Affiliate marketing for new bloggers is amazing. This method of making money with a new blog for beginners is pretty simple.
There is work involved and a learning curve to master but it’s possible to learn strategies and tips to make money.
In this post I will help you to understand why affiliate marketing for beginners.
As a new blogger there will be many tasks to plow through, and your plate will be full with duties.
Setting up a new blog/website requires time, money, and some know how, if your building it yourself.
With all your efforts spent towards getting your blog going now your ready to start making some money.
After a few months of writing blog posts, promoting your work, and tweaking the design of your site, you check your analytics and you’ve made goose eggs. $0 dollars. WTH?
My suggestion: AFFILIATE MARKETING!
What is Affiliate Marketing
Essentially affiliate marketing is the process by which a company or an individual promotes a product or service in order to get paid a commission for their referrals.
For example, you ( as an affiliate) could promote products found on Amazon … let’s say a specific fitness product found on Amazon.
It would be your job as an affiliate marketer to promote this product to a target audience.
Every time someone from this audience buys the product on Amazon, you will receive a commission.
Related Reading: What Is Affiliate Marketing
9 Compelling Reasons Why Affiliate Marketing For New Bloggers
1. You don’t need a huge online following to be successful.
Before starting my blog I believed that for you to have success online selling products you needed to have a ton of followers on social media, or your website was already super popular.
Don’t get me wrong you will need an audience to sell to but even with a small online following if your able to look at your niche and find problems that your readers have you can start recommending products that solve their problems.
Having a small online following can result in sales, especially if the affiliate product you are offering is very specific to your audience’s needs.
For example: if you blog about ways to be more productive, your typical reader may be interested in ebooks, or even online courses to increase their productivity.
You can find affiliate products to promote that will help your audience. Just find a product and see if they offer an affiliate program for bloggers to join.
There are several affiliate programs that you can join as a new affiliate or new blogger. I made my first affiliate sale with a network called ShareASale.
I recommend ShareASale because once approved you will have access to tons of products for just about every niche you could think of.
Get Started With ShareASale Here
Another great affiliate program would be Ultimate Bundles. They have product bundles that include ebooks, planners, and courses.
They have the best bundle’s of products designed to help in managing finances, wellness, and online marketing (blogging), and productivity.
Get Started With Ultimate Bundles Here
Once you’ve established a few affiliate relationships you can browse their product offerings and select products that can help your audience.
If you started your blog and began collecting emails from your audience you can send an email, like doing a poll and ask what are some of their interests, or concerns?
This is a chance to discover what your audience is most concerned about.
How to identify your audience
If you don’t have an email list and not many followers on social media then you can go to google and start typing in keywords that are related to your niche.
Again if you blog about productivity go to Google, and search how can I be more productive? When doing that search Google will return the most asked questions around that keyword.
Showing you people also searched for How to be more productive at home? How to be more productive at work? How to be more productive at school?
Using this method you are able to come up with keywords to use for your blog post and write out a full articles or reviews for your affiliate products.
This method requires excellent keyword research strategies to optimize your post for search.
2. You don’t have to spend money on product inventory.
Having a traditional brick and mortar business I invested money for inventory and that was a huge but necessary expense. Often times I would end up selling off the inventory at a lower price.
With affiliate marketing you as an affiliate have 1 role. That is to promote the affiliate product using your unique affiliate links. The company will be responsible for inventory, shipping, and all product details.
You’re simply sharing a referral link that allows someone to purchase the product directly from the company.
3. You don’t have to spend time creating your own product.
Nowadays , we tend to be extremely short on time. Creating your very own digital product is a process that takes time.
You can align yourself with an affiliate product especially if it’s a product you love and use and start right there.
When you offer a product you love or have personal experiences with, it becomes easier to sale to your audience.
4. You don’t have to worry about warehousing, shipping, or customer service.
As you become more experienced with affiliate marketing, blogging, and online marketing you may want to create your own affiliate products.
They can be online courses that give ideas and business tools to your audience. Or even a step by step guide to for a DIY home product.
Until you actually decide to create your own product, let the experts deal with warehousing, inventory, and even product development.
You can focus on selling a product without any of those issues.
I didn’t see the bigness of affiliate marketing for new bloggers in the beginning because I thought that I needed MY OWN PRODUCT in order to be super successful.
Having your own product is great but understand that this belief is false.
You will want to create your own products, but you don’t need your own products to get started in affiliate marketing. Joining an affiliate network, you can start making money right away.
5. Affiliate Pay Out
I’ll call this the bonus reason. If you compare Affiliate Marketing with running ads on a new website with little traffic, you will see that there really is no comparison when it comes to the money you make.
While building your traffic volume, the ad networks would be paying you cents per click.
Using an affiliate product to offer on your blog, it could pay 30%- 40%- even up to 50%.
For example: if you promote an online course that cost $200 your commission on that sale could be up to $100.
6. Free Traffic
A kool benefit for affiliate marketers is the potential for more brand awareness.
You may promote a product and do a great job getting people to your website to view the product.
There still exits the possibility that the visitor may not purchase that product, however that visitor may see something on your website that catches their eye and decide to read some of your posts, or even sign up for your email list.
Because of affiliate marketing you have just received completely free traffic that can possibly convert.
7. SEO
You can have inbound links from the affiliate networks or products you promote.
These types of links can be great because they give your website more “link juice”. Also the affiliates may send traffic to your site which can be good for Google
8. Work Anywhere With An Internet Connection
One of my favorite benefits of affiliate marketing (besides the pay) would be the ability to work from anywhere.
You can use your laptop, tablet, or a desktop and an internet connection and work as a digital nomad.
Getting out of the office was my goal many years ago. Working online affords the opportunity to move away from traditional work life.
9. Become Your Own Boss.
This will be the most important reason for many people. The ability to build your business, work when you want to work, and have total control of your destiny is a dream/goal that can happen for you.
It won’t be easy! It will take time, perseverance, hard work, and of course a solid plan, but you can do this!
Affiliate Marketing for new bloggers VS Ad- Networks
For a brand new blog with not much traffic it will take some time before you accumulate enough impressions and clicks to be paid $100 by an ad company.
Using ad networks to monetize your new blog is not bad. I am certainly not suggesting that you don’t apply for ad networks.
I’m simply saying that the ability to make money with affiliate products can be more profitable then ad networks particularly for a new blog with low traffic.
There are premium ad networks that pay more money per click, however they require your blog to have an established amount of traffic.
Those requirements can be 20,000 pageviews or sessions all the way up to 100,000. As you reach those traffic levels to your blog definitely apply to those premium networks.
You don’t want to miss out on a potential income stream.
So wrapping this section up. You started your blog and may want to turn it to an online business and make money.
If that is the case then you should look at all ways to monetize your new blog.
If it’s running ads, affiliate marketing, email marketing, or sponsored post, go for it!
Just find a method that works!
When it comes to monetizing you want to use products that give value and help your readers solve their problems.
PRO TIP
I have been through several courses and purchased ebooks on affiliate marketing for new bloggers. One of my favorites is:
GET PAID TO PIN– the author Dale of bloggingherway.com gives a great presentation and shares marketing tips for different affiliate programs.
I was able to use her strategies for Pinterest affiliate marketing to quickly start driving traffic to my affiliate offers.
Others have had success too:
- One blogger has steadily made at least $500 monthly after reading Dale’s book!
- One blogger shares how she made her first affiliate sale within 24 hours of using simple techniques. (and they were a brand new blogger too!)
GET PAID TO PIN is a great investment and will help you master affiliate marketing using the social media platform Pinterest.
It comes with some killer bonuses like Dale’s personal Tailwind pinning strategy, a list of over 40 affiliate programs to join, and a list of over 400 Pinterest group boards to join.
Grab your copy of the book here. It is super affordable and you get a tone of value for the price.
It teaches you what you need to know to be successful in affiliate marketing using Pinterest and was a worthwhile investment for me.
There are a ton of ways to make money with your blog. I simply believe that affiliate marketing for new bloggers is a good way to get started.
Now it’s your turn
I’m curious, what affiliate programs are you having success with? Do you prefer affiliate marketing over ad placements? Leave comments below to join the conversation.
If your new to blogging or looking to start your blog enroll in our FREE go at your own pace course to setup your blog.
