How To Use Affiliate Marketing To Fund Your Blogging Business

Blogging about your passion is fun thing to do. There is no doubt about it. But at some point you need to find a way to monetize your blog. You can always use Adsense, but I personally find it to be unprofessional. In fact, most top bloggers do not use Adsense on their authority sites. It just looks cheap and brings down your blog a notch lower. I have personally had a lot of success with affiliate marketing, and I know a lot of other folks in the industry are using the same channel to raise funds for their businesses.

Affiliate marketing is very lucrative to bloggers as it requires no inventory, and you can earn commissions on the items that are being sold in your niche and beyond. If you are in the blogging niche, you can sell blogging books, blogging tools, premium blog subscriptions, and even blogging conferences. In addition, you can go beyond this by selling things that are somewhat related to your niche but are not specifically made for the folks that are interested in your niche.

Choose the right offer to promote

If you get to promote the right offer on your blog, you can achieve immense success and make a lot of money in the process. I personally go after items that are a necessity for the folks who are visiting my blog. In addition, I avoid promoting products that cost a fortune on my blog (you should leave that to your list). This is a volume-based strategy. You can also take a commission-based strategy and promote super-expensive products. Both of these strategies work, but it takes work to make them work.

It is all about conversion

you should always test multiple offers on your blog to find out which one works the best. That’s why we have split testing folks. You are working hard on your blog, and you deserve to get paid for your efforts. But if you promote a product that comes with a sales-page that scares your leads away, then you probably should not promote that product. It does not matter how much conversion an affiliate program pays per sale or how related the product is to your niche. If you can’t convert, you don’t get paid.

Where to look for affiliate offers

You can always look for affiliate programs on sites such as LinkShare, CJ, or ClickBank. But there is a sneaky way to find out what offers are working for other affiliates in your niche. You can check sites such as Squidoo and E-zinearticles to see if anyone is writing reviews about products in your niche. If someone is going through the effort of putting up a review on these sites, the chances are the product is worth a look. If your niche is broad enough, the chances are you are not going to have a whole lot of trouble finding a product to promote.

At the end of the day, your focus should be conversion and not commission. You should test everything that you can (headers, content, links, colors,…). It is tough work. But once you start converting, you are going to find that extra energy to go for more. Now that’s the beauty of running a business on the Internet.