Affiliate blog marketing strategies

There’s a lot that goes into building a website, starting a blog, and making money from affiliate links. I can’t cover everything in a single article, but I will point you in the right direction.

Here’s an overview of some things you’ll need to know to be successful at affiliate marketing and blogging:

Search engine optimization basics

I already mentioned how well SEO and affiliate marketing go together. 

SEO takes time to kick in (we found that it typically takes between three to six months to show results). But once it does, you are rewarded with consistent, recurring monthly traffic sent straight to your affiliate links—i.e., passive income.

For example, BankMyCell is an affiliate blog that gets over 200,000 visits from Google every month.
So what do you need to do in order to rank higher on Google? Three things:

Find the keywords people are searching for
Create high-quality content that matches the search intent of those keywords
Build links to that content from other websites
Of course, there’s more to SEO than these three things. But if you don’t get the basics right, the other stuff doesn’t matter. Check out our complete guide to SEO to learn more.

Social media marketing

While SEO takes a lot of time to work, social media can give you results much faster. But it requires near-daily effort to continue to perform—if you stop posting, traffic stops coming.

That said, social media is an important part of a good marketing strategy.

For example, Making Sense of Cents is one of the biggest financial blogs out there. Michelle Schroeder-Gardner, the owner, is an expert at affiliate marketing. She does a great job on social media:

~137,000 Facebook followers
~20,000 Twitter followers
~34,000 Instagram followers
~175,000 Pinterest followers
All that, in addition to over 20,000 monthly visitors from organic search, makes for a highly successful affiliate marketing blog.

How can it be done? Well, you can get inspiration from one of the blog’s contributors, who wrote a step-by-step guide on how she achieved so much success on Pinterest. You can read it here.

It boils down to:

Finding your niche.
Figuring out what kind of content people want and creating that content.
Sharing click-worthy photos and graphics.
That’s how things are done on Pinterest, and it’s pretty much the same requirements for other social media platforms. Basically, find your niche, share what people care about, and make your content click-worthy and engaging.

Email list building

The third organic marketing strategy that pairs well with affiliate blogging is an email newsletter.

Making Sense of Cents also has over 300,000 email subscribers, and this is actually where it makes the majority of its affiliate income.

How is it done? Here are some things I noticed about Michelle’s blog and email strategy:

1. She offers content upgrades on each of her blog posts, e.g., ebooks, spreadsheets, and printable PDFs in exchange for an email.

2. She has an email opt-in at the top of her homepage.


3. She promotes her online community via Facebook and gets people to subscribe to her newsletter through that community.


Check out this guide to learn more about how you can grow an email list on your blog.