Starting your blog can be one of the great options to work from home and earn money online. You can write a blog about something you’re passionate and knowledgeable about, then monetize it to supplement your income. Unfortunately, many people still don’t know how to start an affiliate marketing blog. It’s the same with me when I just started to start my blog. I was struggling to learn from many resources to set up my affiliate blog.
Hence, I decided to write this step-by-step guide to start an affiliate blog. It’s not something complicated stuff like you’re afraid of. Instead, it doesn’t require any coding skills to start. Besides, the cost to start your blog is super cheap compared to any business mode like eCommerce that requires any upfront money to buy inventory and marketing costs. Please kindly note, when you have an affiliate blog, you can promote your blog with free traffic without spending any dime on ads.
Let’s break down the step-by-step strategies for how to start an affiliate marketing blog.
Table of Contents
Step 1: Determine and Validate your Blog Niche Market
Before you start your affiliate blog, you will need to determine your blog niche. If you can’t decide which niche you want to pursue in your blog. Here are several criteria you can use as consideration to choose your blog niche.
- The niche has a large audience base (Profitable Niche)
- The niche that has many products to sell
- The niche you are passionate and knowledgeable about
- The niche that has long-term potential like cooking, wealth, health, relationship, etc.
Let’s deep dive into how to find blog niche idea and validate.
Determine Blog Niche
Base on the above criteria, you will determine the niche for your blog. There are two most popular methods to determine your blog niche.
The first method, you can find niche ideas from Clickbank. It’s one of the biggest online retailers that sell digital and physical products. It can be a very good place to find niche ideas and validated the niche popularity. Since Clickbank has wide range variety niches, you can find the ideas in their affiliate marketplace section.
There is a niche category on the left side of the page (red box). You can find many new niche ideas from those lists, even narrowing it down to a micro-niche. Then we will validate it later.
In the second method, you can find niche ideas from Udemy. It’s one of the largest online course and education platforms. You can find the most popular niche in the main category and the sub-category as your blog’s niche idea.
Validate Blog Niche
After determining your affiliate blog’s niche, you will need to validate your niche ideas. The methodological approach to validate will be based on data-driven. As we know, that niche audience can be found in two places Google and Social Media. You will need to check whether there is a demand on the niche you have chosen, whether the demand higher on Google or Social Media. So you can focus your marketing effort on the right placement. Let’s break down the validation strategy.
Validation Method 1: Google demand check
Google demand check can determine the monthly search volume and the niche trend on Google. You will use two methods to validate it, first, by checking the monthly search volume (demand) using Google Keyword Planner, and second, validating the niche trend using Google Trend.
Let’s take an example, the home decor niche on Google Keyword Planner. The monthly search volume is average at around 100K-1M, which is a high-demand niche.
Talking about the benchmark number for the monthly search volume, here the benchmark number that you can use as a reference to determine whether it is a profitable niche or not.
Monthly Search Volume < 5,000 = Not a profitable niche
Monthly Search Volume 5,000-10,000 = Sweet spot (profitable niche)
Monthly Search Volume 10,000-50,000 = very profitable niche (but competitive)
Monthly Search Volume > 50,000 = Incredibly profitable niche (very competitive)
After knowing the monthly search volume, it’s important to validate your niche trend using Google Trend. We would like to know how was the niche search volume trend over the five past years. Whether it’s seasonal, evergreen, trending, uptrend, or declining? We want to avoid declining trend niche, sharp notches niche that seems to disappear quickly, and seasonal trend niche.
For example, if you choose the ice fishing niche, it’s mean your website will only get huge traffic and sale from Google in the winter season only while for the rest of the season, you are not making much money.
The trend niche that we are looking for was the steady niche evergreen or showing an uptrend curve. It means the demand for the niche keeps increasing time by time. Here is one good example of a home decor niche showing an evergreen and uptrend graph.
Validation Method 2: Audience Size on Social Media
After checking your niche’s demand on Google, you will need to check the demand on Social Media like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. Here we show you great tools from Facebook, which is free by using Facebook Audience Insight Tools. The benchmark number for Facebook and Instagram audience size must be at least 1 million people. If you find the market size is less than 1 million people, it will be difficult to scale larger due to less overall activity.
Next question, how do we determine the size of a market? You will need a Facebook Business Manager account which is used to run Facebook ads. Don’t worry; you are not going to spend a dime on advertising. The business manager account provides an awesome analytic tool called Audience Insights.
This tool will give you invaluable information; what you need to do is just enter the countries you want to focus on. In this example, we will use the food & drinks niche in the United States. Here the results of the Facebook Audience Insight tool for the food & drinks interest in the United States.
Facebook Audience Insight results give you information that the food & drinks niche Facebook audience size in United State is about 100M-150M people!!
Then, another good question coming out, can we know exactly how much the audience size for the food & drinks niche on IG only? Yes, of course!! Facebook Audience Insight only gives you an estimation of Facebook audience interested in food & drinks in the United States only, but didn’t give you information on how much the audience size on Instagram.
To get the audience size on Instagram for the food & drinks niche, You will need to access your Facebook Business Manager, then create a dummy ad. After choosing the campaign objective, you will be directed to Adset level. On the edit placement under Adset settings, you can choose the placement of your ads. The cool thing is the audience size on IG will be shown if you only mark the IG checkbox, as you can see from the picture below.
As you can see, Instagram’s audience size interesting in food & drinks will be 130M people, which is big!! It means your audience size for the food & drinks niche was big on Facebook and Instagram. You can promote any related product on that niche on Facebook and Instagram. It’s a very effective strategy to validate your audience size niche.
While on Pinterest, you can validate your niche audience size on the Pinterest audience insights. You will need to create your Pinterest business account to access this feature.
We can see that the food & drinks niche also has a large audience size on the Pinterest platform, which is 51% (half of the Pinterest users!). It’s a sign that you can promote any related product about the food & drinks niche on Pinterest also.
Step 2: Determine your target audience
Well, you have decided on your blog niche and validate it. The next step will be to determine your target audience. You will need to get an idea of what will be your blog reader avatars.
You can perform qualitative research to get an idea of who is your readers and what kind of information will be valuable for them. The easiest way you can do by spying on the brand product or services social media you want to promote as an affiliate. You will get a better picture of your blog reader by spying on the followers, likes, and comment from the social media brand page. So, you can tailor your blog content to make it fit your reader’s needs.
Step 3: Choosing a Blogging Platform
Regarding the blogging platform, you can use it to start an affiliate blog. I would like to recommend you use a self-hosted site for long-term business. I myself using Bluehost to set up my blog since it’s really cheap for the beginner who just started their blog.
I highly recommend you start your affiliate blog using Bluehost as your self-hosted site. You can start your blog very cheap, like 3.95 per month with a 1-year domain FREE. So, you don’t have to buy any extra cost domain. It’s easy to set up, and customer support will be available 24/7 to solve your issue.
Having self-hosted sites can bring you several benefits. There is no risk your content will be removed since you own your site. Many top bloggers achieved their great income results by using the self-hosted site.
Step 4: Setting Up Your Web Hosting
After you have chosen your blog hosting Bluehost which I highly recommend it. I will guide you step by step on setting it up to your blog with Bluehost, don’t worry. It’s super easy, simple, and fast.
Visit Bluehost homepage
Go to the Bluehost home page and click “Get Started.”
Choose your Hosting Plan
Then, you will need to choose your hosting plan. I highly recommend you choose a basic plan.
Enter Domain Name
You will need to put a domain name for your blog and find a simple domain name that easily spells and remembers for your reader.
Enter Your Account Information, Package, and Payment Information
In the next step, you will need to fill up your account information and choose the package. In order to get the lowest price benefit, you can take a 3-year package, which offers you $3.95/ month.
You don’t need to get any extra package at the beginning. Once your blogging starts making your first sale, you can consider taking the domain protection and site lock security package. Lastly, inputting your payment information and click “Submit.” You’re done!
If you need more in-depth tutorials step-by-step on how to set up your blog with Bluehost, you can follow this full complete tutorial.
Step 5: Create your First Blog Post
After you have finished setting up your site, you will need to create your first blog post to promote an affiliate product. There are three types of blog post content you can write to promote an affiliate blog.
Post Type 1: Tutorial Post
You can write a tutorial post about the product you want to promote. Usually, it’s applied to software products that need step-by-step guidance. By showing the step-by-step guidance, you can invite your reader to buy the product through your affiliate link.
If you want to increase your affiliate sales, you can send them special video records showing them how you use it to improve their business in exchange for buying through your affiliate link.
Post Type 2: Product Review Post
Product review posts are also popular since most people tend to research the product on the internet before buying it. Hence, providing a genuine review from your side about the product can help people have a point of view of the pros and cons before deciding to buy. As a thank you from your blog reader, they will buy the product through your affiliate link for providing your honest review about the product.
Post Type 3: Recommendation Post
You can write any blog post topic and promote the affiliate product indirectly in the middle of your blog post. This is just like your recommendation to solve any issue you have faced previously by referring your blog reader to use the product or services. Being honest with your reader is the key to writing your affiliate post recommendation.
Step 6: Find and Apply for Affiliate Program
After writing a blog post, you will need to apply the affiliate program to add your affiliate link to your blog post. You can promote affiliate products from affiliate networks like Clickbank, CJ Affiliate, JVZoo, Digitstore24, or Warrior Plus.
Some affiliate networks like ShareASale, Impact Radius, and Awin requires you to have a website. The acceptance rate can be higher if you apply by using a custom email domain like yourname@yourblogname.com. If you use Bluehost, they will give you a free custom email domain you can use. You can learn the step-by-step tutorial on how to set up your custom email domain from this complete tutorial.
You can also apply for a stand-alone independent affiliate program like a digital or physical product. Or even applying for Amazon and Etsy affiliate programs.
Congratulations! You have Set up Your Affiliate Blog
If you have followed all the steps above, you have successfully set up your first affiliate blog post. The next thing you need to do is writing more blog posts to promote the affiliate product. You feel burnout if you’re a completely new beginner in the blogging world. But, this is what sets apart between those who make it and don’t.
If you feel overwhelmed, you can take a break for a while and come back again. It’s about consistency. You don’t need to become a good writer to create a successful affiliate blog. I myself can be considered not a good writer. But, I can assure what I am writing can be understandable for my blog reader since English is not my first language.
Don’t forget to pin and follow me on Pinterest!
The key here is patience, persistence, and keep learning. Good luck in making your first affiliate blog. Let me know If you still have any questions about how to start an affiliate marketing blog, kindly drop a comment below.
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