Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers: How to Earn Big

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Affiliate marketing and blogging go together like cookies and milk—they’re made for each other.

I’ve been monetizing my blogs with affiliate marketing for over 10 years and even recently sold one of my affiliate-monetized blogs for multiple six figures. It can be a lucrative combination. 

In this article, I share everything I know about how to earn a serious income by merging affiliate marketing and blogging.

How much can you make from affiliate marketing?

We looked at how much affiliate marketers make and found that, on average, affiliate marketing bloggers make between $30,000–$50,000 per year.

That said, it’s possible to make much more than this. Some high-ticket affiliate marketers earn several million per year. It depends on how much time and effort you put into your business and what niche you’re in.

How affiliate marketing and blogging work together

Most high-earning bloggers use a combination of search engine optimization, social media, and email lists to drive traffic to their blog posts, which contain affiliate links.

Once a user lands on the blog, they may click on one of the affiliate links and purchase the product that’s recommended, resulting in the blogger being paid a commission by the affiliated brand.

 

Affiliate marketing and blogging work so well together because:

• Low overhead – You don’t have to hold inventory, pay for storage, or hire people to pack, ship, or manage products. You just need website hosting and a desire to write.
• No customer service – Your affiliates handle all the returns and customer questions. You don’t need to provide customer support beyond helping people decide if they should purchase the product or not.
• Passive income – Especially with SEO, you can get traffic to your blog whether you’re working or relaxing on the beach. It’s a great way to make a passive income. 
  

Where to find affiliate partners

You can find affiliate programs in many ways:

• Through affiliate networks like ShareASale or Avantlink
• By partnering with the Amazon Associate’s Network
• By reaching out directly to brands you want to work with

You can also find affiliate programs by searching “[niche] affiliate programs” on Google and looking at the listicles others have written about your niche.

For example, “coffee affiliate programs” brings up several articles:

How to come up with blog topics to promote affiliate links

Once you’ve decided on your niche and found some good affiliate programs, you need to decide what topics make the most sense to cover on your blog.

Luckily, there are a few tactics that make this really easy. 

Study competitors to find what’s working for them

The first and often easiest tactic is to spy on your competitors’ content. You can see what affiliate programs they’re a part of and how they promote those affiliates just by browsing their websites.

For example, coffee affiliate Homegrounds displays its top affiliate products right at the top of its page in the navigation:

And if you want to see exactly which keywords it’s ranking for on Google and how much traffic it’s getting from those keywords, you just have to plug the website into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and go to the Organic keywords report.

As you can see, this brought up a lot of keywords—104,603 to be exact. Luckily, you can filter this down to show only the most relevant keywords.

Personally, I like to target keywords with a KD (Keyword Difficulty) score of less than 30 and a volume of at least 500—guaranteeing you only see keywords with decent traffic potential that aren’t too difficult to rank for.

This whittled down the list to 3,360 keywords. That’s still a lot, but it’s much more manageable. You can filter it down further if you like, but I personally like to just start looking to see what came back from this first filter.

Peruse the list of keywords and check the URLs that rank for keywords you like to see how they’re promoting their affiliates. Add any promising keywords to your content calendar.

For example, you can write about the best “coffee roasters” and promote them using affiliate links, just like Homegrounds does.

Do some basic keyword research

Keyword research is the starting point of any good SEO strategy.

Ahrefs has a free keyword generator tool you can use to make this process super easy. 

Simply type in a broad keyword related to your niche, like “coffee” or “coffee maker,” and you’ll be shown keyword ideas:

Then, use these ideas to come up with blog topics. For example, you can write a review of the “bunn coffee maker” or a roundup showcasing the “best coffee makers.”

If you want additional ideas or more keyword data, Ahrefs also has Keywords Explorer, which provides a lot more info for you to work with.