Launch an Affiliate Blog Empire For Ever-Growing Profits

Starting out as an online affiliate marketer is an exciting path to take for an entrepreneurial career. It’s one of the few low cost methods of making money online that doesn’t require you to create products of your own.

There are many ways to launch this type of career, but none as formidable as having your own starter blog that you grow into an empire of earnings. If you’re new (or struggling) with this path, you’ll be happy to know that there is a simple formula you can follow to build a foundation for you to succeed with.

It requires you to do some preliminary work that sets you up for success, and then you can snowball your commissions and income to support you on autopilot with very little work on your behalf.

If you’re serious about being the kind of affiliate who is recognized as a leader in your niche for guiding consumers in a way that protects their investments and helps them find the solutions they need, you’ll be one of the many who achieves their goal of online success in the fastest way possible.

Below, you’re going to find a seven-step process that helps you do just that. Instead of floundering as an affiliate who isn’t sure of what to do next, you’ll have an exact roadmap that guides you through it from start to completion.

Find a Niche That Pays Off for Affiliates

Too many affiliates buy domains and hosting and set up an affiliate blog in a niche that’s doomed to fail. You must do the preliminary work involved in ensuring your success before you take any action.

This research phase is just as important as the reviews you’ll be publishing. It helps to start with things you’ll be excited about reviewing. If you randomly pick a topic someone else is earning money with, but you have zero interest in it, chances are you’ll quickly abandon your blog – or your audience will be able to tell you lack enthusiasm.

Think of hobbies, skills and interests – regardless of whether or not you currently consider yourself an expert. For example, if you pay attention to the news and have started to develop an interest in survival preparedness, that’s a wonderful niche to get into as an affiliate.

This is because many others are also in the same boat, and your reviews will be from a consumer perspective as you take the initiative to learn, share and make recommendations in this niche.

Sometimes, you’ll already have plenty of expertise. Take weight loss for example. Maybe you’ve lost 50-100 pounds and you want to help others by recommending supplements, fitness gear, trackers and nutrition plans that you used to shed the weight.

In addition to considering your own interests and skills, dig into some market research. Look to see if there is a wide enough audience, plenty of competitors, lots of companies with an affiliate program and trends that are rising in the niche.

Ideally, you want an evergreen topic you can evolve with, not a flash in the pan trend that will disappear, leaving you starting from scratch once it dissipates. Take a look at the competition and see what they’re doing.

What kind of content do they publish? What comments do readers leave on their blog posts and social media posts? Who is ranking for those top spots in Google when you search your niche keywords, and how are they doing it?

Don’t just look at what’s being done – make note of what they’re missing. Content gaps are where you can really shine as an affiliate because you’ll be serving the audience in a way no one else is.

When you begin looking into affiliate programs, look for digital and tangible products and companies. For example, in survival and weight loss, you can promote digital eBooks or memberships as well as tangible products on Amazon and elsewhere.

You want to look on platforms like ClickBank, Warrior Plus, JVZoo, Amazon, Share-a-Sale, and Commission Junction to see what all is out there. Also Google your niche and the words affiliate program to see who has a direct program that’s not on a third party platform.

You always want to recommend the best products that will help your readers. But you also need to take into consideration things that affect your earnings. This is more than just price point and commission percentage.

It includes the duration of your cookie and payment terms. For example, do you have to reach a minimum in earnings before you can get paid? What’s the timeline for payment? Is it immediate, weekly, or 60 days, like Amazon?

Look at their product line and the reviews for products. Do you think you want high ticket items where you’ll sell less, but earn more? Or do you want to sell more and make up the earnings through volume?

Think about the target audience you plan to serve. Who are they? What are their pain points, goals and obstacles? You’ll need this information if you’re going to have a successful affiliate blog.

Do you want to target a broad audience, like everyone who needs to lose weight – or a narrow audience, like only those who have 100 pounds or more to lose? Don’t drill down too much or you’ll be limiting your earnings.

Before you purchase a domain and build a blog, you might want to test the waters a bit. Create social media accounts with some content about the niche and see if you have any engagement or responses.

Set Up Your Affiliate Blog the Right Way

While affiliate marketing is a low cost entry into online marketing, there are two things you do want to pay for – a domain and hosting. You could set up a blog on WordPress.com

However, in doing this, you’re never in full control over your blog. They are. Instead, you want to use WordPress.org, which lets you install the software on your own server and build a WordPress blog on your domain where no one can tell you what to do.

Even if you don’t think you’d ever be at risk of losing your account, you’d be surprised at how many people with harmless content wake up to find their blog gone in an instant, with no recourse for getting it reinstated.

You want to pick a dot com domain that has your niche keyword(s) in it, and ideally make it as short as possible. Something like SurvivalPrepPlans.com or WeightLossOver40.com would be better than a domain with five words in it.

Next, find a hosting plan through something like Bluehost or SiteGround. They have cheap plans where you can sign up for under $5 a month, and that way, you can connect your domain to your hosting, install WordPress and get ready to start earning as an affiliate.

There are a few plugins you may want, but watch how many you add because bloat can cause your website to drag and load slowly. You might want a spam protector like Akismet, some sort of SEO plugin like Yoast, and a cache tool like W3 Total Cache to improve site speed.

Next, you’ll want the setup to showcase a functional and aesthetically appealing blog. There are both free and paid themes you can choose from, but make sure it’s not cluttered or hard to read.

Set up your navigation menus and categories as well as common tags you’ll be using for your product reviews. It might help to create a mind map of topics for your blog to help you with this process.

Your sidebar can be where you build a list (which you’ll learn later), promote products and have links to previous content your audience may want to see. You can even show them in monthly links so visitors can click and see all of your June content in August.

Your blog might be a place where you share banner ads under the header, in the blog posts themselves and as vertical ads in the sidebar. If you get a heat mapping tool, you’ll be better able to see how people navigate your site and be strategic with where you place everything.

As you’re getting everything in working order, check to see if your blog shows up properly (and loads quickly) on a variety of gadgets and browsers. Does it function well on both Chrome and Firefox?

Is it easy to view and click on links from a smartphone, laptop and PC? Test links because sometimes, people can see a portion of the blog page, but the screen doesn’t allow them to click through easily, which means lost commissions for you.

Think about the navigation from one page to another. As you begin building content, you want a solid interlinking strategy that both visitors and search bots can use to find relevant content.

Lastly, you need to up strategic pages for your affiliate blog. An About page helps people learn more about you, which is where trust is built. This is especially relevant if you’re reviewing with a slant of, “I’ve done this and now I want to help you achieve the same goal.”

You might also want to have an affiliate disclosure page, in addition to a statement in the footer or sidebar of your blog. Some affiliate programs (like Amazon) require this, but it’s a good practice ethically to let people know you receive a commission if and when they buy through your link.

Some affiliates like to have a resource page where they link out to certain types of favorite product recommendations. For example, you might have a list with the best bug out gear that includes a bug out bag, tent, firestarter, first aid kit, etc.

Create Affiliate Content That Converts Into Commissions

Once your first affiliate blog is fully set up, it’s time to begin creating commission-generating content for the niche topic you’ve chosen. Your content should never be just about pushing products on people.

A good affiliate with longevity in mind for this career also considers the fact that it needs to be informative and useful for their readers. Whenever you create a new piece of content, ask yourself if there’s a good balance between information and promotion.

It should never be a 50/50 split, either. It needs to be 80% educational or informative and 20% promotional so that your audience is engaged and appreciative of your content to the point where they convert well for you.

Your affiliate reviews need to do more than just recite the product details from a listing. The consumer can go to that page and read that for themselves. Although you do want to include it as part of your review, there are other things that are important to your audience.

The first is that you convey honesty and authenticity in your review. They are going to be able to recognize if you are the type of person to lie about products and tell them every product is perfect, which will result in very few sales and commissions.

One way you can achieve this is by making sure you include any drawbacks or negative details about the product in addition to everything good you have to say. The consumer understands that no product is absolutely perfect, and they want to know if there are any features or problems with the product so they can make an informed decision.

Instead of simply listing off the product details, discuss each one a little bit. For example, if you are talking about a kitchen gadget, don't just list the fact that it has machine washable parts, but add a little bit of context to that and how important it is to be able to toss these gadgets in the dishwasher and save time in the kitchen.

With a product review, you want to build a rapport with your audience, and one way you can do this is by including storytelling and personal anecdotes about your experience with the product or even that type of situation that calls for this kind of solution.

Your product reviews should always include a call to action so that they know where to purchase the product. Make sure you are adhering to the rules set forth by the affiliate program if they have any guidelines about how you can link or refer people to their site.

Make sure you are using a variety of product review techniques. Sometimes you may want to review a single product in a blog post. Other times you may want to compare two products to one another and discuss which one is better.

You can even create buyer’s guides or comparison tables that discuss multiple products for different purposes. This lets them analyze the comparison of products based on their own personal needs and preferences.

You can also do tutorials that are informative for your audience, where you happen to mention the products that you recommend or are using almost like an afterthought. Keep track of what your audience responds well to so that you can do more of that, but also watch what competitors are doing to see if they have structures that you aren't utilizing yet, which might suit your audience well.

Give Your Prospective Buyers Media Preferences

Some affiliates make the mistake of relying on text only to promote products on their affiliate blog. This is not going to serve your audience well, because many of them have different media preferences where they prefer to see product images or watch a video of the product in use.

Whenever you are using a multimedia approach, whether it's screenshots of a product, a video showing you using a gadget or over the shoulder implementation of a course, or even an infographic or table/chart that shows information in a visual manner, it can boost your commissions easily.

By using other media, you're also allowing the reader to take a break with their eyes from big blocks of text so that they can see some sort of illustration that shores up your claims of this being the product they need to consider buying.

Some companies have visuals that you can use in your promotions, which they provide to affiliates. Other times you may want to take your own pictures if you own a product. You can also buy stock images off of sites like DepositPhotos.com or even create images using artificial intelligence tools like Midjourney or Ideogram.

There are also AI tools that can create videos for you, such as an explainer video that hypes up a product and explains what it is and how it can help them with some sort of improvement in their life.

Many affiliates like to use unboxing videos for tangible items. These work very well in many niches, whether you are opening up a kids toy or an MRE (Meals Ready to Eat) where you can show your reaction to the product and even use it.

You want to include a mix of media in your affiliate reviews. Some people might land on a review and prefer to skim and read the content, while others hate reading and want to watch a brief demonstration video on it.

Whenever you do use multimedia, make sure you go the extra mile of optimizing it for search engines. Use alt tags for images and video files that are embedded into your blog posts, ideally with keyword-rich names.

Take Your Affiliate Blog to the Next Level of Success

It's important as an affiliate marketer that you are consistent with your publication of product reviews. You want to create thorough, competitive reviews for each product that you are reviewing or recommending to your audience.

Set some goals for yourself that include the number of posts you can make each week and the amount of affiliate income you hope to achieve with milestone goals that level up each month.

In order to boost your success, you have to keep track of your affiliate income so that you know which products are converting well for you, which platforms are earning you the most money, and which slants or types of reviews get you the most engagement and click throughs.

With some platforms, such as Amazon, you may earn more based on other items that are added to the consumers cart before checkout. On other platforms, such as Warrior Plus or JVZoo, you might earn more by hyping up the upsell items so that your total revenue per sale is enhanced.

You might want to create bonuses for your buyers. You can do a single bonus for a front end digital product, or do multiple bonus items for each level of a funnel that they purchased through your link.

Another way to increase your revenue is to have your own suggested items for buyers to add to their purchase. You can do this with both digital and tangible products. For example, if you are recommending a course about making money as a social media influencer, you might have other courses on specific platforms that you can recommend, or even tangible items like a ring light if they are going to be making videos.

Amazon always gives consumers suggestions for what else they might want to buy whenever they are on a listing of a product. You can do the same with your tangible product buyers and make recommendations of other things they may want to purchase at that time.

With some platforms, where you can have direct interaction with a vendor (like on Warrior Plus or JVZoo), you might be able to approach them to negotiate a higher commission rate or even a private deal for your customers where they get a coupon code, helping you convert more visitors into buyers.

Pay attention to digital product vendors to see when their upcoming launches are. You can plan for a bonus creation and promotions you can do on your blog and via email and social media so that you have a chance of increasing sales and commissions during the discount launch pricing.

This can even help you earn cash prize contests if the vendor is hosting one. Being early in a promotion and having a bonus are two things that can tip the scales in your favor.

Look for ways to diversify your promotions. Have some lower ticket items and some higher ticket ones. You have to make sure your content and bonuses reflect the value needed to convert those visitors into buyers whenever they’re going to be spending more.

You can also begin promoting things that will give you recurring, passive income. These will include things like subscriptions to memberships or delivery services for tangible items that pay you over and over again until the customer cancels.

There are other ways you can monetize your affiliate blog, and as your success and positioning in Google and other search engines grows, you'll begin getting offers from brands that want you to let them sponsor a spot on your blog.

You might also want to monetize your affiliate blog with ad revenue through search engines, but you may earn less doing that than you would with a straight affiliate promotion, so you'll have to test your earnings and see which works better.

There may come a time when you decide to begin investing in paid traffic to drive targeted visitors to your blog so that you can earn more. You have to make sure you understand the ad process well before you start spending money because you want to ensure that it's a profitable effort for you.

Don’t Let Vendors Steal Your Customer Base

One of the biggest mistakes you can make as an affiliate is simply sending all of your visitors that you worked hard to get to your site straight through to a vendor. At that point, the vendor is the one who gets that individual on their list and they can sell to them far into the future.

You are the one who created the content that provided a solution to that person. Therefore, it's important that you have the ability to build a list of buyers so that you can promote products to them and help them solve their problems in a way that earns you a commission.

In order to do this, you'll need to have an email autoresponder system in place. You can use something like AWeber, GetResponse or MailChimp. By having a list of subscribers, you'll be able to communicate with them directly whenever there is a new product you need them to know about, and send them straight to your blog or even promote the product directly in an email.

This is a great way to build a relationship with your site visitors because you can be more personal in your email communications. You can even segment your list so that you are only sending them targeted promotions that are exactly right for their preferences.

To begin building your list, start by creating a value packed lead magnet. You don't want to simply tell people to sign up for notifications, because that's not enough of an incentive to get them to hand over their coveted name and email address to a stranger.

A lead magnet can be something like a checklist, cheat sheet, short report, full eBook or even a video course. You want to give them this free in exchange for their contact information.

This is their first impression of you, so you want to make sure you go to the effort of impressing them. Whenever your lead magnet is ready, you can set up a dedicated landing page that you drive all of your traffic to in an effort to get them on your list first before you promote to them in the future.

But you can also build a list using various opt in strategies such as popups or forms that are embedded in your content or on the sidebar. When they subscribe to your list, you'll have a welcome email that goes out, and from that point on you can either have a sequence of emails that naturally drips out to new subscribers or you can simply blast new emails whenever there's something for them to read on your blog or a product they need to be notified about.

Grow Your Affiliate Blog Into a Profitable Empire

Getting your initial affiliate blog up and running is where the majority of your learning and hard work will take place. Once that is operational and you begin seeing profits, you can explore whether or not you want to scale your affiliate blog empire into more than one blog.

Some people prefer to pour all of their effort into that one blog and simply ramp up their productivity and review schedule with more content. Others may want to get into a different niche or something that even complements the original topic.

For example, you might have a weight loss affiliate blog that focuses on nutrition, and you launch a separate blog that is dedicated to fitness for weight loss. The two are closely related, and you can even cross promote them to your audience.

But it's possible that you have multiple interests and passions and you may want to have something like a dog care affiliate blog as well as a golf blog, in which case neither of these topics is related.

This is a great way to earn more and diversify your income in different niches so that you're not relying on a single niche to support you. But it can be more challenging, depending on how you manage your business.

Taking care of more than one blog it's going to require more time, so if you're only doing this as a side hustle, it may prove more challenging than if you were a full-time affiliate marketer.

What you don't want to happen is for your quality to begin suffering because you are spreading yourself too thin and trying to keep up with the consistency needed to run your blog.

You don't want to go from creating three outstanding pillar blog post reviews each week on one blog to publishing three thin blog posts that don't have much value because you are trying to get the same number of posts on another affiliate site.

Not only does your time get stretched thin from writing the reviews themselves, but you also have to factor in the time needed to conduct research and study trends as well as drive traffic in the new niche.

It's important to be honest about these challenges because it's better for you to have a single blog that you run very well and excel at than for you to scale your operation in an effort to earn more, but have the opposite effect.

Many people are capable of replicating their success in different niche markets with separate affiliate blogs with ease. This gets easier the more experience you have, where you systemize the process and even work with concepts like batch content creation to save you time.

If you do decide to grow your single blog into an empire, start slow and small and allow it to gain momentum naturally. Don't try to immediately mirror your productivity with a second or third blog because it will take time to manage each component together.

You may want to consider hiring a virtual assistant who can do some of the mundane tasks for you, such as scheduling your social media links to drive traffic back to your blog or even uploading the content for you.

If you want to hire a freelance ghostwriter to create the product reviews, you can search on UpWork to see who is available. You can also use artificial intelligence tools to help you make quick work of the product review process, because it can research, brainstorm, outline, and write or edit you are content with a strong call to action and persuasion built in.

As time goes on, make sure you are continuing to track the performance of each of your blogs in your network so that you can trim the fat and eliminate certain topics that are not working for you while focusing your efforts more on topics that are bringing in profits.

Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest and most lucrative business options you have available to you online. Be methodical with your approach and carefully analyze what you are about to do before taking action.

Track everything and experiment to see what works best with your audience, because each one will be different depending on which niche and which products you are promoting.