Blogging vs Affiliate Marketing – Your Complete 2022 Guide

Passive income is one of the trendiest buzzwords sweeping through to digital marketing and entrepreneurship worlds for the past number of years.

While these two strategies often go hand in hand, in this article we will have a look at the key components of each, pros and cons of each method on how they can work together to provide you with financial freedom, a stable and sustainable income quality assets that you can sell for 24 months earnings.

Blogging refers to creating content on your website that provides value for its readers and affiliate marketing is when you recommend products and services to potential customers and get a Commission when the customer buys.

If you are reading this article, you might have heard these terms popping up over and over again and you want to find out more about what each of them are and how they are related and what are the keys to success with each method.

What Is Blogging

Blogging is writing content in a topic that you are passionate about in the hope of providing value and useful information to potential readers. This leads to stable traffic that can be monetized using various methods including Affiliate Marketing.

Blogging usually starts out as a hobby on the side and only your friends and family will venture to your blog in your early days.

A lot of people that I have seen, give up after some time as they are not seen any return or are not fully sure how blogging works to generate income in detail. These same people make come back 6 months later and be amazed that their articles are getting a tons of hits online.

This propels them to write more and the rest is usually history. They start generating more and more traffic and start to discover other bloggers who are making a ton more money than they are and they are eager to learn how to get a slice of the pie.

They quickly learn the various ways to monetize their content like Ad Networks, Accepting Guest Posts, Digital Products and one of the most lucrative options, Affiliate Marketing.

What Is Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the process of referring an audience to buy certain products and getting a sale when the customer buys through their link. Since Pro Bloggers have large audiences, often in the market to buy products, Blogging and affiliate marketing are a perfect marriage.

Almost all serious bloggers are also affiliate marketers but not all affiliate marketers are bloggers. Affiliates can utilize Youtube, Social Media, Paid Ads and Email marketing can all offer tremendous returns when done right.

Affiliate marketing is an industry that is experiencing huge growth as it is a win-win-win for the referrer, the customer and the eventual seller. As bigger companies wake up to the benefits of affiliate, they are all getting involved and starting their own affiliate programs.

If you know a company that doesn’t do affiliate, check back in 12 months and they more than likely will. Almost all big companies have them already!

Stages Of A Successful Blog

Success leaves clues.

Having built multiple successful blogs, We know exactly what goes into a successful one and how to maximise your revenue.

The main key to success with your blog is to work hard and to work smart.

Writing quality content that people are actually searching for and letting Google now what you want the post to rank for is the best way to do.

Weigh up the competition for each search term you want to rank for and then writing a better post than what is currently there will allow you to take the top spot 9 times out of 10.

How To Start A Profitable Blog

  • Pick A Niche That People Are Passionate About And If They Have Money, That’s A Big Bonus
  • Do Your Blog Title Research And Create A List Of Blogs You Are Going To Write.
  • Weigh Up The Competition And Make Sure You Outrank Them By Writing A Longer And Better Post
  • Be Prepared To Wait To Get Traffic As Google Will Take Around 3 Months To Index Your Site And Start Ranking It.
  • Monetize Your Site With Ad Networks Like Ad Sense, Ezoic And Mediavine.
  • Add Affiliate Links To The Mix To Maximise Your Income
  • Create Digital Products, Online Courses And Membership Sites To Move To The Next Level.
  • Check Your Progress With Analytics, AHrefs or Moz And Google Search Console
  • Rinse And Repeat

This may sound quite straight forward but just like any business, it takes a great amount of hard work and consistency to get it off the ground. You also need to be incredibly patient as you site will sit idle with no traffic for a long time and you will question whether it will ever take off. That is completely normal so keep the faith in the process!

What makes blogging so attractive is that once you have put in the work, it will generate income for years to come into the future unlike traditional jobs where you are constantly selling you time for money or ‘Running on a threadmill’.

How To Be Successful In Affiliate Marketing

The best way to be successful in affiliate marketing, I have found to date is through blogging. You can slip product recommendations with links into your regular blogs or you can create recommended gear pages which cover all of best products you think people should buy who are in your industry and two types of product reviews that we recommend.

Singular Review:

It is probably best to actually have the product and review your thoughts of the product but not 100% necessary.

Cover topics like under headings like:

  • Intro And Your Personal Experience Of The Benefits:
  • What Do You Get With The Product
  • How Did It Perform
  • What Was The Value And Quality Like
  • Pros And Cons Of The Product
  • Other Products Worth Recommending
  • Do We Recommend Buying
  • Where To See More Reviews And Get The Best Price

Be Truthful

Don’t fall into the trap of always recommending the user to buy the product, you can’t generate any trust with the reader. If there are 10 beginner golf sets and you review all of them saying they are the best ever, the customer isn’t going to trust you and buy.

By including the other products we recommend at the bottom, we can recommend the best product no matter what review they came to the site for. This has generated a ton more sales for me than simply being a ‘Yes’ reviewer and the logic makes sense.

You can even have different favourites at different price points for each category.

The Vs Post

This is one of the secret sauce methods that is often overlooked by bloggers. People like comparing products against each other to see which is better and they don’t want just a list of features, they want to know about performance, value, durability and price as well.

Writing a quality vs. post can generate a huge amount of affiliate commissions for you.

Load The Sidebar

We load our sidebars but with the best selling products from the best selling categories within the blog niche. We make it look good and we entice the user to go shopping.

You will have to join our online course to get more of the secret sauce and proven methods that have gotten us to top over and over again.

Social Media

Social Media is a powerful tool for targeting audiences with products that they may like whether that is cold traffic or through remarketing.

Offering affiliate products on groups and paid ads is common place but there is a lot of spammy crap that goes on in these social media groups.

The most effective ways I have seen with social media is in placing your Facebook pixel on your site and then any visitors to the site see Facebook Ads to sign up for your course, maybe with a discount or if people were shopping certain reviews on your site to invite them back to best list of that particular item to move to closer to buying and increasing your affiliate commissions.

You can also use highly specific targeting to run ads for affiliate products but you need to make sure the commissions are high enough to cover the cost of the Ads and the

Youtube For Affiliates

Youtube has exploded on the scene over the past number of years as one of the best ways to create a highly engaged audience in a short amount of time. Granted, jumping on the camera and producing a quality series of videos that people want to watch and get value from is not a super easy thing to be able to do.

Plenty of people will shy away from the camera but if you follow the template we have set out, not only will you be able to generate views and subscriptions easily, you will also be able to push people towards affiliate products.

We have even seen people being super successful doing product reviews with Powerpoint videos that are just like blog posts except with some music, visuals and someone doing voiceovers.

The truth is, generating affiliate sales through Youtube can be much faster and even more successful than blogging these days because the competition is so low.

If you do a search for a highly competitive term on Google, you are likely to see 10s of quality blogs addressing that already but on YouTube the same competition just does not exist and your video can be getting views that very day.

YouTube is probably the biggest opportunity on the Internet right now and as always make sure that you only recommend products that you would consider buying yourself.

Paid Ads

Once you have been in the blogging game for awhile and you know which page is making the most money you can even start to run paid ads to those pages true Google ads in Bing Ads. That is effectively paying a small amount every time someone clicks through to your page and it’s a great way to scale an already profitable page.

since the costs of paid ads can add up quite quickly, you need to be tracking the cost versus the amount that’s coming in and also making sure that your page is designed with maximum efficiency and with conversions in mind.

Pros And Cons Of Blogging

Pros

  • Sustainable And Stable Income Every Month
  • Huge Amount Of Demand For Valuable Info
  • High Resale Values
  • Highly Monetizable And Scalable
  • Become An Influencer In Your Industry
  • Turn Your Passion Into Profits

Cons

  • Takes A Long Time To Become Profitable
  • It Is A Lot Of Hard Work
  • More And More Competition Over Time

Pros And Cons Of Affiliate

Pros

  • Make Money Quickly
  • Tons Of Ways To Promote Producte
  • Risk Free
  • No Start Up Capital Needed
  • Can Be Highly Lucrative
  • Can Be Quite Passive

Cons

  • Offers Change All The Time
  • Increasing Competition
  • No Guarantee Of Success
  • Sometimes Companies Don’t Pay

Best Affiliate Programs For Beginners

Amazon Affiliates

Amazon is the go to affiliate program for 99% of bloggers and affiliate marketers although they continue to reduce their commissions making it less attractive for new marketers to get involved in case they change their fee structures downwards again.

Most commission rates on amazon are now sitting at 3% with some categories like physical books still sitting at 4.5%

EBAY Partner Program

When Amazon drops it affiliate commission rates, Ebay licks its lips because it knows that more and more people will start sending their audience to its platform in order to avail of the higher 5-7% commissions rates and impressive conversions statistics.

Ebay has all of the products you could want as well and a trusted name in the industry. With Ebay you get up to 50 -70% of their revenue from the sale with is usually 10%. When you sell an item for $100 you can expect to keep $6 in commissions as opposed to 3% with Amazon.

One good strategy is to include links to both and let the customer decide and if Amazon cuts further, just remove their link.

Other Affiliate Platforms

There are other Affiliate platforms out there like Clickbank and CJ Affiliate that have all sort of merchants offering attractive commission rates and out current favourite, Impact Radius who have a ton of quality merchants with attractive rates and precision measurement, so be sure to check them out.

Conclusion

Blogging and Affiliate marketing work best in the same campaign. If you create Blog posts that are generating traffic every day and pushing the audience towards the genuinely best products and if you follow our 5 step program towards a successful blog, you can make a genuinely large income every month from Digital Products, Affiliate Marketing and Ad Networks.

If you want to buy your financial freedom and put an income in place that allows you to do the work you want to do every day, you have got to look at Blogging with affiliate marketing as one of the very best ways to do it with Youtube also being an alternative to blogging and probably the best opportunity in the digital world for creating a stable income at this time.