There are currently over 152 million blogs worldwide, close to 75 million powered by WordPress alone. With so many bloggers many of us wonder how can we build our audience, gain traffic and eventually monetize our blog. However, knowing where to start can be challenging especially if you’re a new blogger or just new to monetizing. With so many ways to make money off a blog or website it can be overwhelming when we first decide to look for ways to monetize. One of the best ways anyone can monetize their blog is through affiliate marketing!

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is for you the (the affiliate) to earn a commission for endorsing products or services to your readers. The most commonly used method is pay-per-action, which means that a blogger gets paid only if a reader undertakes a particular action, such as asking for additional details on the product, clicking on the ad, registering on the marketer’s website and, of course, making a purchase. Affiliate marketing is increasingly considered as one of profitable monetization technique for bloggers, and by following these three steps, you can start implementing it on your blog as well.

1. Choose a Reliable Affiliate Program – Once you manage to integrate your affiliate marketing efforts with your regular content strategy, you need to choose a reliable affiliate program. However, this all depends on your area of expertise (what niches your blog actually covers). In other words, if you are posting niche-specific articles, you would probably want to connect with the industry experts. For example, if you are writing about fashion based content you should apply to be an affiliate with a clothing retailer.

• Amazon Associates: For the majority of us we have utilized or heard of the Amazon.com. One of the main reasons a vast majority of bloggers start with Amazon’s affiliate program, because it sells millions of products that fit almost any niche. Also, Amazon Associates are guarantees that once a product is sold, the commission will be sent to the affiliate blogger within 24 hours of the sale. The only thing you need to be aware of is that the higher your range, the higher the commission you receive. Depending on the type of a product, Amazon pays commissions of 4% to 14%.

• Google AdSense: AdSense is a Google program that isn’t actually affiliate marketing program, but it is commonly used by affiliate marketers nonetheless. It offers advertisement units to bloggers, who need to register for the program first. This enables them to use their accounts to make money through the ads posted by Google on their blog. Similar, to Amazon Associates, AdSense provides its users with numerous benefits, including several monetization options, multiple language support, country-specific payment methods and various ad formats.

2. Integrate Affiliate Links Properly – An important thing you need to keep in mind is that each and every affiliate link you add to your blog needs to be integrated properly. Only this way will you be able to keep the balance between user experience and your blog monetization. Don’t over clutter your posts with affiliate links. There is a huge misconception that the more links you have, the more you earn. This not the case so just keep your blog organic and every link you add makes this more difficult.

3. Affiliate Aggregator Service – If your blog topics are more diverse, you might consider a program such as VigLink, which automates access to more than 30,000 affiliate programs and monetizes the links on your site for you.

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