Jonny, can you give me some affiliate marketing tips to help me to generate an income online?
As a blogger, you should always keep an eye on different ways of making money.
Most of you will probably see advertising as your main source of blogging income, but this isn’t the only option. In fact, you could make more money and see more success by choosing a different path – affiliate marketing.
When done correctly, affiliate marketing can bring in an outrageous amount of monthly revenue for your blog. The best thing about it is that you don’t have to do a lot of active work.
Effectively, you will make money by writing blog posts. Yes, different nuances exist – and there are good and bad ways to approach affiliate marketing – but when done properly, it can be successful.
Naturally, two questions need to be answered:
- What is affiliate marketing?
- How do bloggers make money from affiliate marketing?
We’ll tackle the first question, then launch into some tips to help you get started.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is defined by Investopedia as an advertising model in which a company compensates third-party publishers to generate traffic or leads to the company’s products and services.
Taking this definition, you are the ‘third-party publisher.’ In simpler terms, you will get paid to advertise products on your blog, via your content. Okay, but isn’t this the same as a sponsorship? No, the key difference is that you’re not paid a penny unless you help the company make sales.
What tends to happen is you are paid a percentage for every sale you elicit. This is tracked by your affiliate link, which you use to advertise the products and get people to click. When someone clicks your link and then buys something from the company, you receive a cut of the sale.
In essence, the ideal process will look like this:
- You create a blog post
- Somewhere in the post, you talk about a particular product/company, posting your affiliate link to them
- Readers click on your link and buy something from the site
- You get paid!
This sounds like an excellent opportunity to make a passive income. With that in mind, what tips should bloggers be aware of to maximize their earnings?
Find an Affiliate Program
Firstly, you have to understand how you become an affiliate. Thankfully, it’s as easy as searching for affiliate programs online. This will show you a range of results from so many different companies. In essence, an affiliate program is where you can sign up, select different products to promote, get your link, and start earning.
Now, there are plenty of different options out there, so how do you choose the best one? If you need some assistance, Tech Radar has compiled a list of the best affiliate programs for 2025 so far. It’s worth checking it out to get a few ideas as to which ones are better than others.
Don’t Forget About Your Audience
This is arguably the number one rule when it comes to being an affiliate. Looking at lists of the top programs is useful, but you need to keep your blog/audience in mind at all times. Specifically, what are the main talking points of your blog? What are the key characteristics or traits that your audience members share?
By understanding this, you quickly know which programs will work for you, and which won’t. Moreover, you’ll understand the type of products you should promote and talk about. If they relate to your audience/blog, it’s much easier to talk about them. Not only that, but it’s easier for you to generate sales.
Think about it, imagine you run a fitness blog. Advertising fitness equipment or protein shakes is a genius idea as your readers will be interested in them. Thus, there’s a high likelihood they’ll order products via your affiliate link, as a way of supporting you. By contrast, would it make sense for you to post affiliate links to gardening products? Is this what your audience is here for? Will they be interested?
The more relevant the products are, the more success you will have via affiliate marketing.
Opt For Two Types of Affiliate Products
Realistically, you can select as many affiliate products to promote as you like. However, a good tip is to choose two different types of products:
- Ones that people are likely to buy often and repeatedly
- Big one-off purchases
You should do this as it helps you maximize your earnings. With the first category, you will likely promote cheap products that people may buy regularly throughout the year. The benefit of this is that they’re things that people may buy already, meaning they’re more likely to keep buying them again and again. However, from now on, they could choose to use your affiliate link to help support your blog. As such, you end up earning continuous commission every time these repeat purchases are made.
The second option might not bring in continuous money, but it helps you earn larger commissions when people make purchases.
Drive More Traffic To Your Blog
Affiliate marketing works best when you have lots of people viewing your posts. It’s a simple law of averages; if 10% of your readers click your affiliate links and make purchases, you’re going to make more money the more readers you have on your site!
Consequently, you really need to improve your marketing game to get your blog out there to your target audience. This will involve using a combination of techniques, such as SEO, PPC, social media, online advertising, and so on.
Write the Right Content
While getting people on your site is essential, you also need to ensure they stay there long enough to click on your affiliate link. This is done by writing the right sort of content to elicit sales. Again, you have two main approaches that see the most success:
- Product reviews
- Non-promotional blogs
Product reviews involve you basically advertising and talking about the product itself. It’s an obvious way of drawing attention to a product, and you can attract audiences from across the internet. With reviews, you will attract people who are already researching this product. They’ve started the buyer’s journey, and they’re looking for social proof. Write a compelling review, and you can convince them to buy the product. At which point, provide the link at the bottom of the page, and you could secure a sale.
Non-promotional blogs possibly work best for your regular readers. While people are keen to support you, they might stop reading your blog if all you post are reviews. Unless, of course, you’ve made it clear from the beginning that your blog is just going to be reviews. The idea with this content is that you write normal and engaging content that provides value for the reader. However, during the post, you find a way to segway to your product, linking to it.
Let’s go back to the fitness blog as an example; you write a post about workout recovery, and one section talks about recovery shakes. Here, you can recommend a product to your audience, giving them your link to it. It fits the blog perfectly, isn’t overly promotional, and can result in plenty of clicks.
Give Back To Your Audience
Why would someone click on your affiliate link? What’s making them click your link instead of just going to the website directly? Convenience, yes, but there’s something else; loyalty.
If you cultivate a loyal audience of readers, they feel like they owe you something for your work. They enjoy reading your content, and they want to support you. Using your affiliate links is the easiest way to do this as it costs them no extra money, yet they know you’ll be financially compensated.
Thus, you should focus on giving back to your audience and engaging with them. Make them feel wanted and appreciated, earning their loyalty. With a group of loyal followers on your back, you can almost guarantee regular commission from your affiliate links. Looking back at a previous tip, this is where promoting everyday products really comes in handy!
Always Be Transparent
The final tip is more to do with the legalities surrounding affiliate marketing. Yes, affiliate marketing is legal, but there are certain rules you need to follow. The main one is that you must be transparent about when you are promoting something. This typically means adding a note at the start of your blog telling people that affiliate links are included. You can read up on the legalities around affiliate marketing in your spare time, and it’s highly recommended.
Fail to be transparent, and you could be hit with fines and other legal measures. Effectively, this would mean that all of your hard work was for nothing, as you’d probably have to use your earnings to pay any fines.
All in all, affiliate marketing is a key way to earn revenue from your blog. Don’t rely on regular advertising as the only way to make money, and don’t hold out for sponsorship deals.
Add affiliate marketing into the mix as it can help you earn passive income every month. Use the tips above to help you get started and make the most out of your affiliate program of choice.
If you want to delve deeper into the nuts and bolts of starting a profitable affiliate marketing business which is based on principles of NLP, Conversational Hypnosis, Neurosciences and Consumer Psychology – sign up for our newsletter below.
Till next time.
