The Go-Getter’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers:
Most of the beginners focus on Google Adsense to monetize their blog. Further, there are many bloggers who put a lot of attention into creating their own product. And while doing so, they leave their blog un-monetized for a long duration of time until their product is ready.
What if I say that there is a better and easier way to earn money online on your blog?
Yes, there is! And it is called affiliate marketing.
Don’t worry if you are new to this topic. I’m going to cover everything about affiliate marketing for bloggers step-by-step in this blog post.
Here is what we are going to cover today:
1. What is affiliate marketing?
2. Why is affiliate marketing for bloggers a good way of monetization?
3. Five Things to know about affiliate marketing for bloggers.
4. How affiliate marketing actually works?
5. Best programs for Affiliate marketing for Bloggers in India.
6. Cons of using Affiliate marketing.
This is going to be a long post. So without wasting any time, let’s get started with the affiliate marketing for bloggers.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is an arrangement by which an online retailer pays commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals.
In simple words, affiliate marketing for bloggers is a way to sell products without owning or creating one. Here, you are just diverting your blog traffic to some specific products, which are owned/created by someone else and earn profits on sales.
It’s really simple to make money from affiliate marketing for blogger and it requires only 3 steps:
- Find a product or service that you like
- Promote that product/service to your blog readers
- Earn a small profit (as commission) for each sale that you make.
That’s all. No need to create a product set up the payment system, or deliver the product from your side. Just promote the product and make money.
Here is an example of affiliate marketing for bloggers.
The below-given book contains an affiliate link from Amazon. I’m am an affiliate partner for amazon associates program. If you buy the book by clicking on the link given below, I will receive a commission for the purchase.
Now, here I’m not trying to sell you the book.
However, if I was a blogger who writes about psychology and then I could have promoted this book to my readers. I would have suggested this book as a must-read book on psychology and recommended my readers to buy this book.
Note: This is genuinely a good book, otherwise I wouldn’t have selected it even as an example.
If I had created a huge audience, who trust my expertise, then they would have bought this book. And each time any of my readers buy this book using the above link, I would have made some profit.
Why is affiliate marketing for bloggers a good way of monetization?
Here are few top reasons why affiliate marketing for bloggers is a good way of monetization:
1. Affiliate marketing works even you do not have a huge traffic on your blog:
Let’s say that you are just getting 100 visitors per day. If you want to make money through ads with a small traffic, you will earn only a few bucks as you are paid per click (PPC).
Even if you’re getting 20 clicks on your ad, and pay per click rate is 20 paise (which is quite high), still, you will hardly make Rs 4 in a day.
However, if you promoting products like shoes, clothes, books etc and are able even a single sale per day, you will make a lot more compared to what you’ll earn by ads.
For example, the commission for selling shoes as affiliates on Amazon is 12%. If you have a fitness blog, and you promoted a running shoe worth Rs 3,000, got a sale, then you would have made Rs 360 just by that single sale.
2. You can monetize your blog from day1:
To get your google adsense account approved, it sometimes takes even months. Google will first validate your blog along with your blog contents and the amount of traffic that you are getting.
Further, if you are planning to sell your own products on your blog, then again it might take you months to create that product.
However, through affiliate marketing, bloggers can start making money from day1.
Most of the affiliate program hardly takes a day to approve your account, including amazon associates.
And why shouldn’t they hurry to approve your account? By promoting their products, you are increasing their revenue. Here, both you and the sellers are making money. That’s why most of the affiliate programs readily accept the accounts of the affiliates.
You can become an affiliate for a program and start promoting their products even from the day 1.
3. The bigger your email list, the higher will be the revenue:
Let’s say you have an email list of 1,000 people and you are promoting the same shoe (Rs 3000, 12% commission) to your email subscribers. Even with a small conversion rate of 2%, you will make an earning of Rs 7,200, just by sending a single email.
Imagine how much you can earn per email if you have a bigger email list and you are sending emails frequently.
4. You do not need to create your own product or services:
The best point of making money through affiliate marketing for bloggers is that you do not own the product. All the works like creating a product, pricing, setting payment system, shipping, customer services etc are taken care by the seller. You just have to promote the product and enjoy the profits.
5. You can learn what your audience wants:
By promoting the products, you can learn what kind of products works for your audience i.e. which products they are buying.
Through this learning, you can create a similar product in future and sell it to your audience to keep the whole share of profit, not a commission of 5-10%.
Further, by offering affiliate products, you can warm your audience for the idea of buying from you, so that when you launch your own product, they will be comfortable with it.
Also read: 11 Insanely Easy Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog
5 Things to know about affiliate marketing for bloggers.
1. For making tons of money by affiliate marketing for bloggers, you need to promote high priced products.
Let us understand this with the help of an example.
Suppose Blog A is a sports blog and promotes sports items like sports jerseys, shoes etc. Here the average price of products that they promote is Rs 3,000.
Let’s imagine there is another Blog B, which is a literature based blog, and it promotes literature books. For blog B, the average price of products that they promote is Rs 200.
Assuming commission and monthly sales for both these blogs, here is the monthly total profit for both these blogs:
| Avg Product Cost (Rs) | Commission | Monthly sales | Monthly Total Profit (Rs) | |
| Blog A | 3,000 | 10% | 100 | 30,000 |
| Blog B | 200 | 10% | 200 | 4,000 |
Here, you can notice that even the sales of blog A is half of blog B, still, it is making more than 7 times profits than blog B.
To match the same earnings, blog B has to generate 15 times more sales compared to blog A.
In short, it is pretty tough for the blogs promoting low-priced affiliate products to match the earnings generated by blogs promoting high-priced products.
2. The earnings by affiliate marketing for bloggers depend on their blog niche.
You cannot promote sports shoes if you are running a literature or poetry blog. The audience of a poetry blog and not visiting that blog with a mindset to buy sports shoes.
However, the audience of a sports blog knows that the sports products are costly and their mindset is ready to pay for the high-priced product.
That’s why your niche matters for generating big profits by affiliate marketing for bloggers.
For some niche’s it is difficult to find high priced products. For example educational blogs, where the bloggers generally promote books (which costs between Rs 200-400).
On the other hand, there are few niches, who can easily promote high priced products. For example- a photography blog.
Those bloggers can easily promote best DSLR cameras, which easily costs Rs 35,000 or above.
Similarly, if you have a fashion blog, you can also make huge money by affiliate marketing. Most of the designer clothes or shoes costs above Rs 2,000. That’s why the commission for the products will be high and you’ll generate greater profits.
3. The golden rule of Affiliate marketing for bloggers:
Here is the golden rule of affiliate marketing for bloggers- “You should become the affiliate of only those products that you have personally used.”.
While recommending products to the audience, your reputation is at stake. Do not promote bad products, which can decrease the trust of your audience towards you and harm your brand.
4. Affiliate marketing will teach you how to sell.
If you not able to sell few of the best-selling products on amazon to your audience, how will you sell your own products or services to them?
Affiliate marketing is the best way to learn how to sell to your audience.
5. Be transparent about your affiliate products
It’s important that you disclose all your affiliate links.
There’s no point in hiding this. Make your audience understand that purchasing from your affiliate link won’t change the purchase price for the products. They are anyhow going to buy the product at the same price.
Further, by disclosing the affiliate links, your blog readers will appreciate your honesty and will contribute to your blog’s earnings.
How affiliate marketing really works?
Now that you have learned what is affiliate marketing for bloggers and its key points, you should also understand how affiliate marketing actually works.
Here’s how affiliate marketing for bloggers works:
1. When you join an affiliate marketing program, you will be given a unique id along with your logging credentials.
2. Once you log in to your account, you can generate specific url for different products using that unique id. For example, let’s say you want to promote a sports shoe. Then you can create a specific sharable url for that shoe, in which your unique id is tagged. You can promote the shoe using that specific url.
Please note that you can generate code for both simple ‘text’, ‘image’ or ‘combination’ using the unique id. This can help you to promote both link and shoes image on your blog.
3. You can share that generated URL on your blog and whenever someone clicks on that URL, he/she will land on the product sale page. Further, if he/she buys the product, you will be eligible to get your affiliate commission.
4. Many of the affiliate programs has cookies in the URL, which means that even if that person doesn’t buy the product at the time of landing, but purchase some product within 24 hours, still you will get the commission for the sale. This is because the cookie works for 24 hours, which proves that the buyer was directed from your blog.
5. Further, you will get the commission for all the products that the buyer purchase after he visits the merchant page from your blog.
In addition, it needn’t be the same product for which he/she initially visited the merchant page. Even he/she buys a different product, yet you will receive your share of commission.
For example, let’s say you are an affiliate for amazon. You placed an ad for a book on your blog. One of your visitor clicked the link and visited amazon store using that link.
However, he didn’t bought the book. Instead, he found an amazing shoe on the amazon store and bought it.
In such case, even though you didn’t promoted the shoe, however, you’ll get commission for it as the buyer visited amazon store through your link.
In addition, whatever he/she buys from the store for the next 24 hr will also be credited as your commission as there are cookies in the product link that you shared on your blog.
Best programs for Affiliate marketing for Bloggers in India
There are a number of programs available for affiliate marketing for bloggers in India. Few of the best ones are stated below:
1. Amazon India
Amazon is a leader in the e-commerce business in India. You can find a variety of products to promote from amazon which varies from shoes, clothes, books, electronic items to house hold items, kitchen appliances, musical instruments etc.
The commission rates for different products of amazon varies between 2-12%. Here is a detailed structure about the advertising rates for specify product categories.
Source: https://affiliate-program.amazon.in/welcome/compensation
2. Flipkart
Flipkart is the biggest competitor of Amazon and it offers a similar affiliate program. The commission offered by Flipkart is also similar to that of Amazon.
You can check out the Flipkart commission rate here and joint the Flipkart affiliate program using this link.
3. Godaddy
Godaddy is a leading web domain and hosting provider in India. If you are in an online marketing, SEO, web development or similar niche, you can become a godaddy affiliate. Here is a link to join godaddy affiliate program — https://in.godaddy.com/affiliate-programs
4. Hostgator
Hostgator is another leading domain and hosting provider in India. The commissions offered by hostgator affiliate program is quite high. Hostgator India offers a commission pay out of 1250 per sale. This payout increases as you sell more. Further, you can earn as high as Rs 3,000 per referral.
Learn more about hostgator affiliate program here: https://www.hostgator.in/affiliates
5. TripAdvisor
The TripAdvisor affiliate program is best for travel blogs. The commission are as high as 50-80% for the generated revenue. You can sign up for this affiliate program using this link.
In addition, few other programs offered for affiliate programs for bloggers in India are eBay India, Apple Itunes, VCommision, BigRock etc
Cons of Affiliate marketing for bloggers:
No monetization method can be perfect. Even making money by affiliate marketing for blogger has some cons, which are mentioned below.
- Most affiliate marketing programs pay ‘per sale’, not on link ‘clicks’. In short, if you are not generating sales, you won’t make money.
- Although affiliate marketing for bloggers is easy to start, however earning isn’t always instant. Sometimes it takes a long time to find suitable products which your blog audience will be willing to buy.
- Affiliate programs can change their rule anytime and may decrease the commission rate.
CONCLUSION:
Although there are few cons of using affiliate marketing for bloggers like you only get paid on sales (not link ‘clicks’), however, the pros easily over-shadows the cons.
It cannot be denied that making money by affiliate marketing requires less work as you do not need to create or own the product.
Moreover, depending of the price of the of the promoted products on your blog, you can generate moderate to high earnings through affiliate marketing.
Also read: 9 Tested Ways to Monetize Your Blog- #6 is My Favourite
That’s all. I hope this post about affiliate marketing for bloggers is useful to the readers.
If you have any questions regarding affiliate marketing, feel free to comment below.
#HappyBlogging.