These days, anyone can create a blog – and create one fairly easily. It’s not exactly easy to make a blog popular, but with excellent content, you can make it happen. Once you have a loyal audience, you’ll want a way to make money from them.
But what’s the best monetization strategy? Is affiliate marketing as powerful as it’s claimed to be?
The Road to Popularity
First, you have to understand that no monetization strategy is going to work unless your blog has sufficient popularity. Popularity isn’t a guarantee for any blog, but even average writers have the potential to make a blog successful if they have these three things:
Excellent content.
Excellent content is a prerequisite. If your content is low quality, or if it covers topics that audiences don’t want to read, it’s never going to be successful. That’s why many aspiring writers enlist the help of content marketing services to get a little extra support in this area.
Differentiation.
There are literally millions of blogs out there. That means there’s probably at least one blog that covers a topic similar to yours. How are you going to stand out? How are you going to make your blog the best in this area?
A path to growth.
Even excellent and unique blogs have trouble growing at first. That’s why you need to have a plan in place to grow your blog consistently. Marketing and advertising are great tools to help you in this endeavor.
The Basics of Affiliate Marketing
So let’s say you’ve gotten the popularity that you’ve always wanted. What is affiliate marketing, and why should you be considering it as a monetization strategy?
The basic idea is this: You’ll include a link or multiple links to a specific product being sold by a third party. You’ll earn a portion of any revenue generated by that link. In other words, if you send 10,000 people to this page and 1,000 of them end up buying the product, you’ll make a small amount of money for each of those 1,000 purchases.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Affiliate marketing is popular for a reason. It has many different strengths, including:
Accessibility.
It’s pretty easy to get started with affiliate marketing. Even if you have no experience, you can grab affiliate links from the affiliate programs of major players in the industry, such as Amazon. As long as you have a knack for marketing, it shouldn’t be hard to generate some traffic to those links.
Passive nature.
Once you have the affiliate links established, the strategy is relatively passive. It doesn’t take much in terms of ongoing upkeep or refinement. As long as you keep sending traffic, you’ll keep making money.
Scalability.
Individually, transactions aren’t going to make you much money. But affiliate marketing has a tremendous potential to scale. If you can generate thousands, or tens of thousands of visitors, you can make some serious income this way.
There are some downsides, however:
Inconsistency.
Affiliate marketing traffic isn’t always consistent. You may have hot months where you generate a lot of sales and slow periods where you barely generate anything.
Tricky implementation.
It’s not always easy to position a link in a way that gets people to click and seriously consider the product. You have to figure out what aligns with your target audience and find a way to make it appealing to them.
Content corruption.
Some people struggle with affiliate marketing because it begins to corrupt the quality of their content. If your entire article is simply written to get people to click a link, you’re going to quickly lose the audience you worked so hard to create in the first place.
Other Monetization Strategies
Affiliate marketing has a lot going for it, but there are some other monetization strategies you should consider as well.
Advertising.
Instead of affiliate marketing, you could simply host advertising on your blog.
Premium content/memberships.
You could also sell some sort of premium content subscription or a membership to your program.
Book sales.
If you have a loyal audience of blog readers, you should have no trouble selling several copies of a book you’ve written.
Courses.
Alternatively, you could put together an entire course to educate your audience or provide coaching and consulting.
Donations.
Some bloggers choose to rely exclusively on voluntary donations from their readers.
A direct sale.
You may even be able to sell your blog directly.
What’s the bottom line here? Assuming your blog is sufficiently popular, affiliate marketing can be a valuable and achievable way to make consistent revenue. However, it’s tricky implementation, and occasional inconsistencies can be problematic. If you want the best possible results, it’s a good idea to use a mix of different monetization strategies to make money from your blog.
