How Bloggers Can Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

The concepts of affiliate marketing and blogging are nothing new, but when you combine the two there is definitely a lot of opportunity for success. The problem that most bloggers have struggles with, is figuring out how to take that initial leap from “blogger” to “profitable blogger”. Whether your end goal is to create a niche site or an authority site, you need to generate revenue to make a long term and successful business blog. A great way to bridge this gap is by using affiliate marketing within your blog content.

The Benefits of Using Affiliate Marketing as a Revenue Source

When it comes to making money with your blog, you have a lot of options, such as:

• Selling ad space on your site
• Using Google Adsense 
• Creating your own membership site
• Promoting ebooks and user guides
• Placing contextual ads on your site
• Offering sponsored reviews and services

These are all great ways to make money, but you are going to need a brand, existing traffic and plenty of things to setup if you are going to create a product and process orders.

Now we can take a look at why affiliate marketing has become an all-in-one source of revenue for many bloggers.

• Ability to partner with top sites and brands
• Earning commissions of up to 75%
• Never having to place an order, handle transactions or hold inventory
• Place a link on your site and forget about it

If you had to choose between the two, each have their own benefits, but affiliate marketing is a great way to make money if you can figure out how to build niche or content rich sites, create the content, send traffic to the site and forget about it. On the flip side, if you have an authority site you can start making great money by recommending web sites and services to your audience as well. However, instead of just linking directly to a site, you can use an affiliate link and earn a commission on any referred leads/sales.
No matter if you are going after affiliate marketing or building out your own products and services, then best way to finding success is by providing the best content and giving the site visitor exactly what they want.
For example, how many people are searching for the best web hosting services in search daily?… thousands! If you were able to create a great site with amazing content that provided all of the details and quality reviews that people are looking for, then you could be earning $100+ for every new hosting sign up you send through your affiliate link. Best of all, you can use this same concept in nearly any niche and create a blog around this same business model.
The next time you are thinking about creating a blog and how you can monetize your content or audience down the road, be sure to look into affiliate marketing and see how it might fit best into your blogging and business model. Some niches will work better with affiliate marketing, and coupons/reviews sites are always big money makers in this space.