers will want to take a look at.

Domain Names

I get all of my domain names from GoDaddy because they are the cheapest around and have proven to be very reliable in my experience. There are a lot of registrars out there, but make sure you are buying from only one of them (to keep yourself from getting confused where everything is) and you pick one that has been around for a long time.

Hosting

This is something you want to be really careful with. Never pick a host because they are the cheapest. Pick a host because they are the best. I have had some serious issues with hosts (even losing entire businesses because of issues), so this is an important decision to make.

WordPress

WordPress is a script that you install that will allow you to have your affiliate blog setup and running. It’s an industry standard and there is absolutely no other blogging system that I recommend. Just use this from the start, and you’ll thank me later.

WordPress Plugins And Themes

“Out of the box” WordPress is just a simple blogging platform, but there are thousands upon thousands of plugins and themes you can use to make your blog look about any way you want and/or do just about anything you want.

There are just too many plugins and themes to recommend here, but I do suggest you do a Google search for affiliate marketing WordPress themes and affiliate marketing WordPress plugins to see what’s available for your use.

Analytics

Tracking everything in your affiliate marketing business is incredibly important. You need to track many different metrics like clicks, where your traffic is coming from, bounce rates and more.

If you’ve installed your blog using WordPress, you’ll be able to find plugins that allow you to easily track all kinds of different metrics. Do your research and find the best one for you.

Keyword Research Tool

Keyword research is vital to the success of your blog. You have to know what your audience is searching for and give it to them in order to be successful with your affiliate marketing.

I use and recommend Ubersuggest from Neil Patel. I recommend it because not only can you do all the keyword research you need to do, but you can also see the most popular content for your niche. This tool does all kinds of things related to research and is my top recommendation for the price.

Grammarly

You don’t have to be a perfect writer to find success as an affiliate blogger, but you do need to have correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar for the most part. Grammarly is a tool that will allow you to make sure all of your content is at it’s best in many different ways.

Autoresponder

Yes, I know you’re an affiliate blogger, but you really need to be building an email list too, so that you can contact your readers anytime you want. As soon as you make a blog post you could email your list about it and have a ton of traffic to your new post immediately.

There are many different services out there and you need to make sure you pick a good reliable one. The only one I recommend is Aweber because of the ease of use and the reliability.

Imagine building a list with a service that isn’t reliable? Your emails may never get delivered to your readers and/or you could lose your list at any time. This is why it’s so important when making your decision on what service to go with.

Page Builder

While you can easily build pages with your blog in WordPress, there are going to be certain pages you want to build that you can have total design control over. That’s where a page builder comes in.

For example, I offer bonuses for a lot of things that I promote as an affiliate, and I like to build a nice looking page listing the bonuses and then place a button on the page that has my affiliate link in it. With the standard WordPress pages that can be hard if you’re not really techy.

I use OptimizePress to build any kind of marketing page I need in my affiliate marketing business.

Again, there are a lot of options out there for page builders and I have tried many of them. Most don’t work, many are hard to use, and none of them compare to the ease of use and the amazing templates that come with Optimize Press so I recommend you save your time and just use OptimizePress.

Video Equipment and Software

One of the best tactics you can use in your affiliate marketing is to incorporate video. Be it you doing screencast videos where you’re just showing your computer screen to doing videos with you actually in them. Videos make for great content and amazing for pulling traffic in via different strategies.

To do this though you’re going to need some equipment such as Camtasia for screen recording, a good camera or a good cell phone with a camera, video editing software, etc.

My advice is to define your video strategy, and then determine the equipment you’ll need to carry out that strategy. It’s going to be different for every person and every strategy.

Now I’ve only given you 10 resources here, but almost all 10 of these are vital to your affiliate blogging success. My biggest piece of advice is to start from the top and work your way down over time.

If you’re just getting started don’t worry about advanced stuff like doing video marketing. Focus on getting your blog setup correctly, work on finding good topics to create content around, work on creating high quality content, and what you can do to get traffic to your blog. Don’t get lost in what tools you’re going to need. That’s the downfall for most people who are trying to get started with their affiliate blog. Focus on doing and as time goes on you’ll know when it’s time to start looking for additional tools.

What Affiliate Programs Should Affiliate Bloggers Use To Make Money?

If you’re new to affiliate marketing and you don’t know where to find products to promote on your blog, I’m about to open your eyes to the best of the best affiliate programs. Joining the right affiliate programs is a HUGE key to your success. You need to make sure you’re using a good reliable program that will actually pay you and provide a good product or service to the person that you have referred.

You also need to understand all the ways you can get paid as an affiliate. Here are a few examples:

Pay per sale – This is where you get a percentage (commission) of the sale that you make.

Pay per click – This is where you get paid when someone clicks on your affiliate link. Usually a very small amount.

Pay per lead – This is where you get paid a certain amount of money for every “qualified” lead that you send to a company.

There are many more ways you can make money as an affiliate, but those are the main options.

One last thing before I give you some great resources for affiliate programs you can join.

Some affiliate programs are very picky. If you don’t already have a good blog that is full of content and some kind of traffic coming in, they won’t approve you for their network, so my advice is to start with filling your blog with good content and getting traffic before you apply to some of these.

Don’t worry though. If you want to start promoting products you can be an affiliate for there are affiliate programs that accept just about anyone. At least have your blog setup and a few pieces of content on it. They will ask you for the ULR (domain name) for your website.

Now that we’ve covered all of that, here are my biggest recommendations for affiliate programs to check out for new affiliate bloggers.

Disclaimer: These resources are current at the time of this resource being created. Do your research to make sure they are still available and what their requirements are to apply and be approved for their program.

Amazon Associate Program

This is my top recommendation for affiliate bloggers and especially for those of you who are new to affiliate marketing. Amazon has a great reputation, awesome tracking, and a ton of products all in one place for you to choose from. You also don’t have to have a big site with a lot of traffic to start using their program. While commissions aren’t the best it’s your best option if you’re just getting started because of the aforementioned.

ShareASale

ShareASale has been around for a long time and is a trusted network to work with. They run the affiliate programs for some of the biggest brands around so you will have a lot of options for products to promote with them.

CJ Affiliate (formerly Commission Junction)

This is another affiliate network that has been around for a very long time and can be trusted. Like ShareASale they run affiliate programs for big brands and have a lot of different products you can promote.

Impact

Like ShareASale and CJ Affiliate, Impact is also an affiliate network who runs the affiliate program for many big brands. It’s also been around for a long time, and they are very reliable with their tracking.

Side Note: As you can see these are the big networks. Each network runs the affiliate program for different brands, so these networks are full of things you can promote as an affiliate. Each one has different brands and companies within it.

MaxBounty

If you’re looking for pay per lead or pay per action programs this is a great network to start with. MaxBounty is a CPA (cost per action) network where you can get paid as an affiliate for actions that your referrers take. Like signing up for an email list, filling out a form, etc. Just make sure you read all the documentation for any program and follow the rules very carefully.

Perform (formerly ClickBooth)

This is another network similar to MaxBounty. It’s harder to get approved with them, but they have more companies and offers than MaxBounty.

Side Note: Be very careful with CPA networks. You need to stick with trusted networks like the ones I’ve just mentioned. There are more bad networks out there than there are good ones, so make sure and do your research before going all in with one of these.

ClickBank

This is one of the biggest affiliate marketplaces for downloadable digital products such as ebooks, courses, software, and the like. I really like ClickBank because they process the payments for the vendors, and they are the ones that pay your affiliate commissions. Plus, since they are all digital products you’re going to make a bigger percentage of each sale.

With several niches supporting digital products, you should check it out and see if they have digital products that would be perfect for you niche.

JVZoo

This is a niche specific affiliate marketing place for digital products in the Internet marketing and make money online niches. Even though it’s very niche specific I wanted to mention it here because more and more people are entering these two niches year after year. Plus, you can get super high commissions here with some paying 100% commissions and paying you instantly to your PayPal account.

Adsense

This is a good option for those of you who have a new blog and you’re new to all of this affiliate marketing stuff. You can simply copy a code to certain places on your website and you’ll be paid (usually pennies) a click.

MediaVine

This network is a lot like Adsense, but much better paying. The only caveat is that you need to have a blog filled with content and already be getting some traffic. I do recommend it over Adsense if you already have an established blog.

I just gave you a ton of options with a ton of resources. The most important thing I can advise you on is to make sure you’ve got your blog already to go, you’ve got some content on it, and you’re getting some traffic before applying for any program of any type. As your blog grows and your traffic grows you can get involved with more networks with better options but remember we all have to start somewhere. I encourage you to research each of these resources yourself, find out the requirements, and decide what will be the best for your readers and for you to make the most money!