A good recommendation does wonders to a business or even services. You want to eat Chinese food, you ask for recommendations. Want some places to relax? You look for suggestions. It’s fascinating how word-of-mouth marketing can have a relevant impact on different industries, even blogging.
Nowadays, people call it affiliate marketing. Over the years, affiliate marketing contributed to the success of businesses and services. Brand and service promotion has never been this passive. If you’re a blogger and you’re looking for ways to increase your revenue through affiliate marketing, this article is for you!
What is Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers?
Affiliate Marketing works similarly for businesses and for you. However, you are the one promoting the brand or service and earning a commission. Every time a visitor to your blog clicks on an affiliate link or purchases a product through your link, you earn a commission. About 16% of online purchases are made through affiliate marketing, which means your blog can generate a large amount of revenue if you participate in the affiliate program.
The year 2022’s statistics showed affiliate marketing spending reaching up to $8.2B in the United States. This projection will even grow in the coming years. This strategy of generating passive income works for you, especially if you have a hard time monetizing your blogs through different means.
How Do Bloggers Earn From Affiliate Marketing?
This is the most exciting part you probably have been waiting for—the part where bloggers earn passive income from affiliate marketing. Companies offering products or services use affiliate programs to increase brand awareness. About 83% of brands use affiliate marketing to raise their digital presence. Bloggers earn from the affiliate program through:
Pay-per-lead
Generating leads for merchants gives your blog revenue. Each time you generate a lead, or a prospective buyer for a merchant, you get paid. Usually, the pay-per-lead program works when a visitor of your blog clicks your link and gets redirected to the merchant’s site. If the visitor signs up on a form or provides information such as contact number or email address, that visitor becomes a lead for the company and revenue for you.
Pay-per-click
Merchants rarely offer this because not all clicks convert to sales. However, if a merchant offers this type of program, this is probably one of the best programs where you can get the most revenues.
Pay-per-sale
Commission-based marketing lets you earn when your blog visitor purchases a product through your affiliate link. The more sales you drive to the merchant, the higher your commission.
10 Ways Affiliate Marketing Will Transform Your Blog
Even if you stay all day doing nothing, you can still earn a lot of money. In fact, influencers earn more money from the affiliate program than getting a 9-5 job (not that there’s anything wrong with it). Here are 10 ways affiliate marketing will transform your blog!
1. Optimise Conversion Rates
An affiliate program lets you optimise your blog’s conversion rates. You can’t be a part of the affiliate program if your blogs are not optimised or do not have high conversion rates. Why? Simply because affiliate marketing works in a way where you need a high number of clicks, leads, or sales to earn revenue. Without a high volume of site visitors, you have no way of reaching these criteria. Fortunately, you just need to optimise the conversion rate you already have by checking your CTAs, UX, colour schemes, etc.
2. Retain Visitors
Affiliate Marketing actually lets you build a lasting community of visitors. With the right product or services to promote, the affiliate program helps you build a solid relationship with your readers. If they know that the products you promote are high-quality and do not disappoint, they will seek your advice and recommendations again and again. It’s a relationship built on trust that you only offer your readers excellent quality products.
3. Discover Long Line of New Products
Being a blogger/affiliate marketer lets you discover new products that you can take an interest in. Sometimes, people discover new products that surprisingly become their holy grail. This isn’t impossible for you, too!
4. Be in the Loop for What’s New
There are so many new products on the market, and being an affiliate marketer lets you stay updated on what’s new and trending. Taking advantage of this could actually help you raise your revenue more. Say you discover a hot selling product that only a few influencers are promoting as of the moment. You can drive more sales to the merchant, which means you can earn more money. Early bird gets the worm, they say!
5. Build Relationship With Merchants
Many perks come with affiliate marketing, and one of these is building a strong relationship with merchants. Suppliers want influencers to promote their brand or products, however, not just any influencer. They need someone they can trust, someone who can drive sales to them. You can be that someone. Building a good foundation based on trust between merchants and yourself enables you to drive your blog sales funnel higher. You can even get free products from them if you’re lucky or great at what you’re doing.
6. Strengthen Your Credibility
You’re not just writing to generate revenue. Through affiliate marketing, you are also building your name and credibility as an influencer. The products you promote determine what kind of influencer you are. You shouldn’t just grab products that generate sales, but each product should also represent you as a person, a blogger, and an affiliate marketer. Just because it sells like hot popcorn doesn’t mean you should promote it. You know exactly what kind of products to promote and which ones to avoid.
7. Increase Brand Awareness
Increasing brand awareness gets easier when you’re an affiliate marketer. You can reach a bigger audience with the products you are promoting. The products you promote give your website additional traffic and increase your brand awareness. According to Nine Peaks Media you can be more digitally present by using B2B SEO best practices and increase your market share significantly.
8. Promote Products People Already Know
It’s a lot easier to promote products that people already know about than to create products yourself. Aside from not knowing if they’ll convert to sales, it takes a lot of time, too. Affiliate Marketing opens your door to products that people are already aware of. Some products sell a lot, which means you can leverage this. It’s just a matter of knowing the right products to promote, and you can then start from there.
9. Open Door to Guest Blogging
Being an affiliate marketer opens your door to guest blogging. The trust you build with your readers allows you to expand your horizons and entertain guest bloggers or even write blogs on another blogger’s site. Your revenue doesn’t have to come only from you. In fact, you can generate money from other bloggers, too. Collaboration with another blogger saves your brain the strain of writing 1000-word posts because your guest blogger can do that for you.
10. Monetize Email Subscribers
You can monetize your email subscribers by being an affiliate marketer. Your readers trust you with the products you promote that even some of them would expect a regular email update containing new products or services you’re using or some product reviews. Email marketing actually generates high ROI while staying engaged with your readers. Two birds with one stone!
Conclusion
Being an affiliate marketer brings so many advantages. Influencers can even earn more when they participate in affiliate programs. You just need to know how to play the game properly. When you do, you’ll be surprised at how much you can gain (monetary and other) from being an affiliate marketer.
Your point about monetizing your blog through affiliate marketing really struck a chord with me. It’s no secret that running a blog takes time and effort, so being able to generate some income from it is a game-changer. Affiliate marketing provides a fantastic opportunity to earn passive income by promoting products or services that align with your blog’s niche. Plus, as you mentioned, the potential for high commission rates can make it even more lucrative.
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I truly agree on the fourth Way – Be in the Loop for What’s New. Through this, there’s a greater chance to be aware of the new trends and you get to improve your income. Thank you for sharing this!