Creating a Blog for Affiliate Marketing
A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Blog for Affiliate Marketing
Creating a blog which one can use for affiliate marketing is a simple way to make money right at home. No specific experience is needed, but there are several rules one should follow to improve the chances of success.
Affiliate Marketing to Make Your Writing More Profitable
Sharing your experiences and thoughts is now easier than ever. You might think that a blog is just a way to tell people about your interests and maybe find new friends that have the same desire for writing as you. However, nowadays blogs are more than just a writing hobby. They have slowly but surely become a way to make money from home without being an expert in the business. You can promote products and services and monetize your writing with a little effort and a lot of passion.
As you may know, affiliate marketing is a way to benefit from promoting brands through your posts, placing links in your texts, and monetizing visitors or customers who are led to the brand you are promoting through your blog.
Does it sound challenging? We can assure you that this is much easier than you think. We’ve prepared an easy guide on how to create your blog and start earning money using just your writing skills and a little bit of marketing knowledge.
Step 1. Defining your target audience and the blog niche
Starting from the very beginning implies thinking through your blogging development direction. The first step is to pick a niche and the people you will address your writing to.
Pick a niche. Think of the things you really like or you know a lot about. It can be anything in the world. The main point of blogging is passion and desire to work on something that brings you joy because these two things are the motivating forces that help you improve. The more effort you put, the more money you can earn.Second, narrow your theme to a topic that will be interesting for you but will also have a lot of opportunities for affiliate programs to sign onto. This is the step where you need to conduct research and find how many competitors there are in the field that you have chosen and what affiliate campaigns are available. Pick a niche in which you have a good amount of perspective and not much competition in terms of other blogs at the same time.Quick tip: You can also give yourself an opportunity to expand your niche by picking several related topics. For example, makeup and hair products, travelling and hiking, vlogging and content creation, etc.
Identify your target audience. After you’ve chosen your niche, it’s time to clarify who your target audience is. This is not an easy thing to do, but a little research will give you an idea about who your readers will be and what information will be useful and valuable for them.The easiest way to do this is to follow the brands you want to get as your affiliate clients on social media and see who their customers or clients are. You can do the same thing with your competitors.Choose an affiliate program. A quick search will give you an opportunity to identify what affiliate programs you can sign for. Contact brands that might be interested in your service through their cooperation managers.
Step 2. Choosing a blogging platform and the domain name
When it comes to starting your blog, it’s important to pick a suitable blogging platform. There are several platforms you can choose from; the most popular are:
WordPress
Joomla
Wix
WordPress is the biggest blogging platform and offers a lot of opportunities and quick setup. It is designed specifically for blogging purposes and has a lot of different features that come in handy while creating your blog from scratch. Some advantages of WordPress are:
Customizable design
Built-in tools to control your blog
SEO-friendly permalinks and mobile-optimized themes
Multiple widgets are available
Joomla is used for creating websites but also includes an extension for blogging purposes. It’s easy to use and has excellent flexibility alongside with convenience and usability. Wix in its turn has drag and drop templates, user-friendly interface, and free hosting.
Make a choice according to your needs and convenience.
A domain name is something you need to carefully think through as it will be the first thing your readers will see. Make it memorable, short, and related to your topic. Use a name that is well-understood when someone pronounces it – this way it is more convenient for people to remember your site when hearing about it in conversation. It will also be useful for a voice search, which has been progressively becoming popular. Pick a few names and discuss it with your friends and family before deciding which one is the best.
After picking your domain name, you should register it. You will see which domains are available and which are already taken.
Step 3. Designing and structuring
The design of your blog has a much more significant influence on your reader than you probably think. It not only presents your theme but also helps you to stand out from the crowd. If it is done correctly, your blog design makes people stay on your site longer and has a pleasing influence on your audience’s attitude towards your content.
Quick tip: Don’t use very vibrant colours, complex fonts, or a coarse background. Pick the colour combinations that will not distract from your content. Choose fonts that are easy to read.
Structuring your blog is also essential to make it organized. Decide what categories you need or what widgets you want to add. Add images or video-clips you think will be useful for your audience.
Step 4. Search Engine Optimization
SEO is one of the most essential things you should learn in order to run a successful affiliate blog. It helps to get more traffic and boost your earnings from affiliate programs.
There are a few tools you can and should use for your optimization, such as:
SEMrush – This software will help you to get insights into your competitors’ strategies in display advertising, organic and paid search, and link building. Also, it provides data on website traffic, backlinks, keywords positions. There are several helpful in-built tools; for example, SEO Content Template gives you ideas to write well-crafted content, optimized for search engines.
Moz – A tool that is created to check your ranking score – links authority and the importance of your site in relations to others. Moz rank for each website depends on the number of backlinks, their value, and the domain authority. Moz scores each website from 0 to 10. The higher the value of backlinks is, the higher the score a site gets. An average score for a website is 3.
Ahrefs – A tool that helps you monitor and analyze your backlinks and their types. It has its own crawler and provides a complete report on all of your backlinks and referring domains. You can check out your competitors’ backlinks too. That way, you’ll get an idea of what websites you can get backlinks from.
Google Trends – A tool that is used to check the level of interest for a prospective keyword and find which keywords are getting more popular. It works the best with Google Keyword Planner. Though they are much alike, there is an essential difference – GT shows the relative popularity, which is the number of particular queries divided by the total number of searches of the same geography and time range.
Google Keyword Planner – A software which is designed to build keyword lists for pay-per-click campaigns. It helps to build ad groups and find new keywords that you can add to your ad campaigns.
Try all of these tools out and decide which ones are the most convenient for you to use.
Step 5. Blog content
Good content is key. Every marketer knows that. In order to earn more from affiliate programs, you need to provide valuable and interesting information. The more users read your posts, the more they will follow affiliate links.
Be honest with your audience. Including affiliate links so that they look good in your text, is real mastery. Be truthful when you speak about products and services, and you will get your audience’s trust. Honest reviews are the key to making your content more credible.
That’s why it’s essential to know a lot about the products you promote. If you have the opportunity, try them yourself.
Be careful while using links and keywords. Don’t clutter your text with keywords as they make it clumsy and rough. You want to make your content unique and easy to understand, that’s why writing skills are very important.
Get help if needed. Some bloggers post a lot and use the help of freelance writers for editing texts to make great content every day. You can find such help on platforms like EssayTigers, Freelancer, UpWork, etc.
When putting affiliate links, remember to follow these tips:
Make words or phrases clickable. Add anchor text – the visible clickable text in a hyperlink – to affiliate links; they look much better than a link itself.
Don’t put too many links – it’s better to add one or two links for a piece of content.
Make links more noticeable, using bold fonts.
Make your links look more neat or professional using link shorteners like Google Shortener, Bitly, etc.
Use sidebars to make links more noticeable. However, you should be attentive to keep them user-friendly and convenient. Too many sidebars distract from content and annoy users.
Use visuals. Don’t forget to add visuals to your content. They help make your posts easier to digest even for boring texts. Using images or videos polishes up your blog and gives it a more interesting look.
Final Thoughts
We believe that everyone can start making money from affiliate blogs right at home. Creating a blog is interesting and exciting; making it a profitable hobby is even better.
Nowadays there are a lot of tools that will help you to start your affiliate marketing blog and run it yourself without struggling. Even if you have no knowledge of creating websites you can easily make yourself a blog page with customized design and necessary options. Use our guide to start to monetize your writing right now without too much effort.
If you are looking for an affiliate program, check out the Radical Cloud Solutions affiliate program. It allows you to choose and promote the products you want through your blog, website, or social media and get a commission for every referral. You need to invest nothing but your time. Start getting your commissions today!
