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For many bloggers, maintaining a blog isn’t just about writing about things they enjoy; it’s also a great way to make money. One of the most popular ways of generating income from your blog is via affiliate marketing, a way to earn commission by sharing certain products with your readers.
Learn how affiliate marketing works, how to choose an affiliate program for your blog, and start earning a commission each time you sell an affiliate product.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing lets content creators—in this case bloggers—make money simply by sharing products they enjoy on their own digital platforms. Creators share a custom link to an affiliate product with their audience. When someone clicks through from the blog to the brand’s store and makes a purchase, the blogger gets a percentage of the profits.
Affiliate marketing is growing in popularity, and the number of brands investing significant amounts of money into affiliate programs is growing. Experts estimated that affiliate marketing spend in the U.S. would increase from $5.4 billion to $8.2 billion between 2017 and 2022.
Squarespace, for instance, has its own affiliate marketing program, which it uses to generate awareness of, and engagement with, Squarespace products. Affiliates simply sign up and Squarespace provides them with creative support, product updates, and tracking links so that they have everything they need to start promoting Squarespace to their followers.
For an ambitious blogger who posts high-quality content regularly, joining a number of different affiliate marketing programs can potentially generate a healthy income. There’s no restriction to how many programs you can join.
Choosing affiliate programs for your blog
One way to choose an affiliate marketing program is to find brands whose products you genuinely like and would choose anyway, whether or not you were getting paid to write about them. It’s easier to write about products you love authentically than it is to write about products to which you feel no emotional connection.
Maintaining a strong degree of authenticity in your affiliate marketing blog posts will help you to build and maintain trust with your audience so that they keep returning to your blog. If your audience feels like your recommendations aren’t genuine or your content is heavily ad-oriented, you could risk losing their interest.
Once you’ve found some brands you’d want to write about, reach out to them to find out if they run an affiliate marketing program. Search for the brand’s name and “affiliate marketing” and, if they run a program, there will likely be a page on the brand’s website where you can apply.
Creating an online store for affiliate blogs
Your affiliate blog site can eventually become sort of an online boutique for affiliate brand products. This can help you to maximize sales of the products you write about because your audience will be able to browse them all on your website.
One of the best things about having an affiliate store on your website is that you don’t need any inventory, you won’t need to do any shipping, and you won’t have to handle any customer service. Any sales you make will be fulfilled by the affiliate brand and you’ll simply be paid a commission.
Creating an affiliate store on your site is easy with platforms like Squarespace, which allows you to add a store to your website. Squarespace sites also can be connected to affiliate tracking tools so that customers are redirected to complete their purchases. Once the purchase is finalized, you automatically receive your commission.
Start thinking about the products your audience will love, and build an affiliate marketing strategy into your blog’s growth plans.