Add Affiliate Marketing to Your Blogging Arsenal.

How can bloggers take the next step to becoming great affiliate marketers? After all, bloggers are sending readers to links every day with their posts. They’re bringing their focus and passion to topics of their choosing, and they’re creating compelling, unique content that helps to bring in an online audience. So why not develop some affiliate relationships and start to expand the income streams?

Sometimes it just helps to know where to start. After all, the very essence of affiliate marketing is similar to blog links—sending traffic to a link offered from a merchant or network. If readers go and buy, you get paid.

Many bloggers that come to affiliate marketing do so to build ancillary streams of income. That’s natural as blogging is a low-pay and high-compete market. Adding affiliate marketing tactics to a well-read blog can help generate the kind of income envisioned.

Let’s break down what bloggers will need to get the most from affiliate marketing.

Blogging Activity

Blogging takes up a lot of writing and blog structure time depending on the industry focus. What happens with the blog is entirely up to the person. Depending on the time, energy, and effort poured into it, levels of posting, social media, and SEO activity, a blogger can turn the blog into a required reading source. It can also turn into another source of income. Some bloggers use relationships with marketers wisely and help both parties make some money via the transaction.

Growing The Blog

First, bloggers should brush up on a few affiliate marketer elementary steps. They should ask themselves first how they want to grow their blog. Do they want to use it as a springboard to conference speaking gigs? Or do they want to help buildup lists on the way to a fully-formed affiliate marketing program?

Building a successful online business in affiliate marketing, often requires good content marketing. If you’re serious about using your blogging and content skills in affiliate marketing, then you’re already aware of how much work there will be involved. Even for great writers and bloggers, writing blog posts daily and producing content consistently requires a good deal of patience and hard work.

Taking The Steps

Many bloggers start with affiliate marketing by using their network, reaching out to readers and sponsors, building up their industry contacts, and more. Young PRepro suggests using your blogging skills to create unique content for affiliate marketing campaigns. Think about how best to serve your subscribers and how to buildup your email list. Hopefully all bloggers have emails from their readers, advertisers, and audience members.

They should have a feel for the type of products they want to market. Typical affiliate marketing products include: digital products, physical products, services, membership websites, and recurring-subscription software packages. Commission levels and marketing options vary for each of these.

Advertiser Relationships

Some bloggers enter into specific relationships with online marketers and receive codes for an advertiser, text, or product links. In affiliate marketing deals, advertisers pay a publisher when a reader buys something from the advertiser or subscribes to the service offered. Experts suggest that you research the top ten affiliate programs known for having solid business practices, like on-time payments and having a large bank of available offerings. That will help to grow your blog, affiliate link sites, and reputation in the industry.

Search Keywords

Using keywords wisely helps both bloggers and marketers. A good tip for advertisers is to monitor the keywords in its affiliate program. For instance, if you’re an advertiser in the auto insurance vertical, monitoring SEO mentions of key phrases like “auto insurance” and “car insurance” will not only help keep your finger on the pulse of the industry, but also assist you in identifying new prospective affiliates.

Research Affiliate Programs

One of the biggest hurdles for bloggers with a reasonably-sized reading audience is the sheer number of affiliate programs available. Bloggers can choose from several business models for affiliate marketing activity. You can create a single website for a single product or develop a site for a variety of affiliate products. Talk to other bloggers in online forums to get a sense of the strengths and pitfalls of each activity. The setup and follow-through for these affiliate programs involves different implementation steps, but all will generally benefit from similar marketing techniques.

One affiliate program, AARP Auto Insurance, presents users with a chance to earn commissions for referring visitors to purchase their car insurance. According to the information, the first time a user sends a lead, you earn an extra $10. This revenue share increases as the user brings more traffic flow from users who complete a free auto insurance quote.

Affiliate marketing is growing fast, and expectations for more blogger-marketer relationships are expected in 2013. Be ready for the next marketing revolution.

Here are some additional tips for bloggers looking to move into affiliate marketing:

Affiliate Marketing Basics

A number of guides are online to better understand the techniques, marketing standards, payment structure, terminology, and more. Some sites include Affiliate Marketing Basics or Affiliate Marketer Guides. Check these if you’re new to affiliate marketing. These will include tips on learning how to increase your blog traffic with affiliate marketing.

Choose the Right Plan

Like most other businesses, there are a wide variety of services, vendors, and plans available to bloggers in the marketing space. Check out affiliate program directories to learn about different types of programs, and see which ones make the best fit for your blog’s theme or focus. Then find out which ones pay best, and choose your provider based on all the criteria on hand.

Find the Right Affiliates

Online marketers in affiliate programs should have a link on their sites to direct you to their particular programs. Click around to different affiliate sites and learn how the specific program works and what requirements, specification, and deadlines you’ll need to know about.

Check Similar Blogs

If you’re uncertain where to add the affiliate marketing links on your blog, visit other websites like yours to see where they place banners, links, tower ads on the sides of pages, and more. Some blog posts will be labeled “sponsored” and will include certain affiliate links or text. Click over to these ads and familiarize yourself with the user experience for your blog.

Simply Experiment

Sign your blog up as an affiliate and start to place ads on your site. You’ll soon start to see what works with your readers and your site’s look and feel. As you get a grip on a marketing program, you’ll start to see what works best for your site and what produces a steady stream of web income.

Author: Clara Brink

Courtesy of www.revenews.com