Trying to figure out how to write a blog for affiliate marketing? Follow these 13 actionable steps and you’ll be well on your way to getting targeted traffic to your content and consistent monthly revenue in no time.
Let’s break down each step in detail, shall we?
How To Write a Blog For Affiliate Marketing
First, choose a profitable niche based on your actual interests. Next, it’s about building content that is the ANSWER to your target audience’s searches. Understanding keyword research plays a vital role in this.
Knowing how to write a blog for affiliate marketing isn’t about being a professional writer. In fact, nowadays AI and ChatGPT can be used to create content!
It’s about being honest and giving your reader the best user experience possible to help connect them with exactly what they’re looking for. This creates trust, and trust means return readers. Develop that relationship with your target audience and you’re well on your way to being a successful blogger with steady income to boot.
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1. Choose your niche based on your passions and interests
When it comes to blogs there’s one important thing to remember: you can’t be everything to everybody! You’re not Amazon! You need a primary, central theme for your blog so your readers know what to expect. This can be literally anything, BUT it needs to be something you have a genuine interest or passion for.
The key to building traffic to a blog is to create a consistent stream of new content. And if you’re writing about something you have a genuine interest in, then this comes that much easier! If the goal for your blog is to create revenue through affiliate marketing, don’t try to come up with a niche that you believe is “untapped” (almost everything is “tapped”).
Instead, go with something you have a true passion for or at the very least a general interest in. Whether it’s travel photography, chess, or 360 cameras, ANY NICHE YOU CHOOSE can be a profitable one when you build your affiliate marketing business right.
And it all starts with choosing a theme that interests you.
2. Build your website (Much easier than you think!)
So many people don’t even know where to start when it comes to building a website. Do not sweat this! The fact is, building a website isn’t hard! The process is WAY more straightforward than you think.
Are you going to have to learn how to “code”? Will it be hard to customize? Will it even be able to handle real traffic? And how much will hosting cost? In my experience, the best place to build and host your website(s) is at Wealthy Affiliate.
Not only is Wealthy Affiliate’s web hosting top notch, allowing for heavy traffic to find your content without issue, but it’s one of the best affiliate marketing training platforms you’ll find online.
The fact that Wealthy Affiliate’s hosting package (comparable to $250-$300/month packages elsewhere) comes included free with your Wealthy Affiliate membership is a huge win.
Related Article at WorkFromYourLaptop.com!
Check out “How Hard is it to Build a Website?” and see the step by step process for building a website at Wealthy Affiliate!
3. Target the popular keyword searches your target audience is making & know where to place your keywords! (Important!)
What are keywords, you ask? Keywords are the words or phrases people type into search engines. Keyword research is the study of those words or phrases to determine how much traffic the most popular searches can bring to your site.
Now we’re getting to the nitty gritty. Your content!
Imagine having the ability to know the exact searches your audience is making. It would be like owning a traditional brick and mortar business that has thousands of people waiting outside to come in and knowing EXACTLY what every single one of those people is looking to buy!
What would you do with a power like that?If you’re smart, you’d line your shelves with exactly what they’re looking for, right? (See point #4!)
There are keyword research tools out there designed specifically to gather all the data from all the searches being made into search engines like Google. In my opinion, the best one you’ll find online is called Jaaxy.
Related Article at WorkFromYourLaptop.com!
Check out “How to Use Jaaxy” for a detailed review of how Jaaxy works with all its bells and whistles! So much more than just a keyword research tool, this is my top tool in my arsenal that I use for every piece of content I write.
So how do these popular keywords fit into the writing of your content?
Think of Google as a machine that is desperately trying to connect people with answers to their questions. It analyzes the millions of bits of content online and spits out the most relevant answers. And how does Google know what’s relevant? It’s by the strategic placement of the keywords you’re targeting within your content!
Place your keywords into your post’s url, the post title, and into the first paragraph to make sure Google understands exactly what your content is the answer to. But don’t keyword stuff! Google is smart and will reject your content as “spammy” if done wrong!
4. Make your content the answer to your target audience’s searches
This is the “lining your shelves with exactly what your customers are looking for” concept we touched on earlier. When you do good keyword research and you find the searches your target audience is making, make your content the ANSWER to those searches! Answer the question at hand directly. Truly help your audience.
If it’s a product or service they’re searching for, review it honestly (see point #8). This is a critical element to enhancing the user experience that leaves your audience satisfied, builds rapport, and brings them back for more.
5. Choose “low hanging fruit” keywords so your content will rank!
When you go after a super popular keyword that 300 other websites are targeting, your article will just get lost in the abyss of the internet. But when you choose a keyword that has low competition it is that much easier to rank for it.
Related Article at WorkFromYourLaptop.com!
Check out “The Free Way to Do Keyword Research Without Tools” and learn how to use Google itself to show you the exact topics your target audience is begging for answers to!
So let’s say you’re in the “make money online” niche and you’re ready to target the most popular keyword searches your audience is making. One of the HIGHLY popular searches will most definitely be “how do I make money online?”
But guess what? Every other blogger in your niche knows that too and has created content to be the answer to that question. In fact, some of these bloggers are heavyweights, with authority websites that yours will need a lot of time and authority building before it can hope to compete with.
Not to worry! Jaaxy breaks down the keyword research data to allow you to find keywords that bring traffic but have much less competition. These are the “low hanging fruit” keywords you’re after!
Check out this incredible live class from Wealthy Affiliate showing exactly how to get your content to the front of Google’s search result pages by targeting the “low hanging fruit” keywords!
Watch This Webinar!: “Live! Low Hanging Fruit Case Study“
6. Don’t “tell” or “sell” your audience, show them!
This point really goes towards creating a great user experience. When your reader feels that they are actually being helped, they will return over and over again.
Think about it, would you go back to a website where you feel like the title was click bait? Would you go back to a website where you feel like the question you had wasn’t answered at all? Of course not!
So, to that point, don’t “sell”. Create your posts so that they are legitimately answering the question at hand.
Never use click-bait. Your readers are much too smart to fall for that and you will never get them back. Be conversational with your content and truly explain your points using examples when possible. Don’t just answer with a list of points. Take the time to explain each one fully.
Put yourself in your readers’ shoes.
“Does this post fully answer the question at hand?” “Do the points in this post make sense and have a good flow to them?” “Would a video help explain this question much more clearly?”
So many times I see affiliate marketers forgetting about the PERSONAL aspect of this lucrative industry. Sure, affiliate marketing’s bottom line is about making money. But you can multiply your profits by 10 times or more by simply establishing a real connection with your reader.
When your reader sees you as a real person they are much more likely to connect with you and your point of view. This leads to traffic that returns many times past the first visit. You don’t need to ramble about who you are and why you should be listened to in every post you publish.
Instead, a simple “About Me” page that is easily found on your website (preferably linked to from your main menu) is all you need. Make sure it has your picture, tells your story, and shares where you’re coming from.
Let your audience see that you’re a person that shares a point of view not too different from their own. Check out my About Me page here.
8. Honesty is the best policy
No matter how much you share about yourself, the second you become dishonest with your audience you will lose them forever! This means being honest with your reviews and not saying a product or service is “GREAT!” just because you’ll get a commission from that sale.
To that point, most people online nowadays understand that posts and websites that promote a product or service may receive commissions for doing so. But it is still legally and ethically important to have a disclaimer somewhere easy to spot on your site.
If you really want to stand out from the crowd online be transparent. Share your success stories but don’t exaggerate them. In my experience I have had by far the most success when I’ve been 100% transparent with what I write about in my posts.
9. Use attention grabbing titles & headlines
Getting ranked on page 1 of the Google search results doesn’t guarantee your article is going to get clicked on. You need to grab your readers’ attention!
Clearly visible, easy to read headlines are very important for your content. In this day and age of the internet, your readers have very short attention spans. When they arrive at your article they will actually start scanning your article rather than reading it from the top down. In fact, the average reader only read about 14% of the words on the page!
Take the following 2 sample titles:
- “My Meat Free Burger Recipe”
- “Slap Your Mama Meat Free Burgers – Vegan in One Bite!”
Which one would you click on? See what I mean?
10. Don’t greet your readers with a wall of text
You don’t want to read this. You don’t want to read one word of this just from the look of the paragraph. It’s a massive wall of unattractive, hard to read text. This paragraph is an instant back-button-pressing-get-me-out-of-this-website-post-wrecker. Right now you’re thinking to yourself, “Is he really going to make me read through all this copy to get his point across? Ok. We get it. This wall of text is horrible. Make it stop. Please make it stop. Wait, maybe I should read through this just in case there’s something hidden in the wall of text. Would he do that just to make a point? No. He’s not. He knows that I’m thinking that and he’s using it against me. Well now I’m so far in I might as well finish it all out. It’s too late for me. Tell my family I loved them. When I woke up this morning I had no idea this would be the end of me. No more sunny skies. No more birds chirping. Say goodbye to all aspirations of traveling the world. Just this never-ending wall of text for the rest of my days. What a cruel, cruel way to go…”
Ok that was just painful, wasn’t it?
Please never do that to your readers.
The rules of reading a book and reading a web page are completely different. On a website you need lots of white space and well spaced visuals. You need short, quick paragraphs to make scanning easier. Keep your paragraphs short, just 3-4 sentences long, depending on the length of those sentences.
And remember to be visual! Find relevant graphics and place them strategically throughout your content. Make sure your images are optimized allowing your page to load fast. Use good visuals and you will really enhance the user experience for your reader.
11. Partner with relevant affiliate programs
Here’s the MONEY part! See, it’s not about just randomly posting content to a blog and throwing in a few affiliate links and sitting back and watching cash flow in.
It doesn’t work that way!
You have to put together a blog that ACTUALLY ATTRACTS YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE FIRST, and THEN you can monetize that traffic through affiliate marketing! Partnering with merchants and their affiliate programs is the easy part. It’s free, and a few like Amazon will basically accept you as an affiliate regardless of how much traffic your website brings in.
Most offer commissions between 1%-10% per sale, which isn’t bad when you consider the volume of sales your site can make when it’s bringing in targeted traffic. And then there’s the affiliate programs that offer big chunks of commissions.
Mix those into your bag and your conversions can really start producing. As an example, Wealthy Affiliate’s affiliate program offers commissions of almost 50%. That’s huge!
Related Article at WorkFromYourLaptop.com!
Check out “How Does Wealthy Affiliate Pay You?” and see my own personal results from Wealthy Affiliate’s lucrative affiliate program!
12. Make Your content sexy and post often!
When you take the time to focus on a great user experience for your readers, your content becomes SEXY. It has relevance, it is visually stimulating, the information flows, and your readers find the answers they are searching for. This translates to repeat visitors who come back for more and more!
And you know what else keeps them coming back? BRAND NEW CONTENT!
You may not feel like you’re a “writer”, but none of us do. It just takes some practice. Think about it like this. We talk all day, right? All those words translated to the page would be NOVELS we are writing every single day. So make your content conversational. Be funny (if possible) and keep the tone light.
Treat your posts like conversations with a friend. Be honest & get your point across by showing them the answer, not just by telling them where to look.
A great practice is to create an average of 2-3 posts per week for your blog or website. Over time, this adds up to 100-150 new articles per year. Google LOVES activity and this brings site authority and consistent traffic!
13. Create Something to Talk About in the Comments
Google loves engagement! When your articles are bringing in some steady comments, Google sees this as proof and confirmation that readers are finding what they’re looking for and asking for more. This is a GREAT WAY to get your posts ranking!
So how do you drive up that engagement? Simply ask your readers to leave comments! Direct them to ask questions, share their experience, and ALWAYS reply back!
Sometimes a timely comment can open up a whole discussion that gets other readers involved as well. Now you have content that is sparking conversations, answering questions, and worthy of being on the front page of Google’s search results page!
Related Article at WorkFromYourLaptop.com!
Looking to create consistent revenue online? Check out my newly updated review of the training platform I owe all my success to! Straightforward, affordable, and FREE to test drive, this is the training that delivered for me!
Final Thoughts
Bloggers who are successful don’t just get lucky with articles that somehow go viral. It takes consistency and work. Do you keyword research to find what your audience is searching for and create content that is the answer to their searches.
How do you feel about these 13 actionable steps? How quickly will you be able to implement some or all of these steps into your own blog? Are there any steps you’d like to see added? Removed?
Let me know what you think! I always reply, and I look forward to reading about your experiences! [cough, step 13 in action, cough]
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I’m interested in how long it took you to become successful/start making an income doing affiliate marketing? And roughly how many hours per week were you putting in? What would be your most important advice to someone starting out in this business if you had to answer it in a couple sentences? Great content, keep it up!
The first step is building out your website. You want to build it right from the ground up. Then comes keyword research. That’s the key to creating content that will find your readers. Then it’s all about creating content on a regular basis. You just keep pushing out quality content and slowly but surely your audience will find you. Personally, I think I got my first commission 6 weeks in. I remember how excited I was. Slowly but surely my traffic grew and by my 12th month I had a $4k month in commissions. That was unbelievable to me. You can check out a full review of the platform I owe my success to along with my personal results here. Thanks for the comment!
I have started my own blog and try to provide good content to my blog. However, it is a challenge to keep productive and to find content for the blog. How do you go about finding topics to write about? I’m still waiting for some turning point since I have been on and off to produce content for my blogs. Thanks for the useful tips!
It’s all about keyword research and having an understand of the kinds of topics your target audience is searching for. Think about the kinds of questions they’d ask and make google searches for, do keyword research to find high quality keywords with low competition, and off you go to writing your article! Thanks for the comment!
Hi Eric
This post was such a great read. I like how you broke everything down into smaller bite size pieces to make everything more readably and understandable for people.
You reinforced some thoughts I already had and seeing how it works for you makes me know I am on the right path with my new blog.
The important thing like you say is find a niche that your passionate about and it becomes easier to write and not sell or be spammy. I have bookmarked your site to refer back to some more.
Keep up the great writing. Also keep up the wanderlust, from someone who has travelled some and now lives in a different country than the one I am from.
Kevin.
Glad you enjoyed this! Here’s to wanderlust!
Nice site. It looks like you really know your topic well. How long have you been doing Affiliate marketing? I take it, you built this website? And how long did it take you to discover how to get dropdowns on your site? I find a lot of that very complicated. Last question, What do you think is the most important thing in being an Affiliate Marketer? Thanks for the info.
I started into affiliate marketing in January of 2017. I didn’t have any background building websites at all (I’m a firefighter and paramedic), so it was definitely like being a fish out of water. Check out my article on building your own website as it takes you to the exact platform where I built mine and learned everything I know about affiliate marketing. 🙂 It’s there that I learned the most important thing about being an affiliate marketer is to choose your niche around your true passions and interests, and then create consistent content that directly answers the questions and searches your audience is making online. Thanks for the comment!
I fully agree that you want to create content that is enjoyable, but also informative, for your audience to read. There is nothing worse than landing on a blog with no visuals and long boring paragraphs.
How often would you recommend to publish a new blog? Should it be every week, or far more often than that?
A good rule of thumb is to try to post 2-3 articles per week. Thanks for the comment!
Hi Eric. Thank you for another interesting article. Im just starting my adventure with digital marketing and posts like this are extremely helpful. I couldn’t agree more that most important thing is to choose proper niche – only if we are passionate about something we will be able to achieve success and be reliable for our readers. Looking forward to use your advices in practice.
I appreciate the kind words. Thanks for the comment!
Love the website! I was wondering if you can tell me how to find a good place to drive traffic and get more visitors to my site. Recently I haven’t been getting a lot of people to my site and was wondering if you have a package or knowledge of how to get more people to my site.
Thanks, Mason
The key to traffic is keyword research and posting consistently. Do those things and Google will take notice. Thanks for the comment!
Hi Eric and thanks for sharing this. Very well put together and it all makes sense. Unlike that last not-really sentence of mine. I was wondering though. Have you come to a time with your site when you can opt for keywords that have slightly higher competition than the classic low-hanging fruit keyword phrases? The experts tell us to start with low-hanging fruit when we are building up a website, but does there come a time when you can try and rank with a more competitive keyword phrase? Is that still the case or is there just too much competition out there that unless you have an army of writers creating content, the lone blogger is better off staying in the low-hanging fruit domain? Or does that depend on your niche? thanks, Andy
With more authority any website can start ranking for more competitive keywords. The key is creating a consistent flow of content. Try to average 2-3 posts per week. A single writer can do that pretty easily when you focus on the content and not so much on all the extras like getting the perfect visual and call to action, etc. just get the content down! Good keyword research and consistent content lead to authority! When you see traffic increasing through more conversions, engagement, etc., you’ll know your authority is growing as well. Great question. Thanks for the comment!
I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for a long time and when I first started a lot of this info wasn’t out there like there is now. Great job putting all these tips together for beginners and experts alike. Bookmarking this. Great points made. And the wall of text, lol! Thank you!
haha thank you! I appreciate the kind words and the comment!
Hey Eric,
Another great article. Lots of information and great tips. I look forward to putting these to good use!
Thanks for the info. Keep up the good work.
Connie
Very glad you enjoyed this! Thanks for the comment!
Hi Eric, I agree long paragraphs can be boring, and I also like to see good images in the posts I visit. I was wondering how long my blog posts should be to achieve the best results? What do you recommend? I`m a beginner and still have to learn a lot about how to write a blog for affiliate marketing. Thank you in advance.
Regards,
Debora
I think a good goal is 1000 words. In the very beginning, writing a 1000 words can feel like a lot, so maybe shoot for at least 800. But trust me, once you get a few articles under your belt and find your style you start to find a basic pattern or template to your writing. Your article will answer the basic who, what, when, why questions, and when you make sure to do this, along with your intro and final thoughts, you’ll quickly find you’re way over your 1000 word goal. Thanks for the comment!
Hello Eric,
Great article! I really like the part where you talked about showing your audience not telling them. That is truly the foundation of a successful business. You have to serve your customers, make it personal, and solve their problems!
I have to ask before jumping into this training thing. What else is there with this training program? Is there a community, training modules?
It appears you have some value here, especially if you can start for free!
Thanks,
Chad
I stand behind Wealthy Affiliate’s training 100%. It’s the training module that taught me everything I know! And yes, it’s a global community of like minded people all attacking the same goal. The training is thorough, straightforward, and eye opening. You have all the tools, resources, expert classes, and one on one coaching you need to be a success story.
Feel free to check out this detailed Wealthy Affiliate review for a full breakdown.
This is quite good and well appreciated for your in depth look at what blogging entails and why it is such a needed skill to scale through the rat race. Well! Like you rightly pointed out, it doesn’t require special writing skill to blog. All it entails is the willingness to work and the ability to get out and be passionate about one’s niche and that would definitely yield the right results over time. Thanks
Very glad this helped you out! Thanks for the comment!
Love this article! I work from my laptop too using affiliate marketing too, can honestly say it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made. Your advice is so helpful too! Thanks for the infograph. Will be back for more. Stay stay with that content!
Glad you enjoyed that infographic. I liked putting it together. I should probably do more of them, lol. Thanks for the comment!
Great Article Eric. I struggled with blogs when I first started as I always tried to make it really professional looking instead of writing from the heart. Your dead right about interacting with your clients by showing them you are a real approachable person. Keep up the good work.
Thanks so much! I appreciate it!
Great tips you have there Eric. One of the things bloggers can help other bloggers in affiliate marketing is to show them how to do proper keyword research using their own preferred tool. I often do a quick run on this when discussing about a new niche or a new product idea. As a free bonus, I always produce a list of 10 low competition keywords to help them get started. It’s a nice giveaway for those who aren’t expecting it.
Great tips! I like that! I’ve always felt the more you help the more chance you have of being successful! Thanks for the comment!
That was a great post, I really enjoyed reading it!
You made some good points here, especially about being truthful and transparent. I always keep my blog post honest as I don’t want people to buy something they won’t be happy about.
Keep up the great work.
Take care:)
Glad you enjoyed this! Thank you!
Hey,
This is a great article and I love your website. Trying to write the best kind of blog post has been difficult for me, and I have learned quite a lot from you. Especially the “show them” don’t “tell them” section. I have a leadership blog and I am an advocate of leading by example rather then telling people what to do.
People will follow you from what you do, not what you say, and that is exactly the message I am getting from you. Thank you for sharing this article as I believe it will benefit many people.
Keep up the amazing work on your site.
All the best,
Tom
I really appreciate the kind words, Tom! Thank you and thanks for sharing your perspective. Best of luck to you and your business!
Love all the relevant info you had on making your posts stand out. The headline made me laugh though i am not vegan lol. And yes I do get a headache when people squeeze their text together. Very well written glad I could stop by and have a read. Cheers
Haha. Glad you enjoyed this! Thanks for stopping by!
If I was to split up your list and group them into topics, one of the most important topic I could grasp was “be true, be yourself with your audience” topic. I remember when I was looking for shoes for my wedding. The seller helping me didn’t know that I was getting married and started to show some pair of shoes there. Price at that time… pretty ok for shoes, and good ones but when I told him that my wedding would be at that weekend he change the mode from “help” to “profit” and started to convince me to buy the most expensive because how could I go to my own wedding with one of the others.
I had a friend with me and he said: if any of your invitees say anything about your shoes, I personally come here and buy the most expensive for you, the other one is very good.
Here we see two different behaviours, the friend and the seller. Of course my friend didn’t have any profit by doing so, but when the intention is to really help, my words have more weight.
I’m a beginner in this “work from my laptop” world so that’s a good place for me to start off!
Great illustration! When we make the shift from “sell” to “help” everything else falls into place. Thanks for the comment!
Hi,
Wow! this was super informative, I am new to blogging and you crystallized everything in simple words. I think the key word is building a “connection with your audience” (you definitely could connect to me). I will work on these points and improve my blogging experience to the readers. Thanks for the post and tips.
Very glad this helped you! Thanks for the comment!
Thanks Eric, to be fair I am not sure that you need any comment from me, you seem to have nailed this! But I did want to congratulate you on an excellent tutorial.
When I started Blogging (I have 3 commercial Blogs live today) I struggled to find the right advice and simple guidance to situate me to get started and maintain my Blog. In a couple of pages here you have captured what I had to gather together from a number of different sources.
I would recommend your post and will definitely use it as a tool in coaching some of the people that I am working with today.
Thanks again
Hamish
Thank you so much for the kind words. It means a lot coming from a seasoned veteran. Thanks for stopping by and sharing your perspective!
Hi Eric. I’m just starting in affiliate marketing and there is so much I learnt from this post alone. I din’t know that Titles and Headlines were sooo important. I just thought that writing good content with a keyword in the tittle was enough. From here on I’ll spend time trying to make my titles engaging too.
And I didn’t know either that I could use pretty links for my affiliate links. I’ll try them.
Thank you so much for this post! I think I’ll have to bookmark to keep on consulting it as I digest one by one each of the points.
I’m really glad you enjoyed this! I think the key is writing so that you fully answer your reader’s question and make the experience as user friendly as possible. Thanks for the comment!
Writing a blog has really been a challenge to be until I got to know ideas like this.
so you can see that you necessary doesn’t need to be a good writer before you can write good articles in your blog to start earning. Thanks for the tips I appreciate it
Very glad to help. As always, practice makes perfect. Make these steps a part of your routine and your content will definitely grow into quality content that your audience will enjoy. Thank you!
This is a great nudge to encourage those who may be on the fence about starting a blog. It doesn’t take professional writing skills, but it requires honesty and a passion for your blog topic. I appreciate you sharing the Jaaxy tool for keyword research. It’s great to have a free tool to help drive success and I think it’s also a helpful way to brainstorm for new post topics and ideas that will be popular.
Very glad to help out. Jaaxy is my top tool in my arsenal. Glad to share it! Thanks for the comment!
Hi there thank you for this! Im actually beginning my journey as an affiliate marketer and I had no clue how to write on my blog…I didn’t know the right or even the first words to use, so thank you for this! I agree, one of the most important (and underrated) parts of all is showing who the owner of the blog is as that creates trust and plus as a consumer, I tend to remember the owner’s face too.
Very glad this helped! Thanks so much for the comment!