How to Become an Affiliate Blogger: Putting the Work Today For Passive Profit Success

Blogging can make you ‘Big’ money….it really can. However, making money blogging requires a change of mindset—you need to start thinking less like a hobbyist and more like an entrepreneur looking to scale their blogging business.

It would be best to focus on affiliate blogging to make money from your passion for writing.

So, what is affiliate blogging, and how can you get started with it? How to become an affiliate blogger?

This guide on becoming an affiliate blogger provides all the answers, including step-by-step instructions for kickstarting your affiliate blogging journey.

Disclosure: Some of the links in this article may be affiliate links, for which I may get compensation at no cost to you if you decide to purchase a paid plan. I’ve personally used or thoroughly researched these products and stand for them. This site is not intended to provide financial advice but for entertainment only. You can read our affiliate disclosure in our Privacy Policy.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

When you promote the goods or services of another individual or business in return for a cut of the sale, it’s known as affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketers sign up for affiliate networks, find trustworthy affiliate products to promote, and then market them to their audiences.

Bloggers doing affiliate marketing first gain the trust of their audience and then share goods or services that would benefit them to make money.

Essentially, affiliate marketing is a simple way to sell goods and services without creating your own to earn an income.

For bloggers, taking on affiliate marketing means choosing a good product or service, telling your readers about it, and getting a portion of the proceeds from each sale that comes from it.

How Does Affiliate Blogging Work?

So, you know what affiliate marketing for bloggers entails, but how does it work to earn you money?

Even for those experienced in online marketing, affiliate marketing can get complicated.

Luckily, you can start blogging for a living without getting into the intricacies of affiliate marketing.

In affiliate blogging, you must advertise a good or service in original content and include a unique link that navigates to a specific product and identifies you as the traffic source.

You receive a commission when a reader clicks on your link and buys the product.

Affiliate marketing was created to help companies advertise their products without spending a fortune on them.

Affiliate blogging, on the other hand, is a three-way relationship between the seller of the good or service, you—the affiliate blogger, and the reader who ends up making a purchase using the unique link in your blog post.

What Are Some Reasons To Do Affiliate Marketing As a Blogger?

The biggest reason to do affiliate marketing as a blogger is to earn a steady passive income.

Any income earned and maintained with little effort is considered passive income. You are already writing blogs as a hobby.

Affiliate marketing allows you to earn a passive income by tapping into this passion and skill for writing to sell something you like and know well.

With affiliate marketing, you can create a single blog post endorsing a product and have it continually generate revenue for you.

Another reason to do affiliate marketing is that you do not need a massive audience for your blog to generate income from it; you only need the right audience.

You don’t need to build up a sizable traffic base, unlike other forms of monetization like ads, to start earning a decent income.

You must ensure that your blog brings in people interested in reading your products’ recommendations and the most likely to buy them.

With affiliate blogging, how it works, and the reasons to do it explained, it is time to get down to business, i.e., the steps you need to follow to become an affiliate blogger.

How to Become An Affiliate Blogger: Step-By-Step Instructions

You can generate passive income through blogging and affiliate marketing. So, how do you get started with it? Here are the steps you need to follow to become an affiliate blogger—and a successful one.

1. Choose a Specific Niche for Blogging Based on Market Factors

Here’s something for you to think about:

• Your passion will not make you money
• Your expertise in a particular area does not guarantee profits in blogging
• Hard work won’t necessarily get you where you want to be in blogging

I’m not looking to demotivate you or make you quit blogging even before you begin; I’m only trying to prepare you for what may lie ahead.

I want to ensure that you’re not making the same mistakes in blogging as many others before you have made. Let me explain this with an example.

Suppose you are a subject-matter expert on Ratte potatoes. Each day, you start blogging on this rare potato type thinking that people would be very interested in the topic. You begin in the morning and keep typing in your thoughts till sunset.

You go to bed thinking there will be hundreds of comments on your blog and an equal number of its shares on social media.

You wake up the next day, quickly grab your laptop and turn it on in anticipation of something great. You navigate your blog and find there are no comments and just one share of your blog—that too by your sibling, who already knows about it.

So, why doesn’t your blog have any shares or comments? It is because no one gives two hoots about Ratte potatoes. Even if you get a few visitors to your blog, you’d need to convince them to buy these potatoes if you want to make money.

Anyone can be interested in learning about a new kind of potato but getting them to buy it will take some doing. 99.99% of the time, you will fail to convince your blog visitors to buy Ratte potatoes. It may seem harsh, but it is the truth.

To put it another way, you can only make money from blogging if there is a large audience for what you’re selling through your blogs.

So, before you start blogging, you must put your passion aside.

Instead, find a niche for your blog with high demand in the market and a sizeable audience interested in learning about the products you promote and buying them.

2. Choose a Platform for Blogging

There are several blogging platforms available today to kickstart your affiliate blogging journey. However, I recommend WordPress because it’s free and gives you complete control over your content.

WordPress makes it easy to set up a blog. It is specifically made for blogging and includes a ton of useful features for when you’re starting from scratch with your blog. WordPress’s benefits are:

• An adaptable design.
• Internal controls for your blog.
• Mobile-friendly themes with SEO-friendly permalinks.
• Numerous widgets.

When thinking of WordPress for freedom of design, you should be looking at WordPress.org, which is the self-hosted version. It gives you the most possibilities for customization. You need to find the right hosting provider to install WordPress.

Another option is Joomla. It is a platform for building websites and has a blogging plugin. It is pretty flexible and straightforward, along with simplicity and usability. The last option is Wix, which offers drag-and-drop layouts, an intuitive UI, and free hosting.

Although WordPress is recommended, as it powers 43% of all the websites in the world, you should choose a platform that best meets your unique blogging and affiliate marketing needs.

3. Choose a Domain Name and Web Hosting Service

You must choose a domain name and get web hosting to start affiliate blogging.

Web hosting is where your blog’s files and content are kept online, while a domain name is its internet address (URL), i.e., https://pabloraschetti.com.

It would be best to think long and hard about your domain name because it will be the first thing your viewers will see.

Make it brief, memorable, and topic-related. Use a name that people can easily understand when pronouncing it; this will make it easier for visitors to remember your website when they overhear it in a discussion.

It will also be helpful for voice searches, which are growing in popularity. Before determining which name is the best, choose a few options and discuss them with your family and friends.

You need to register your domain name after choosing it. You must check the available domains and those already registered before attempting this.

The next step is to find a web hosting server where your target audience will be directed when they type in your URL (or chosen domain name) in their browser. For web hosting, I would recommend Bluehost as it is the choice of many successful bloggers.

Not only that, WordPress.org officially recommends it as a hosting service, which only reinforces its utility for bloggers.

4. Choose the Right Products to Promote

Everyone has guidelines and ideals when choosing affiliate goods to sell on their blog. However, here are some recommended ideas for choosing the right products to pitch in your blog posts:

• Promote the goods and services you enjoy using.
• Join an affiliate network and look for high-quality items that fit your specialty.
• Suggest products with a money-back guarantee to ensure your readers can return the product and get refunded if they accidentally purchase a product they don’t want. It keeps their trust in you.

5. Focus on SEO to Target the Right Audience with the Right Keywords

SEO is a vital skill you must master to run a profitable affiliate blog. Increasing traffic helps in increasing affiliate program earnings.

You must make sure you’re attracting the right audience—one that genuinely wants to try out the product or service you recommend—if you want to create affiliate sales. The best way to do this is search engine optimization (SEO).

You must rank your blog for investigational keywords to succeed as an affiliate marketer. When prospective customers aren’t ready to purchase, they search Google for investigational keywords.

Before committing to a purchase, they want to look for reviews of the product and see how it compares to its competitors.

To get your target audience on your website and reading your blog, you need to target search phrases related to your chosen product that have keywords such as “review,” “compare,” “best,” or “alternative” in them.

If your website appears in search results for these keyphrases, you are likely attracting the right kind of visitors to your blog. You can and should utilize a few tools for optimization, including:

• SERanking
• SEMrush
• Ahrefs
• Google Ads Keyword Planner

SEMrush can assist you in learning about the organic and paid search, display ads, and link-building techniques of your competitors. Additionally, data on backlinks, website visitors, and keyword positions are provided by this tool.

You can track and analyze the various backlinks you have with Ahrefs. It is equipped with a crawler of its own and offers a detailed report on all your backlinks and the websites with them.

You can also look at the backlinks of your competitors. You will then better understand the websites from which you can get backlinks.

Finally, the purpose of Google Keyword Planner is to create keyword lists for pay-per-click advertising campaigns.

Creating ad groups and finding new keywords to use in your ad campaigns are some things you can accomplish.

6. Write Useful Content for Your Readers/Target Audience

All your efforts in setting up your affiliate marketing blog and optimizing it for Google search results will come to nothing if your content doesn’t appeal to your target audience.

They won’t continue reading your blog, let alone buy products you promote if they feel your content is not helpful or isn’t adding any real value to their lives.

So, how can you produce valuable content for your audience? Most blogging ‘101s’ will tell you to be entertaining, original, and helpful in your approach to get results, but does that work?

Not necessarily, and the following are some reasons why:

• What you think is helpful to your target audience may not interest them.
• The content framework you’re using is not reliable or proven to work.
• The blog you wrote is good, but hundreds of others are better.

Simply writing stuff you believe is exciting and publishing it will get you nowhere. Yes, words have power but solely relying on them is not enough to make money from blogging.

It would help if you thought out-of-the-box to write content that your target audience will find interesting and have never read.

Coming up with original content and one that can garner a massive audience will take some doing.

Knowing the three levels of content creation would make the task a bit easier for you. The three levels of content creation include the following:

• Knowing about your niche’s trending/popular topics and writing exclusively about them.
• Mastering the proven content frameworks for increasing the popularity of your blog (how to post, list posts, etc.)
• Publishing content provides more value to the target audience than any other post on that topic.

Critical Considerations for Successfully Running an Affiliate Blog

There are numerous ways to advertise affiliate goods. However, blogging is one of the best and easiest ways to get started on the road to passive income generation.

But to do that, you must follow the step-by-step instructions detailed above and consider the following recommendations for blogging for affiliate sales.

Build Authority in Your Niche

You need to prove to your target audience that you are an authority and subject-matter expert on whatever you’re blogging about that interests them.

So, how can you build influence and authority? Leverage everything at your disposal—your professional experience, connections, etc.—to get your name out there.

You can also make new connections through outreach. It involves making the right connections in your niche so that you can contribute guest posts to authoritative sites.

Guest posting on trusted websites can help you generate high-quality backlinks to boost search engine optimization (SEO).

Improving your SEO and high-quality backlinks will give your blog a higher ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

You need to provide Google with something concrete to treat your blog as an authority in your niche. I say this because search engines process 3.5 billion search queries each day.

If you’re not providing Google with something that sets your blog apart from others, it will simply skip it, resulting in a poor search engine ranking.

Getting backlinks from authoritative sites in your niche will put you on a higher pedestal in front of Google than other sites trying to rank for the exact keywords.

You should consider taking some Blogging Courses to know more about the right strategies. Here is my review of the best blogging course.

Build a Community of Loyalists

Blogging is like any other business. The more value you offer to your customers (readers in your case), the more chance you have of making money and profits.

It would help if you built a community of loyalists and then profited from it.

It may sound greedy, but you cannot hope to make good money—or any money—without building an engaged online community for your blog.

When starting with blogging, make sure to build real, tangible connections instead of focusing your efforts on driving more and more traffic to your blog/website.

In the end, building connections and leveraging them to expand your community of loyalists will get you those sales that have helped many bloggers make hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Your blog will benefit tremendously from an engaged online community, whether it is a Twitter community, followers on your Facebook group, the comments section of your blog, an email list, or others.

The online community will help you make money while benefiting from your blogs. In this end, it is a win-win for you and your audience.

Wrapping Up

I believe anyone can start earning money with affiliate blogs from the comfort of their own home.

I hope you have found how to become an affiliate blogger with my post and references.

Starting a blog is fun and thrilling, but turning it into a lucrative hobby is much better.

Several tools available today will enable you to launch and maintain your affiliate blog quickly.

Even if you have no experience building websites, you can quickly create a blog with the required features and a personalized layout using the tools at your disposal.

Use this guide to start generating income from your blog today. I wish you the best of luck!