How To Start An Affiliate Blog The Right Way (2024)

Affiliate marketing is on the rise, and for good reason. Everyone is looking for an extra source of income without a ton of extra work. If you enjoy writing, then affiliate blogging could give you the income boost you’re looking for.

Keep reading to find out what affiliate blogging is, how much you can make with an affiliate blog, and how to start an affiliate blog today.

Affiliate blogging is when you, a blogger, promote a product or service in original articles and include a unique link or discount code related to that item that identifies you as the source of traffic. When readers click on your link and/or purchase the item, you get a commission.

Affiliate marketing was developed as a way for businesses to promote products without spending vast amounts on advertising. It's a three-way relationship between the product/service provider, the affiliate blogger, and the reader-turned-buyer.

According to these 2020 affiliate marketing statistics, 48% of affiliate marketers with an established audience earn $20K per year. However, newer bloggers might start out making $5K per year. That $5K will grow as your readership grows.

How popular is being an affiliate blogger?

Around 84% of bloggers use affiliate marketing to monetize their content.

There are a few different affiliate commission fee structures:



• Pay-Per-Click: You get paid a certain amount every time someone clicks on your link or code.
• Pay-Per-Conversion: You get paid a certain amount when a reader completes a certain task, usually purchasing a product or signing up for a service.
• Revenue Sharing: You get a percentage of each sale that comes through your affiliate link.

Sometimes, affiliate programs offer tiered affiliate fee structures. For example, say you sign up for an affiliate program to sell subscriptions to a magazine. If you get 1-50 people to buy the subscription through your blog, you get a 10% commission. If you get 50-200 people to buy, you get a 20% commission rate.

Naturally, to get the most profit out of your affiliate blogging efforts, you should choose an affiliate program that offers a good payment structure.

To successfully start affiliate marketing with a blog, you need to create great content that draws in the kind of audience who would want to buy the products you are promoting.

One of the biggest mistakes a new blogger can make is choosing products to promote before coming up with the overall focus of their blog.

Decide what you should write about first, depending on your knowledge, interests, and the interests of buyers. Then choose a product or service to promote that you have tried and would want your name attached to.

Step 1: Choose a specific blogging niche.

Another mistake new bloggers make is choosing what to write without doing any research about what other people are interested in, and what topics are already oversaturated and hard to get into.

Before trying to break into a field where you will struggle to set yourself apart from the competition:

• Look up trending search keywords and topics with tools like Google Trends, Ahrefs keyword generator tool, and keywordtool.io
• Scope out trending topics on social media platforms
• Consider the kind of people you want to write for
• Ask yourself what your target readership would be interested in reading about
• Think about what your blog would have to offer your readers

While it might seem like you should choose a really broad blog category so that more people are interested, choosing a specific niche topic means there is less competition online and that your readers know exactly what they’re getting when they reach your blog.

For example, there are thousands of gardening blogs. There are substantially fewer blogs about growing mushrooms indoors, though.

And mushrooms (at the time of writing) are a really hot, trending topic.

Related: To learn more about keyword research and getting seen in search engine results, read this guide on SEO copywriting.

Step 2: Choose a place to house your blog.

You have two options when it comes to blogging: a blogging platform like Medium or your own independent website.

Blogging on a platform like Medium or on a free WordPress subdomain is a way to start blogging for absolutely no money. There are affiliate marketing guidelines you need to follow on free platforms, so be mindful of that if you decide to go this route.

If you decide to invest in your own blogging website, you can customize your site, build brand recognition, and expand into other forms of monetization (such as offering online courses or dropshipping) in the future, if you wanted to.

If you build your own website, start small. You don’t have to put a lot of money into web hosting, a web builder with several features, or paid website templates.

Choose a platform and web hosting provider you think you could grow with, and start on a lower-level plan. WordPress powers 37% of all websites as of 2021, and for a good reason.

Step 3: Choose the products/services you want to promote.

The products/services you choose should:



• Be things you use often
• Come from companies you stand behind (no gimmicks or schemes)
• Have no major flaws or have a majority of negative user reviews
• Align with the topic of posts and the overall subject of your blog
• Have a sensible affiliate program

Ideally, you should market things you have used for some time. But if you’re really not sure what you should start marketing, these are the 139 Best Affiliate Programs of 2022 (High Paying for Beginners). Look over them, try out the products that appeal to you, then sign up for an affiliate program.

Step 4: Build your content around your niche and your affiliate product offering.

The best affiliate marketing is subtle. You offer high-quality content for free, then naturally weave in how the product relates to the content and link to the product page.

Beauty and skincare articles are actually really great examples of good affiliate blogging.

For example, this article on how to start a skincare routine includes product recommendations (and product affiliate links) throughout the article. The article also links to review articles, lists of favorite products, etc.

Common high-value content ideas include:

• How-to articles
• Listicles (e.g. “the 10 best cities to live in 2022”)
• Reviews
• Product comparisons
• Survey results
• Guides

Note: You must write down somewhere (usually at the beginning of a post) that you will receive a commission if a reader buys a product you recommend. Let readers know that you have an objective opinion of the product, but also preserve transparency by letting them know that you will make money if they decide to act on your recommendation.

A growing majority of readers are aware that affiliate marketing is a thing. They aren’t easily fooled, but they are easily put off by random or poor-quality product recommendations.

Give honest reviews, be honest about who a product is for (and who it is not for), and be transparent about your affiliate marketing efforts.

Do all that, and your blog will be a trustworthy source of information for your readers.

Related: If earning money through affiliate marketing doesn’t sound right for you, read this post on how to start freelance digital marketing.