5 Best Affiliate Marketing Blogs and Step-by-Step How To Start

D o you want to start an affiliate marketing blog and make money online?

You’ve come to the right place. This site you’re on right now is an affiliate marketing blog, and I’ve created this guide to help give you everything you need to know to create your own.

I’ll highlight some other affiliate blogs you can refer to for inspiration.

And give you a step-by-step guide to how you can get started! I’ll even include some expert tips I’ve learned over the years to help you make even more money from affiliate marketing on your site.

Hope it helps!

How Does an Affiliate Marketing Work?

Affiliate marketing is a blog monetization method where companies incentivize bloggers and publishers to promote their products in exchange for a commission on every sale they refer.

When you’re an affiliate partner, you choose a product you like, promote it online with a referral link, and earn commissions when someone purchases it through your referrals.

The easiest way to find a product you want to promote is by joining an affiliate program like ShareASale, Amazon Associates, or Commission Junction and browsing through their site.

After selecting a product, you can get an affiliate/referral link and promote the product through that link on your blog.

Best Affiliate Marketing Blogs To Follow

To help contextualize affiliate marketing blogs – here are some of the best examples to follow for inspiration (other than Blog Tyrant, of course)!

WPBeginner

WPBeginner is more than just a go-to resource for free guides to WordPress. It’s also one of the best affiliate marketing blogs on the planet.

This is because when they’re helping readers tackle questions and concerns about using WordPress, they can promote helpful related products and services for a commission.

Smart Passive Income

Smart Passive Income (SPI) was one of the first blogs sharing tips to make money online and remains a standout example of an affiliate marketing blog.

It shares tons of resources for entrepreneurs, including courses, events, and expert advice to create a win-win relationship where readers learn more about affiliate marketing and other ways to make money online, and the site earns.

AuthorityHacker

The AuthorityHacker blog is a great example because it’s a company that’s been in the affiliate marketing industry for a long time and specializes in affiliate blogging. It teaches readers digital marketing, how to start blogs in various niches, and reviews products and affiliate programs their target audience may be interested in.

They really focus on sharing helpful tips for affiliate marketers who hope to grow their organic traffic on Google and affiliate earnings.

SmartBlogger

SmartBlogger is a great example of an affiliate blog, well-known for in-depth guides and actionable strategies on writing, blogging, and content marketing.

It helps readers transform their writing into a business thanks to persuasive, actionable content and tips for how to monetize a blog effectively.

Ryan Robinson

RyRob.com by Ryan Robinson is a blog that teaches readers how to build profitable blogs and side businesses.

To help ground the content in reality and build a connection with readers, he shares insights from his own success in growing his blog’s revenue. So he’ll share insights on tools he’s used to make money online and make a commission as a result – pretty cool!

And below is a breakdown of how you can get started as a beginner!

How to Start an Affiliate Marketing Blog: Step-by-Step

There’s a huge potential for you to make a big income with affiliate marketing and blogging if you follow the right strategy.

Here are the exact steps that marketing experts follow when they do affiliate marketing.

Step 1: Get Your Blog Off The Ground

Of course, to start affiliate marketing, you’ll need to have a blog or a website. Majority of the companies that run an affiliate program only approve you as an affiliate if you have a blog or a website. That’s because having a blog establishes authority on your niche and it gives some assurance that you’re not a spammer.

While there are a lot of blogging platforms out there, we always recommend WordPress for starting a blog because not only is it free, but it also gives you full control over your content.

To start a blog, aside from choosing a platform like WordPress (and of course, the best WordPress theme for affiliate marketing), you’ll need to own a domain name and web hosting.

A domain name is your blog’s address (URL) on the internet, like BlogTyrant.com or Google.com, and web hosting is where your blog’s content and files are stored online.

When a visitor tries to access your blog by typing in your web address (domain name), they’ll be directed to the blog you’ve set up in your web hosting server.

To start a blog, we always recommend using Bluehost for web hosting.

Bluehost is one of the largest web hosting companies and an officially recommended hosting provider by WordPress.org.

The combined cost of a domain name and hosting can be quite expensive, especially if you’re just starting out.

That’s why we’ve worked out a deal with Bluehost to offer our users a FREE domain name and over 60% off on web hosting.

For a complete step-by-step guide, check out this guide on starting a blog.

Step 2: Choose the Right Affiliate Network and Affiliate Programs

Everyone has different rules and ideals when it comes to promoting affiliate products.

For example, successful affiliate marketing entrepreneur ShoeMoney once said that he doesn’t promote private affiliate products unless he has met the owner in person to judge whether they are a trustworthy character.

Here’re a few ways to choose the right products for promoting on your blog:

• Promote the products and services that you use and love
• Join an affiliate network such as ShareASale and find some reputed products that fall under your niche
• Refer the products that offer a money-back guarantee, so even if your reader makes a mistake of buying the wrong product they don’t want, they can get their money back.

Now that you have a better understanding of the kind of products that you want to promote, the next thing you need to do is to sign up as an affiliate for those products and grab the affiliate link.

Check out our list of the best affiliate marketing programs and networks that you can join today.

Step 3: Attract the Right Audience With the Right Keywords

To generate affiliate sales, you need to ensure you’re attracting the right audience who actually wants to try out the service you recommend.

Now the question is, how can you determine if your blog is driving the right traffic and understand their intention?

If you’re like most bloggers, Google is the #1 traffic source that brings traffic to your blog.

You’re more likely to make affiliate sales from your blog if the search engine traffic you drive has an investigational intent.

Generally speaking, there are 4 types of user intents:

• Navigational intent: Users search for a particular website. They just want to navigate to the website that they’re looking for.
• Informational intent: Users want to find answers to their pertinent questions.
• Investigational intent: Users search for information that may eventually lead to a transaction.
• Transactional intent: Users are ready to buy or download a free product.

As an affiliate marketer, you’ll want to rank your blog for investigational keywords. Your potential audience uses investigational keywords when they’re not yet ready to purchase a product. They want to compare products and search for reviews and recommendations before making a final purchasing decision.

Some of the phrases you’ll often see in investigational keywords are:

• Best
• Review
• Compare
• Alternative

If your site is ranking for keywords with these phrases, you’re likely driving the right audience to your site.

To see the actual searches your users used on search engines to find your site, you can go to the queries report in Google Analytics by navigating to Acquisition » Search Console » Queries.

To know more about keyword research and ranking for the right keywords, refer to OptinMonster’s keyword research guide.

Step 4: Promote Your Affiliate Products Within the Content

One of the best ways to make a long term affiliate income is to write a detailed piece of long-form content (like a tutorial) and make your affiliate an integral part of that content.

I like this affiliate marketing strategy because you benefit from the initial promotion, and then all the long-term traffic from your blog’s Google rankings.

It’s also a nice one because you don’t have to shove the product down people’s throats. You just gently recommend this or that product as being a good choice for that particular part of the process.

Before using affiliate links on your WordPress site, I strongly recommend you install Pretty Links, one of the top WordPress affiliate management plugins.

Pretty Links helps you cloak the affiliate links that you promote on your website.

Affiliate links are typically long, ugly-looking URLs like this:

http://example.com/products/?product_id=123&affiliate_id

Pretty Links helps you cloak such affiliate links and make them shorter and neater:

http://www.yoursite.com/refer/productname

In addition, this plugin lets you manage your affiliate links from a single location on your WordPress dashboard. The benefit is that even if the companies change the affiliate URL in the future, you don’t have to dig deeper into your blog archives to change the affiliate link. You can easily change it by replacing your affiliate URL right from the Pretty Links dashboard.

How to Make Even More Income As An Affiliate Marketer

Now that you know how to get a head start with affiliate marketing, let’s take a look at how to make even more money by recommending products on your blog.

1. Track the Clicks on Your Affiliate Links

While almost every affiliate program out there allows you to track the clicks on your affiliate links, it’s in your best interest to use Google Analytics as well for affiliate tracking. That way you can compare the performance of each affiliate link on your blog even if those products use different affiliate program.

The easiest way to track affiliate link clicks on your blog is by installing the MonsterInsights plugin. MonsterInsights is the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that comes with a lot of built-in features for publishers, such as download tracking, affiliate link tracking, outbound link tracking, and more.

When you track affiliate link clicks on your blog, you can…

• Understand what affiliate products your audience are interested in.
• Determine the top performing affiliate products.
• Figure out the page from where you receive the most clicks.
• Get to know the number of traffic you send to each affiliate product from your Analytics account. This helps you better negotiate with the companies for higher payouts.
• Find out if there are any missed affiliate link opportunities.
• And more…

2. Boost Your Affiliate Revenue With Exit-Intent Popups

Did you know that 70% of your abandoning visitors would never return after leaving your site? With an exit-intent popup, you can show an affiliate offer to your visitors at the last moment when they’re about to leave.

An exit-intent popup detects the mouse movement and prompts the users with a targeted campaign such as an affiliate promotion when they’re about to leave. You can use OptinMonster, the best popup solution ever built, to create an exit-intent popup.

Top 6 Digital used this strategy and increased their revenue by 30%.

Check out our round up of more email popup examples to inspire you.

3. Drive Traffic to Your Article With Facebook Ads

If you have a really high-quality tutorial or piece of content, you can then drive a little bit of traffic to that article with Facebook Ads.

The good thing about this is that if it’s a high-ticket affiliate product with high payout price (say above $50), you can still make quite a lot of money even if you’re spending a bit on the ads. As long as your page is converting and there is enough traffic in the niche, you can do quite well.

If you decide to go this route, do a lot of tracking and testing so you know exactly what is converting and why. Try not to guess too much, as you often can’t be sure what’s bringing the sales.

4. Incorporate the Affiliate Product Into Your Email Marketing List

One of the most powerful ways to add extra affiliate income to your blog is by promoting an affiliate product to your mailing list once people sign up.

The reason this is so powerful is that…

It’s automatic and ongoing: Services like Constant Contact allow you to create follow-up email marketing campaigns that go out to every subscriber once they sign up to your list. You can create one or 100 emails simultaneously and never need to touch them again.

It’s perfectly branded: If your blog and mailing list are tight and on-brand, you’ll find that an affiliate promotion during some valuable mailing list content is a perfect fit. It goes in there very naturally as you go about helping your subscribers.

It’s important not to just say things like “Go out and buy X product now” because it is way too pushy. Rather, you still want to provide huge value and mention affiliate products only if and when they could help a subscriber.

5. Highlight Your In-post Messages With Graphics

Highlighting your affiliate mentions in your article is a good strategy to ensure people see the message.

This can be done in so many different ways, and you’ll need to measure the effectiveness of your own particular blog and individual blog post.

One way is to use a plugin like Shortcodes Ultimate, which allows you to add buttons, quotes, highlighted text, etc., with just a few clicks.

Here’s a screenshot showing you all the different things you can add with this plugin.

6. Build Backlinks to Your Articles

Building backlinks to your affiliate article is a great way to drive more traffic to your site.

For example, if you land a guest post on a high-authority blog, you’ll want to write an article that naturally allows you to mention your original post. Blog owners will allow this if it isn’t a direct “buy this product” type of article – especially if it’s a high-value piece.

We have one of the largest how to start a blog guide on the web that I’m not ashamed to link to when I do blogging guest spots.

Remember, the more work and value you provide in your guest posts, the more shares and links they’ll get.

This also applies to forum posts, comments, and other places where you think you might get a lasting (but useful) slice of traffic.

7. Become an Expert at Using the Product You Want to Promote

Some of the most successful affiliates become so successful because they get really good at using the product or service directly or as an incidental part of their affiliate marketing business.

For example, famous blogger Darren Rowse has a lot of photographers who take excellent photos with Canon and Nikon SLR cameras and then mention those cameras in their posts and/or tutorials on his sites.

Although he might not directly sell or pitch those cameras, he would be making an absolute fortune from people who get inspired to purchase after seeing what gets produced.

The same is true for people who get inspired to start a podcast because they have seen Pat’s and want to use the same setup he does.

If you want to ramp up your affiliate product sales, consider producing more content that displays your skills using the actual product or service. Give people an idea of how powerful it is and how good you specifically are at using it to get results.

Is Starting an Affiliate Blog Worth It?

If you’re still on the fence about getting started with affiliate marketing, here are a few of its advantages over other ways of making money with your blog.

Advantage #1: Monetize Your Blog From Day 1

To start monetizing your new blog, you don’t have to wait for a few months until you grow a massive following. Even if you monetize your blog from day 1, it doesn’t look amateurish because affiliate links are seamlessly and naturally integrated with your content marketing efforts.

Advantage #2: Earn Money Even Without a Massive Following

Unlike other modes of monetization like advertising, you don’t have to grow a massive traffic base in order to start making a solid income. All you have to do is to ensure your affiliate site is attracting the RIGHT traffic that actually wants to read your product recommendations.

For tips about driving the right traffic to your blog, check out our guide on SEO for bloggers.

Advantage #3: Generate Passive Income

With affiliate marketing, you can write a single blog post recommending an affiliate product and have that post generate money for you again and again.

That’s called passive income. Passive income is any income that requires no effort to earn and maintain. You already write blog posts anyway and likely recommend products that you like, so why not make passive income from doing so?

Advantage #4: Make MORE Money

You’re ability to make money with affiliate marketing is based on the number of successful referrals you can generate. For example, if you could successfully refer a premium product, like WPForms, you can earn up to $59.90 per referral.

Let’s say your affiliate conversion rate is 2%. That means for every 100 referrals you sent to the affiliate website, 2 people are actually purchasing the product. That also means regardless of the size and reputation of your website, you can make $100 from those 2 referrals provided that the affiliate commission is $50 per sale.

Now let’s take a look at how much you can earn with advertising.

The average CPC (cost per click) of AdSense, the largest advertising network in the world, ranges from $0.15. The average CPC that you can earn from AdSense depends on a lot of different factors, including the size and reputation of your website.

For example, if your average CPC is $0.25, then you can earn $25 for 100 ad clicks; whereas, with affiliate marketing from our above example, you can potentially earn $100. Without a doubt, affiliate marketing is a better way to make MORE money.

Key Takeaways From The Best Affiliate Marketing Blogs

• Affiliate marketing is a blog monetization method where bloggers earn commissions by promoting products.
• Join affiliate partner programs like ShareASale or Amazon Associates to promote products for commissions.
• Learn from examples from top affiliate marketing blogs like WPBeginner, Smart Passive Income, and AuthorityHacker.
• Start affiliate marketing with a blog by getting a domain, hosting, and choosing the right affiliate programs.
• Attract the right audience with investigational keywords that are crucial for affiliate marketing success.
• Cloak your affiliate links with plugins like Pretty Links to help manage and track affiliate links effectively.
• Increase your affiliate income by tracking clicks and adding exit-intent popups and Facebook ads.
• Incorporate affiliate products into your email marketing campaigns and highlight them in posts to boost affiliate sales.
• Build backlinks to your affiliate articles and become at least a perceived expert user of your promoted products to enhance your affiliate marketing efforts.
• Affiliate marketing gives you many advantages, like passive monetization and potentially higher earnings than advertising.

Start Affiliate Marketing Today!

That’s it!

I hope this guide helps you get a head start on affiliate marketing. If you liked this article, you might also want to check out some of the best plugins for affiliate marketers.