Finally, before you start your affiliate marketing career, here are the last pieces of the puzzle you need to know before you start your affiliate blogging journey
It’s exciting! You decided you wanted to be an affiliate marketer, have your own blog, and make a ton of money.
Now you just need to create that blog and write some articles.
The problem is, again, you don’t know where to even start, or what to do first and you begin to realize all this affiliate marketing for beginners and blogging is not as simple as it first sounded.
It’s like that with everything new.
Seems hard and scary at first because you don’t know what the heck are you doing. That’s why you need to read blogs like this and listen to people like me who will put you on the right track.
In this article, I’m going to tell you more about things you should do before even launching your blog and what you should be careful about.
*For specific and more technical instructions on making a blog see my How to Start a Blog guide.
Let me save you a lot of time and headache, here’s what you’ll learn in this article.
Table of Contents
Let’s get started!
This article is a Part 3 guide from my Affiliate Marketing for Beginners series, linked below:
- Affiliate Marketing for Beginners – The Dark Side – Part 1
- Affiliate Marketing for Beginners – The Fundamentals – Part 2
- Affiliate Marketing for Beginners – Before You Start – Part 3 (this article)
What’s the SEO / Blogging niche all about anyway
As we determined in Part 2 of this series, your best bet is starting a blog in the SEO/Blogging niche.
You can do what you want, of course, this is just my advice. Everything I write here on this blog can be applied to any blog in any niche, maybe with a few changes here and there but the jist of it is the same.
If you want to start a blog in a different niche feel free to do so, just make sure you choose a niche that can be monetized, that has enough interest and pain points, and something you’re personally invested in.
For more info see my How to Choose a Niche guide.
Now back to SEO/Blogging niche, what does that even include?
Blogs? Websites? SEO? Internet marketing? Yeah, all that and more.
The whole idea is that, to make money online, you need a website.
To build a website you need a hosting (paid) and a domain (paid).
To create a nice-looking site you need a theme (free or paid).
To add additional functionalities to your website you need plugins (free or paid).
Then you need an email marketing provider (usually paid).
It all adds up quickly.
There’s so much going on here, new products and services are coming out every day, either to make people money or to save their time, and your job is to find the good ones out there and let your audience know about them.
The basics are always the same (domain, hosting, theme, SEO, email newsletter services) but nowadays there are many more you can use and recommend to your readers, and that means more commissions for you.
You can go really wide and cover everything or go specific and do just SEO or email marketing or just write about hostings. There’s a lot you can do here, but since you are a beginner and learning all that why not write about it all and specialize (niche-down) later?
Whatever you pick, and what I noticed by looking at various websites, most of them have kind of a personal blog, no matter if it’s in the travel niche, lifestyle niche, or any other non-blogging related, they all have a “How to start a blog” page where they promote mostly some hosting companies.
In other words, by doing this you’ll be able to apply what you do and learn in any other website or niche and make some extra cash with it. Even if you go with another niche you can always make money on the blogging niche.
Why creating a blog is the last thing you should do
Because you will lose precious time on things that don’t matter and you haven’t even written your first article.
Too many people (I was one of them) get sucked up in the blog styling, neverending WP theme research, thinking of categories, tags, plugins, and other things that don’t make any sense because no one even knows your blog exists.
Don’t get me started on logo design…
Remember that episode of F·R·I·E·N·D·S (my favorite show), where Phoebe teaches Joey how to play guitar but doesn’t allow him to even touch the guitar before he learns the basics?
Well, consider me your Phoebe.
Before you even touch on the subject of creating a blog you should at least have 3 articles written, all 3 with 1500 – 2500 words in them.
After you get those 3 done I’ll allow you to start playing with the fun stuff and start making your blog.
It’s going to be hard but you need to get a feeling of what’s it like to get a blogger.
Use your competitors as your inspiration and motivation
No one starts anything based on nothing.
This sounds a bit weird, but what I’m trying to say, we all find some kind of inspiration in other people’s work that we may also use for our own projects.
I’m not saying you should 100% copy someone, but you can definitely copy their tactics and what they do, just in a different way.
So before starting your blog go and find 10-20 blogs in your niche that are doing well (you can use my blog too), see what they are doing and how they are doing it.
Try to find patterns, if they all use the same tools, if they all cover the same topics, it might be a good idea for you to start the same.
Successful bloggers aren’t doing things just because, they did they research and planning and they had a good reason why they did something – because it converts and brings them results.
After you find those blogs check their blog posts, see what they write about, see which articles have the most comments, see what WordPress plugins they are using, see which pages they have on their site, see if they highlighted something on their blogs and try to understand why did they do it.
Then, write everything down and try to come up with a plan of your own based on the research you’ve just done.
How to start writing – topic choosing, research, planning, and organization
When it comes to money being made with blogging, most certainly it’s going to come to you from the reviews of tools and services.
Your first job is to look at the tools your competitors are using and see if they are a good fit.
Then, if they are, check if they have an affiliate program with good commissions and join that affiliate program.
And finally, buy the tool and use it on your blog.
Now, you have some real-life experience and you can write about it.
Not just that, you can put your affiliate link in the articles and be ready for monetization when the first visitors start checking your blog.
Type of articles to write about
You don’t have to write a review right away, there are many other article types you can choose from.
Overall there are 2 main types of articles – informational and transactional.
Informational articles are for people who want to find specific information about something (ex. How something is made, how to do something, etc.)
Transactional articles are for people who want to complete a certain action like making a purchase (what’s the cost of something, reviews of products/services, etc.)
For you as a beginner, it will be easier to write an informational article first, but if you’re feeling super confident you can start with a transactional one.
Don’t be fooled though, informational articles can also contain affiliate links and bring you some commission so don’t overlook those.
Now on to the actual article types you can write, here are some ideas:
- Listicles – such as Top 10 lists
- Comparisons VS – such as a comparison between two products or services
- Reviews – a single review of something
- How-to / Tutorials – specific how-to guides or tutorials on how to do or achieve something
- News – latest (big) news in your niche
- Case study – explain how you or someone else did something and what results did it bring you
- Interview – ask a few questions about some hot shot influencers in your niche
- Roundups – gather insights about a specific topic from 10+ people and make a roundup post
That about covers the most popular ones.
Pick the ones you like and start with those.
Why you shouldn’t care about SEO now
SEO is a complex, time-consuming game. If you’re just starting out with your blog sure, set up some SEO plugin, take care of your headlines to contain the most important keywords, but don’t lose focus of your main task right now – writing more content.
I’ll probably get burned by some SEOs out there but they all forgot what’s it like to be a new blogger and how quickly things can become overwhelming for you.
That’s why writing content is your most important skill to perfect in the beginning.
Later on, you can focus on SEO and other blog-related tasks.
How to make your blog stand out from all others
My first inspiration to start a blog was from Matthew Woodward and his own blog like 10 years ago when I saw how much money he was making with affiliate marketing just by writing product reviews.
He did it by writing detailed case studies and reviews of certain products, in a way that no one had done before.
And one blog post especially, about what was the best backlink checker between Ahrefs and Majestic SEO, brought a lot of controversy and debate among SEOs, and more importantly, got so much traffic to Matt’s blog.
That’s one way you can use to drive attention to your blog, do something that no one else has done before.
Another thing you can do is make your blog stand out is to make some visual changes on it. You can either show photos of yourself that are not plain boring as usual when you need to promote your lead magnets for example.
Or, on a serious note, you can show structured data about specific products where everyone else is just using pros and cons. You can have live streaming shows while you are doing something on or for your blog.
How to convert your struggles to strength
Google may be evil, but Google is still your friend.
When you start a blog you may struggle with some things more than the other ones but you can overcome every struggle with the help of specific tools.
English is not your 1st language? -> Use Grammarly to make your writing better
Have writer’s block? -> Use ChatGPT to make a first draft of your article
Don’t know which images to use? -> Google and see what your competitors are using
Don’t know how to create images? -> Use Canva
Whatever you are struggling with there were already countless of other bloggers with the same problem and in the meantime someone probably already made a solution for that struggle.
*That’s a great idea to remember to write about, fix your own problems and then teach others via your blog posts to do the same
If there isn’t a solution for your problem, come up with your own and sell it as a product or service (if you notice more people are having the same issue).
There’s nothing that can’t be solved or fixed when it comes to blogging and affiliate marketing. All answers are already out there, you just need to know where to look and how to look for them.
Signing up for affiliate programs or making a list of the ones you plan to use
While your blog is still in the works it’s time to sign up for some affiliate programs.
Consider these as your starting point:
- Hosting – The one you use (preferably but not obligatory; you can sign up for more and make a comparison post)
- Theme – If you are using (plan on using) a paid one, or recommend several sources to get themes
- SEO – Plugins like WP Rocket are always good to promote
- Page builder – Thrive Architect, Elementor, choose your weapon
Rule 1: Before start promotes your affiliate product, think about what you want to consider this product for yourself. If the answer is no then stop promoting and consider a better product for your audience.
Rule 2: Get a standard, don’t promote shitty products just for some money. And I learned this rule the hard way.
Rule 3: Consider what types of questions you ask yourself before buying any product. Then create your affiliate product-related content a
How to quickly make a blog that’s user-friendly and good-looking at the same time
Coming soon…
