Make Money From Affiliate Marketing

Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? That you can make money from affiliate marketing on auto-pilot. It’s one of the only legit monetization methods that earns you money 24/7/365. Literally while you sleep!

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a gently persuasive promotional strategy involving the marketing of a third party’s products or services with the aim of helping people to achieve their objectives or find solutions to their problems. In short, it’s solution selling.

How do you make money from affiliate marketing?

As a referrer, you earn a referral fee (commission), paid by the product or provider or affiliate network, on the successful purchase of a product by the user.

What is an Affiliate Network?

An affiliate network is a portal that provides multiple affiliate marketing opportunities to publishers (referrers) through a collection (network) of member merchants (product providers) who offer affiliate marketing programs as a means to promote their products. This collective is beneficial for merchants in that it exposes them to a wider audience of publishers than they may be able to expose themselves to individually, while benefiting publishers in that they will be exposed to a wider variety of affiliate marketing companies and products. This arrangement is beneficial for publishers as the network can aggregate commissions and it further reduces the risk of non payment by merchants.

As you will have gleaned, there are essentially 3 parties involved in the affiliate marketing process and a 4th if there’s an affiliate marketing network.

The publisher (yourself).
The merchant (product provider).
The customer (product purchaser)

I don’t want to make affiliate marketing sound like a walk in the park. Because it’s not.

Like any other business, it takes hard work and dedication. But after the initial effort required to create and build up your blog’s content library, you will be able to monetize it for years into the future on full auto-pilot.

While most of the other monetization methods you’ll read about on the internet don’t work, affiliate marketing works and is a genuinely honest way engender passive income from the sale of products and services that you promote but don’t personally have to develop.

When creating your content, always remember that the secret to closing sales, and keeping them closed, is to market in a way that makes purchasers feel like they’ve bought something that will make their lives easier, not like they’ve been sold something.

This requires a special approach.

You must become adept at creating valuable, scalable, evergreen content that helps people, in a “non-salesy” way, to solve their problems or answer their questions.

To this end, you’ll introduce them to products or services that provide tangible solutions, allowing them to work faster, more reliably and efficiently and in a streamlined and automated manner that reduces stress and frees up time to concentrate on income generating activities whilst allowing for a more relaxed lifestyle.

When you recommend products that people really need and want, they’ll develop trust in you and you’ll stand a far greater chance of doing repeat business with them over the years to come.

In short, affiliate marketing is as much about nurturing relationships as it is about recommending the most fitting products. It’s about placing your audience’s needs first and letting your own needs play second fiddle.

I encourage you not to think about selling. Focus only on teaching.

The money will take care of itself!

The rest of this article focuses where to start with affiliate marketing and the steps you need to take to become successful at making money from affiliate marketing.

Find, Research And Define Your Niche

Users search the internet for information. Not just any information but information that provides them with solutions to their problems.

Finding a blog niche then, involves nothing more than understanding what people need and then “selling” them solutions, not features and benefits.

A specific niche is necessary to become an authority in the area in which you specialize.

When choosing a niche, ask yourself whether:

The niche is in demand.
You can make money from the niche.
You will be able to create plenty of content around the niche

If you can’t answer yes to any of the above, then it’s not a good niche for you.

You don’t have to be wildly passionate about the niche but it’s probably important to choose something you would enjoy writing about.

Passion doesn’t guarantee you a paycheck. You may be passionate about survival weapons but it doesn’t mean that there are enough people out there to support a business on the back of it.

You can always learn new skills in an unfamiliar niche.

As long as you’re up for the challenge and able to enjoy writing about the subject, you’ll be fine. But if you absolutely dislike the subject matter, you’re going to find it enormously difficult to consistently write content.

If you’re lucky enough to find a niche that’s in demand and that you’re passionate about, that’s a bonus.

But ultimately, your success in affiliate marketing will be dependent on supply and demand coupled with your ability to help people solve their problems and overcome their pain points.

How To Determine If The Niche Is In Demand

The last thing you want is to pour all of your time and effort into a niche that’s has low demand or is declining in demand and popularity.

The easiest way to judge long term demand is to enter your blog niche idea into Google Trends.

The “weight training” niche reveals that there is good interest in the topic and the trend over the last 5 years is stable.

Whilst the niche may be a little too broad (as explained shortly) it will nevertheless attract a good audience. In turn, this means you will be able to drive enough traffic to your blog to sustain a business.

Google Trends is one of the best ways to judge interest in a topic.

Whilst certain affiliate networks such as Clickbank also provide metrics, I would be a little wary of their accuracy. They are probably better for finding products than for determining niches. While they may give some direction, they are published in the interests of the network’s own business operations.

Here’s an example.

Choose your category from the options on the left side of the page and check out the results.

A higher gravity indicates higher demand for a specific product.

NOTE: The gravity rating is based on the number of affiliates that earned commission from a specific product over the previous 12 weeks. It does not indicate demand for the overall niche.

Grav – Short for GRAVITY™ performance statistic, this number represents a unique calculation by ClickBank that takes into account the number of different affiliates who earned a commission by promoting this product over the past 12 weeks. Since more recent transactions are given a higher value, this number can give you an idea of what products are “hot” at the moment
Clickbank knowledgebase

How To Determine Competitiveness Of The Niche

The greater the number of search queries, the bigger the niche and the greater the competition will be. For each search result, Google provides the number of searches.

Please don’t rely on this number.

According to a Google product expert the number is essentially meaningless and you are encouraged not to place any reliance on it.

The niche is way too broad but I used the seed keyword to show you how to hone in on keywords not to narrow down your niche and then determine on a micro level whether there will be sufficient subject matter (with lower competition) to support a wide variety of content that you can rank for and monetize.

Scroll down to the related searches at the bottom of the results page.

Let’s try “weight training exercises”.

Still too broad to determine competitiveness of micro subject matter, but a better starting point.

Now dial up Ubersuggest to look for additional keywords related to this blog topic. This has become my free “go to” keyword research tool. It helps me by providing not only keywords but also the ability to rank on Google.

We’ll start over again with the broadest keyword, simply to illustrate how different the search results number is compared to what Google showed us.

The search term “weight training ” reveals 12,100 monthly searches which is great.

The ability to rank within the first 20 search results is 72% (100-28), which is also good.

However, the CPC column (cost per click) reveals that nobody is paying for advertising for this keyword ($0.00), confirming that the keyword is, in fact, too broad.

This makes sense because weight training could be undertaken by people for the purpose of bodybuilding, strength training, high intensity interval training (HIIT), fitness or weight loss. Because of its broad nature, it’s impossible to determine your audience.

“Weight training exercises” has 1000 monthly searches, which is to be expected for a less competitive keyword.

There’s an 82% chance of ranking and businesses are paying for advertising.

However, I wouldn’t be too happy yet because we still can’t determine our audience, i.e. weight training exercises for who and for what purpose?

We need some more specific keywords.

Weight training exercises for weight loss is becoming more specific but as you see, search volume is very low and nobody is advertising.

Nevertheless, the search results reveal a number of other keywords that are perfect for content creation, show low competition and good ability to rank in SERP.

With 260 monthly searches, an 89% chance of ranking within the top 20 search results (low competition) and paid advertising of $6.18, “weight lifting for weight loss male” is an ideal keyword for (micro) content creation.

And as you can see, there are plenty of others too.

Take Away: Good (long tail) keywords are those that reflect:

Low search volumes.
LOW COMPETITION.
A good chance of ranking in Google SERP (over 70% – SD of under 30).
Advertisers are willing to pay for.

The public internet has been operating for approximately 27 years.

As of 2018, there were 1.8 billion websites on the worldwide web. If you think you’re going to find a niche with huge volumes of interest and little to no competition, you’re not.

All the best niches have been explored. They’re all competitive. But that’s actually a good thing because it means that there’s money to be made from them.

I’d be really concerned entering a niche with little to no competition.

Don’t Niche Down Too Much

When you fish with a rod, you can only catch a single fish at a time. But if you went out on a fishing boat, dropped a net into the water and trawled for 30 minutes, you’d likely catch hundreds of fish.

Same with an audience.

Isn’t it better to make decisions based on what your audience wants rather than what you think they want?

Widen your net and get it straight from the horse’s mouth!

You can always cater to a smaller segment of your niche by writing posts that target them specifically.

For example, an article like “weight training exercises for women over 40” would be quite focused.

But at the same time, you can write about “weight training exercises for improved strength”. A catch all type article.

And the beauty of a wider audience in a broader niche is that you also widen your earnings potential.

How To Determine Whether The Niche Can Be Monetized

The whole objective here is to be able to earn money with affiliate marketing so you need to look at how you are going to monetize your blog.

Here’s an easy way to judge, straight off the bat, whether your niche can be monetized.

Perform a google search for the topic in question.

If businesses are advertising for that search term it’s an indication that the topic is profitable.

In the weight training niche there are likely to be hundreds of products that you could earn from by way of affiliate marketing sales, especially with the Amazon Affiliate program.

This leads me to the second method.

On the search results page, check through the top few articles to see how those blogs monetize their posts. This will give you a good idea of which monetization methods are working in that niche.

Determine If You’ll Be Able To Produce Plenty Of Content

Attempting to make money from affiliate marketing on the back of thin content, can never work.

The only way you’ll see any success in selling affiliate products is to have an intricate understanding of:

The problems that users have and need to overcome.
What they want to achieve.
What holds them back from purchasing products that can genuinely make their lives easier.
Working knowledge of the products that will help them to become more productive whilst removing the negative thoughts that arise from the above mentioned issues.

This requires a good deal of explaining through content that subtly convinces them that the product you are explaining will adequately meet their needs.

There are likely to be five main reasons that cause problems with producing content.

Some niches don’t lend themselves well to being able to write plenty of content.
You abhor the niche.
You haven’t used the products you are writing about and lack the understanding needed to promote them.
You don’t enjoy writing.
You lack the time to devote to becoming successful.

If you foresee a problem with any of these aspects, choose a different niche – or profession.

Choose Your Affiliate Products (Programs)

Now that you’ve found your niche, it’s time to choose what products you’re going to market to your readers.

It’s better to promote just a few good products that you know really well rather than a bunch you know very little about.

In the first instance, you need to ensure that you never break the trust you have built with your audience.

Secondly, you must be able to create in-depth content around the products that you’ll be marketing. You’ll be more successful at making money from affiliate marketing by concentrating on delivering content to you audience that demonstrates how a product has helped you personally. In so doing, you’ll never look as though you’re selling a product or promoting a feature but rather providing a solution that your audience is likely to need in the same way that you did.

Naturally, this approach requires an in-depth and working knowledge of the products that you’ll be marketing, hence the need to use, or have used, the products yourself. A lack of working knowledge of a product sticks out like a sore thumb.

I encourage you NOT to “run the numbers”. If you’re going to choose affiliate programs based on the highest commission rates, you’re destined for failure.

I can sympathize if you feel it’s not worth spending huge amounts of time promoting products that pay peanuts. I felt the same way initially. But it’s pure economics approach. I recommend Namecheap from time to time as a domain registrar and I earn $2.40 on a $12 domain. I certainly don’t do it for the money. I do it to look after my audience. I have found that bigger things follow. After the domain purchase comes hosting, themes and caching. That’s where I make some lolly! But if I let that little service slip through the cracks, I’ll lose customers to someone else who’s committed to building their online business through relationships and the best possible service. And incidentally, I don’t have to spend much more than a minute dropping an affiliate link like Namecheap into my content!

Another thing to be mindful of …

Affiliate programs showing high reversal rates don’t necessarily make them unsuitable for promoting. Those stats can easily come from poor promotion.

WPEngine is a prime example. A $200 commission is quite enticing for anyone, but there are affiliate marketers out there who, in chase of a quick buck, may mislead consumers thereby resulting in reversals.

WPEngine is an extremely solid hosting provider. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you any different. When it comes to hosting, the real test is when you make websites fast and scalable under traffic. Big traffic. That’s when you wave good bye to shared hosting and say hello to WPEngine.

Choose programs / products that are best for your audience, not yourself. The rest will take care of itself.

Once a product fits in with your own values, it will resonate and fit in with the values of your users in a similar way.

So like I said before, focus on teaching, not selling. Your audience will be thankful to you and therefore more inclined to click on your affiliate links.

How To Find Affiliate Programs / Products

There are two ways to find and research affiliate programs.

If you’re already using a product that you enjoy and know will benefit your readers, you’ll normally find a link to their affiliate program in the footer of their website. If not, do a Google search for “company name + affiliate program”.

The second way is to find products / programs via an affiliate network such as Shareasale.

An affiliate network serves two purposes:

It’a a network comprising many different affiliate programs that acts as an intermediary between affiliate program developers and affiliate marketers, making it easy to find multiple affiliate programs for use on your site whilst also making it easy to register for affiliate programs and aggregating commission payments.
It provides developers (product developers) with greater exposure to affiliate marketers that may not otherwise be reached. They may also include benefits such as payment processing and tracking technology.

Popular Affiliate Networks

Viglink – The ultimate way to monetize your site. Viglink scans your website for link opportunities and then automatically adds links to monetize your site. It turns your outbound links into affiliate links allowing you to earn money when you wouldn’t normally. Merchant members include: eBay, Nike, Amazon, AliExpress but there are thousands more spanning almost every vertical.
ShareASale – My personal favorite. Thousands of products under their belt. 3900+ affiliate programs, Verticals include (over 40 in total): Home and Garden, Fashion, Business and tons more. Examples include: Studiopress, WP Rocket, WPEngine, Namecheap.
Clickbank – One of the oldest. Main focus is digital products. 6+ million unique products. Examles include: Freemake Video Converter, Affiliorama.
CJ Affiliate (was Commission Junction). Examples include: Verizon, Walgreen, GoDaddy, Sunglass Hut, Nike.
Impact Radius – A network offering a platform to track affiliate performance. Examples include: Stackpath CDN, Shutterstock, Airbnb, Gravity Forms.
Rakuten (was Buy.com, LinkShare) – One of the top e-commerce companies around. 90,000+ Products. Examples include: Walmart, Macy’s, Udemy.
FlexOffers – 12,000+ Affiliate programs. Millions of products spanning all verticals. Examples include: AppSumo, Beaurepaires, Crabtree UK.
PeerFly – An affiliate ad network. Accepts publishers (you) in any vertical. Examples include: Fiverr, CBS, Uber, McAfee, Target.

e-Commerce Affiliate Programs

Amazon Associates – Everyone knows Amazon. Founded by Jeff Bezos, it’s the largest e-commerce marketplace in the world (+ cloud computing) offering an affiliate program spanning over 1 million products in every category you can think of PLUS you can earn from Special Program Earnings, Prime Video Channels and a Trade-In Program (USA). Commissions vary by category up to a maximum of 10%. Here’s a fees schedule. Before joining Amazon, please do your research on the affiliate program. They have different rules to other affiliate programs in terms of links (may not be cloaked), promotional methods (online only – no email, eBooks etc.), social media promotion and disclaimers, among a large list of others. Failing to comply with Amazon’s Terms Of Service will get you banned. Furthermore, if you start a blog based on the Amazon affiliate program, be wary of just copying and pasting product descriptions onto product pages on your blog. Google may slap you on the wrists for thin and duplicate content. Don’t be discouraged. It’s a great program. I’m just giving you a heads up.
eBay Partner Network (ePN) – Monetize your site with products spanning the globe. Commission is category dependent and ranges from 40% to 80%. Affiliates who have accumulated earnings of at least $25 in their home currency (USD, Euro, CAD, AUD, GBP) are paid each month, either by way of direct deposit (available in 11 countries) or PayPal, both of which are free. The only drawback is the cookie duration of 24 hours.
AliExpress – Also an e-Commerce site offering an affiliate program as well as a drop shipping program. You can combine the two for boosted earnings. Commission rates 3% to 9%. Check out the schedule.
Etsy – A marketplace where global audiences connect to buy and sell handmade and vintage items. The affiliate program is similar to Amazon, allowing you to link to Etsy products and earn a commission on successful sales. Cashback and voucher sites are not eligible for the affiliate program. Cookie duration is 30 days.

Recommended WordPress Affiliate Programs

Cloudways

Cloudways runs a really good cloud hosting platform.

Now most people aren’t techie enough to setup and manage their own cloud servers.

So that’s where Cloudways becomes a viable proposition. They offer managed cloud hosting through one of 5 of the top cloud platforms.

Through Cloudways, you can set up a hosting server on either Digital Ocean, VULTR, Amazon, Google or Linode. The choice is your’s.

Besides being very innovative in other ways, they offer a really nice choice of commission strucure. You can opt for either a slab or hybrid structure.

The Slab (tiered) structure works as follows:

Leads	Amount	End Year 1	End Year 3	End Year 5
1-5	$50	$600 – $3K	$1.8K – $9K	$3K – $15K
6-20	$75	$5.4K – $18K	$16.2K – $54K	$27K – $90K
21-45	$100	$25.2K – $54K	$75.6K – $162K	$126K – $270K
46-80	$125	$69K – $120K	$207K – $360	$345K – $600K
80+	Custom	Custom	Custom	Custom

With the slab structure it doesn’t matter whether you sell the cheapest or the most expensive plan – the commission is constant.

The Hybrid structure provides for a regular recurring lifetime commission. It’s a nice way to build a passive income stream, but because the initial commission is lower it will take some years for this structure to catch up with the slab structure. It all depends on what plans your referred customers opt for. The more expensive the plan, the greater your earnings will be.

Initial commission: $30 per sale.
Recurring lifetime commission: 7%.

Here’s an illustration based on an average plan – a 2GB plan with Digital Ocean ($22p.m.). NOTE: Some rounding has been used in this table in order to save space.

Leads	Amount	End Year 1	End Year 3	End Year 5
1-5	$30+7%	$462 – $2.3K	$2K – $10.2K	$4.5K – $22.6K
6-20	$30+7%	$2.7K – $9.2K	$12.3K – $41K	$27K – $90.5K
21-45	$30+7%	$9.6K – $20.7K	$43K – $92K	$95K – $203K
46-80	$30+7%	$21K – $36K	$94K – $164K	$208K – $362K

On the face of it the slab structure looks more attractive. But remember that the illustration I’ve done assumes a $22 per month plan for all referred customers.

Based on this, the hybrid structure will catch up with the slab structure between year 10 and 11, where after it will start to exceed it.

If all your referrals took the $42 per month plan, the hybrid structure will overtake the slab structure between year 5 and 6.

You can change between commission structures at any time, but remember that if you switch from slab to hybrid, you will have to build up lifetime commissions from scratch. Think carefully.

Cookie duration: 90 days.

P.S. If you decide to join the Cloudways affiliate program and you you also wish to host with them, use this promo code to get 25% off the regular plan price for your first two months: WPMM25OFF

JOIN THE CLOUDWAYS AFFILIATE PROGRAM

Siteground

When it comes to shared hosting Siteground certainly outperforms the rest in terms of speed, uptime, support and value for money.

I’ve used over 7 different hosts over the years and I seen my fair share of problems.

And the only shared hosting that I feel comfortable recommending is Siteground.

I’ve spelled out everything you need to know in my detailed Siteground review.

I owe much credit to Siteground who were instrumental in helping me to get my loading times down to under 180ms – something I was never able to achieve with other shared hosts. They’re always first to implement the latest speed technologies.

They’re also the only hosting provider I’m aware of that offer their affiliates a free one month trial on any of their shared WordPress hosting plans.

So there’s absolutely no reason not to give them a try!

Mainstream advice recommends Bluehost because their initial commission is higher. But Bluehost is part of the EIG Group who have an infamous reputation for cutting corners and putting profits ahead of users.

It’s a bit of a shortsighted view because once you achieve over 5 sales with Siteground, their commission starts to exceed that of Bluehost.

Siteground offers a 60 day tracking cookie, awarded on the last click.

So if a user visited Siteground by following a link from a previous website and subsequently visits Siteground from one of your links, you will receive the commission.

JOIN THE SITEGROUND AFFILIATE PROGRAM

WPEngine

WPEngine was founded on WordPress and is one of the very best WordPress hosting providers.

The technology they employ is phenomenal and their hosting speed leaves a lot to be desired.

If you’re after great page speed and top quality hosting then WPEngine is the logical choice. It’s truly managed, so you don’t have to concentrate on speed optimization and the like, thereby freeing up your time to concentrate on what’s important – business!

Here’s how it works.

You will need to sign up with the Shareasale Network to join the WP Engine affiliate program. This will also give you access to a vast number of other affiliate programs.

Commission rate per sale is the greater of $200 and 100% of the first payment.

Together with a 180 day tracking cookie, this is one of the highest paying affiliate programs.

They also offers an incentive bonus. The more you refer (and sell) the more you earn.

Additionally, they have a 2 tier affiliate program. After referring an affiliate marketer, you get a $50 “override” for each customer that sub affiliate refers.

Besides this, here’s another great deal to promote to your users.

WP Engine recently acquired Studiopress.

They’ve always given their clients the first 2 months of WordPress hosting for free. Now they’re offering an additional discount on their WordPress hosting plans which translates to 3 months of free hosting.

Or, offer your users a WPEngine hosting plan and they get the Genesis framework + 35 Studiopress themes absolutely free.

Studiopress themes come with lifetime everything. A lifetime license, lifetime support, no annual recurring charges and use them on as many domains as you wish.

JOIN THE WP ENGINE AFFILIATE PROGRAM

Studiopress Themes (Genesis Framework)

I use the Genesis framework by Studiopress for all my sites and I’ll never change.

My Studioress review gives you everything you need to know so I won’t go into a fortune of detail here but the framework is the underlying “engine” on which each child theme runs. The concept is similar to say Toyota using the same engine for the Corolla, Corona and Mark X, with each model (skin) being different in design.

The Genesis framework (a separate installation file) comes with the first theme purchased and because the Studiopress themes come with a lifetime license, it can be installed and used on multiple domains, as can each theme.

What’s great is that there are no recurring annual fees and themes come with lifetime support and updates, unlike many other themes that don’t match up to Studiopress.

By the way, Studiopress were bought out by WPEngine during 2018.

You will need to sign up with the Shareasale Network to join the Studiopress affiliate program.

Affiliate commissions are paid at the rate of 35% on every Genesis framework or theme sale you make.

Cookie duration is 60 days.

Theme costs:

$99 to $129 (including the Genesis framework), or;
$499 for the Pro Plus All Theme Package (60+ themes).

JOIN THE STUDIOPRESS AFFILIATE PROGRAM

MyThemeShop

These themes are blazing fast and SEO friendly! I’ve used them on other sites and I honestly have no hesitation suggesting them. They’re tops!

MyThemeShop have been building themes for over 7 years. They’re well known and respected in the WordPress space.

Here are the features of their affiliate program:

55% commission per sale.
60 Day cookie duration.
Monthly Payouts with no minimum limit.
Two Tier Lifetime 10% Commission on referral signups via your link.
Reporting.

Theme costs: A membership of $8.29 per month (paid annually) for all 95 premium themes PLUS 18 premium WordPress plugins. This is suitable for developers who may need access to many different themes. Alternatively, individual themes range from $19 to $35. After one year, a $19 nominal fee per year covers ongoing support and updates.

For those that don’t know, MyThemeShop is also the developer of Rank Math SEO, the new SEO plugin that I now use on all my sites. It’s completely free and you’ll be blown away with the free features, some of which are only available from paid plugins. If you decide to install it, you can use my setup guide, that Rank Math themselves say is the most comprehensive guide to Rank Math they’ve seen.

When it comes to building themes and plugins, these guys really know their game.

JOIN THE MYTHEMESHOP AFFILIATE PROGRAM

Swift Performance Pro

Swift Performance Pro is one of the most aggressive caching plugins I’ve ever come across. It’s almost as fast as WP Rocket.

Top features include:

Page caching.
Cache warmer with warming table.
GZipCompression.
Minification of JavaScript and CSS.
Async Scripts.
Lazy load scripts.
Defer scripts.
Image lazy loading.
Disable querystrings.
Disable Emojis.
Baked in image optimizer (UNLIMITED).
Database cleaner & optimizer.
Plugin organizer.
Cloudflare and Stackpath integration.
Host Google analytics locally.

With the combination of Cloudways, the Genesis framework and Swift Performance Pro I am able to achieve load times of just a smidge over 100ms.

There is a free version available, however, the true speed lies in the paid version.

It’s worth reading my full review and setup guide if you’re considering using and/or marketing this plugin.

A single licence runs at $39 annually but those that prefer to preserve cash flow can opt for a monthly plan of $4.99.

Unfortunately, there’s no clarity in the affiliate terms and conditions on the workings of the commission payable on monthly and quarterly plans so I can’t comment at this stage.

Commission: 50%.
Cookie Duration: 7 Days

JOIN THE SWIFT PERFORMANCE AFFILIATE PROGRAM

WP Rocket

WP Rocket has a long track record of success and is, without doubt, the fastest caching plugin in the WordPress space.

Not only does it handle caching, it’s also a site optimization tool and being a stalwart in the WordPress space, WP Rocket is designed to optimize page speed and deliver your website to users in the quickest and most efficient manner possible.

The nice thing is that it’s super easy for beginners to set up and it works straight out of the box. Read my review here.

I highly recommend the affiliate program and the product.

Some of the cool features include:

Page caching
Cache preloading or warming
Compression
Minification of JavaScript and CSS
Image lazy loading
Remove querystrings
Disable Emojis
Combine Google fonts
Includes database cleaner
Integrates with Cloudflare
Google analytics integration

Product cost: $49 with a discounted annual renewal cost of $39.

This affiliate program is available through the Shareasale network, who manage some of the best affiliate programs in the WordPress niche.

Affiliate commissions: 20%.
Cookie duration: 30 days.

JOIN THE WP ROCKET AFFILIATE PROGRAM

Beaver Builder

Both the WordPress Classic Editor and Gutenberg are great but they both have limitations or drawbacks.

I use Beaver Builder for all my sites because it allows me to create whatever type of elements and formatting I want to without having to spend time on unnecessary HTML coding. It speeds up my content creation dramatically and I have to say that it has virtually no effect on my loading times.

And because it includes things like subscription forms, contact forms, social sharing, galleries etc, it also allows me to keep my plugin count to a minimum, further enhancing speed. And anyone that follows me knows that I’m fanatical when it comes to WordPress speed optimization.

Beaver Builder works seamlessly without any problems!

Affiliate commissions: 25% recurring annually.
Cookie duration: 60 days.

JOIN THE BEAVER BUILDER AFFILIATE PROGRAM

Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is an opt-in and conversion tool designed to grow a subscriber base.

It integrates with at least 30 email marketing providers so building email lists has never been easier.

The design aspects are tied in with their very own Thrive Architect product (page builder) which happens to be a very formidable page builder in its own right and is also very focused on conversion optimization.

Here’s a list of the type of conversion products that are included in Thrive Leads:

Thrive Box Lightbox – this is basically a modal pop-up (unblockable) that’s displayed on top of your content.
Screen filler – A pop-up that fills the entire screen.
Scroll mat – This is a screen filler that comes in from the top of the page. It doesn’t cover the content, it simply pushes it down.
Sticky ribbon – A ribbon that “sticks” to the top of the page (header area) until closed.
Inline forms – Inserts an opt-in form anywhere you choose, e.g. at the bottom of your posts.
2 Step opt-in forms – This allows a user to first click on a button (e.g. Yes Please button) and then opt in to an email list.
Slide-in – Slides in at a corner of the screen – usually bottom right. This is far more user friendly than a screen overlay but equally as effective.
Opt-in widget – adds a form to your sidebar.
Content lock – Comes up over your content at a specified place and prevents the user from viewing any further content until they subscribe – I would never do it to my readers! I am also quite certain Google would down-rank your page for doing this – you’ve been warned!
Yes / No forms – offer your readers a yes or no alternative to subscribe to your email lists. Nice and user friendly too.
Multiple choice forms – same as yes /no.

Optinmonster is also a great product, but Thrive Leads offers the best value for money with the same functionality.

Thrive Themes don’t charge an annual recurring fee for updates. The product includes lifetime updates, so the software is always kept up to date. And … the plugin comes in at a single price point making it a great choice.

All this makes Thrive Leads one of the better affiliate programs to have under the belt.

Thrive will reward you for ANY product purchased from your affiliate link and there are many, including the next one.

Thrive leads product cost:
$67 for single license, $97 for 5 licenses.

Affiliate commissions: 35%.
Cookie duration: 2 years.

JOIN THE THRIVE AFFILIATE PROGRAM

Thrive Comments

I’ll concede that the native WordPress commenting system is probably the speediest of all. Unfortunately, it’s in need of a major makeover.

I spent many months researching and looking for a WordPress commenting system that’s:

Functional
Is visually appealing
Promotes user engagement
Is fast
Allows social login

In my opinion, Thrive Comments is the only one that fulfills these requirements.

The developers have used the native WordPress comments system as a foundation and have built on it from there.

It allows for lazy loading of gravatars so it doesn’t affect page speed. Gravatars are loaded only when the comments come into the viewport.

You can up-vote and down-vote (beware of trolls), change comments sort order, save your details for the next time so you will be remembered, direct users to a landing page or web page after commenting – as I said Thrive is very conversion orientated and this is built into the commenting system too.

It also allows for Social login which is really convenient.

I use it on my site. Check out how it works by leaving a comment.

Thrive leads product cost:
$67 for single license, $97 for 5 licenses.

Affiliate commissions: 35%.
Cookie duration: 2 years.

JOIN THE THRIVE AFFILIATE PROGRAM

Other Affiliate Programs

All of the brands below offer affiliate programs. Most of these belong to one or more affiliate networks.

Fashion

Adidas
TK Maxx
ThinkGeek
Boohoo
& Other Stories
Frank & Oak
Nordstrom
Revolve
American Apparel
Whistles
Anthropologie
Puma
Fanatics
Missguided
Vans
Clarks
New Balance
River Island
Net-a-Porter
SportChek

Toms
Free People
Vestiaire Collective
True Religion
Keds
Under Armour
Pretty Little Thing
Mr. Porter
Saucony
Nike
Eddie Bauer
The Real Real
Urban Outfitters
Ssense
Bloomingdales
Zappos
Hudson’s Bay
Macy’s
Topshop

Electronics

SkullCandy
Sony
Sennheiser
BH Photo
GearBest
DJI
Apple

Olympus
Best Buy
Microsoft
Dell
Beats by Dr. Dre
Canon
iTunes

Homeware

Overstock
Habitat
The White Company
LinenChest

Wayfair
HomeDepot
Made.com
JSYK

Types Of Affiliate Programs

Single Tier

You earn a referral fee / commission on the successful completion of a product or service based purchase originating from your affiliate link or banner.

Two-Tier

This is similar to an override commission. You refer other affiliate marketers to an affiliate program and earn referral fees on all of their referred sales.

Examples include WPEngine, A2 Hosting and Viglink.

Commission Types

Level

You receive a flat rate of commission per sale.

Stepped (Incentivized)

Your commission is based on a flat rate as above. However, you will be offered an incentive whereby the rate increases depending on the number of sales. For example:

1 to 10 sales – $50 per sale.
11 to 20 sales – $75 per sale.
Thereafter – $100 per sale.

Personalized

Regular top producers are sometimes offered a personalized rate after a specified number of sales has been achieved.

Recurring

Some programs such as SEMrush (one of the very best keyword research tools) offer recurring commissions each year on renewal of the product.

Locking Period (Vesting Of Commission)

Purchases are sometimes cancelled for a number of reasons and can include things like the product not being suitable for the purchaser or funds being insufficient to meet the purchase price.

A locking period is a fixed time set by the merchant after which the commission vests in full and cannot be reversed.

Cookie Duration and Commission Payments

When a user clicks on one of your affiliate links and is taken to a merchant’s website, a cookie is stored in their browser.

If the user makes a purchase, you earn a commission for the referral. However, the user may not make a purchase immediately but may return to do so a few days later, for example.

If the user returns to make a purchase at any time during which the cookie is still valid, you will still earn your commission.

But what happens in the event that a user visits a competitor site after visiting your’s and also clicks on their link to the same product? Who earns the commission?

The answer lies in the merchant’s terms and conditions. Some merchants respect the the most recent cookie while others respect the first placed cookie.

A point to note is that, if the user clears his browser cache (including cookies), there’s no way to track the activity back to your affiliate link and you will therefore not receive any commission.

Affiliate Link Management

Once you’ve joined a few affiliate programs, you come to realize that some of them may include multiple links that direct you to different products and pages on their website.

As an example, I use the Studiopress themes by Genesis for all my websites. There are over 35 Studiopress developed themes plus an additional 30 (approximately) third party themes (all approved by Studiopress) on the Studiopress website with affiliate links to each and every one of them.

As you join more affiliate programs the number of links can become cumbersome. Without a link management tool you’ll have to access a merchant’s website every time you want to use a link because you’ll never remember links that looks like this: https://www.example.com/r.ckg?b=80&u=8626419&p=67.

But that’s not the only reason why link management is advisable.

Some of the other good reasons may include:

A central hub to manage links.
Prettifying links.
Shortening links.
Cloaking links.

Let’s take a closer look …

Central Link Management Hub

Besides wanting to easily manage a large number of affiliate links, there’s a more compelling reason to want to manage your links from a centralized hub.

Let’s assume that over time, you’ve added a reasonably large number of links for X product to a many different posts. In fact, too many to remember.

If at any stage the merchant decides to change the link – and it does happen – can you just imagine having to find and change each and every one of those links in each and every post?

Each one of those links is potential income.

And if a user clicks on a link that doesn’t work, besides losing your commission, it makes for extremely poor user experience.

A good link management tool such as Thirsty Affiliates allows you make a single change to a merchant link that applies to each and every affiliate link across your entire site – within seconds!

And adding a link is as easy as highlighting some text, clicking the TA button in the editor and start typing.

Thirsty Affiliates then suggests links that you can add.

Prettify And Shorten Links

Long links with strings of numbers are not only impossible for you to remember, but they also look ugly when users hover over them (desktop devices).

Thirsty Affiliates allows you to shorten the links and assign meaningful names to them, making them easy to remember and insert into blog posts, emails and social media posts whilst also improving user experience.

Cloak Links

Affiliate link cloaking has always been a contentious issue in affiliate marketing circles but let me assure you that the practice isn’t nefarious. There are some very valid reasons to cloak links which we’ll discuss shortly.

I prefer to refer to affiliate link cloaking as re-directing, whereby a cloaked link automatically redirects you to another website.

What’s the difference then between a normal external link and a cloaked affiliate link?

In terms of user experience, absolutely nothing!

With both of these, you are directed to an external website.

So why do I say re-directed?

It’s simply because of the technical process involved.

When you click on a link cloaked with Thirsty Affiliates, your browser connects to the Thirsty Affiliates server and requests a page to be displayed.

Because the merchant’s web page doesn’t live on the Thirsty Affiliates server, the server duly responds with an error, stating that the page does not exist.

It then redirects the user to the affiliate merchant’s website using either a 301, 302 or 307 redirect, as chosen by you in the global options.

There’s no difference between this and a conventional redirect.

FYI: I highly recommend the Thirsty Affiliates plugin. I experimented with another well known brand (name withheld) and it messed up every single affiliate link on my site. I had to manually switch back to Thirsty Affiliates which wasted an enormous amount of time.

Let’s look more closely at some compelling reasons to cloak affiliate links …

Prevent Commission Theft

This is one of the most compelling reasons to cloak your affiliate links. And so you should. You work hard to earn your commissions.

A typical affiliate link looks something like this: www.affiliatenetwork.com/r.ckg?b=80&u=8626419&p=67.

The bold part following the domain name is the tracking code.

Scammers inject spyware into your web browser. This type of malware is software designed to spy on your own computer in order to retrieve your affiliate tracking code.

Once obtained, they change the tracking code in your browser to their own code, and any commissions earned from referrals that come from your hard work are automatically routed to their accounts.

If your affiliate link is cloaked and looks like this for example, www.yourdomain.com/go/studiopress, its use on another computer would track back to you.

It’s not possible for a scammer to replace your domain with their’s because there is no merchant tracking code associated with the other domain.

Tracking

In the same way that you can track clicks with Google Analytics, so too can you track your affiliate links.

A good affiliate link cloaking plugin like Thirsty Affiliates can track every external click on your affiliate link so you can track, over a period of time, how many clicks your affiliate links have attracted.

This helps you to monitor what parts of your website are working and which aren’t, enabling you to focus on what works.

Global NoFollow Links To Prevent Page Rank Leakage

There are two types of external links, viz. “dofollow” and “nofollow”.

These show in the HTML code of your web page (which you won’t see by viewing the page source) and look something like this,:

If you don’t make the affiliate link a nofollow link, you effectively leak some of your page rank to the merchant site.

So, in order to retain your full page rank, you add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to the link.

Thirsty Affiliates, allows you to make all links “nofollow” on a global basis by selecting this in global options. You’ll never have to remember to do it manually.

Automatic Keyword Linking

A Pro feature that makes Thirsty Affiliates worth every single cent and is one of the most ingenious features of the plugin.

This allows you to add affiliate links to assigned keywords throughout your content.

It’s a brilliant way to monetize your past content without having to manually add links to hundreds of posts.

How And Where To Use Affiliate Banners

I wouldn’t use them within content if I were you.

Banners look similar to ads placed in white space by ad networks such as Google Adsense or Mediavine.

Don’t know about you but I find them distracting and annoying especially if they’re animated. Why subject your audience to that after you’ve spent hours putting great content together and formatted it to look the best it can.

To me they look salesy and desperate.

Within your content, it’s cleaner to add links in pertinent places. It’s a more effective way to encourage clicks.

The only places I could condone banners is in sidebars (no animation) or as images on a resources page.

Genesis Simple Sidebars is a dedicated plugin that will help you display Genesis custom sidebars on different posts and pages, enabling you to use a different sidebar on single posts on your blog page and/or home page.

If you prefer not to use a plugin, you can add a code snippet to your functions.php file to add or replace the Genesis sidebar dynamically.

Add Affiliate Links To Images

Besides images making your posts look great and improving user experience, you can make them work for you by adding affiliate links to them.

Again, Thirsty Affiliates is probably the best way to add affiliate links to images because the plugin will apply all your preset global options such as opening the link in a new tab and adding the “nofollow” rel attribute.

First add an image to your post. Then select it in the editor.

Click the Thirsty Affiliates button. Start typing the name of the link and the plugin will find it automatically.

Start A Blog

Theoretically, you could make money from affiliate marketing without a blog.

If you have an email list, you could market to your client base. If you have a good following on social media, you may consider marketing to your followers.

However, Facebook and Twitter use algorithms to restrict your post visibility to about 5% of your followers. Understandably, they want you to pay for advertising.

There’s a reason why the most formidable affiliate marketers promote products with blogs.

Comprehensive Guide To Setup A Blog

What Platform To Use

Honestly, I can’t remember much about Wix, Weebly, Squarespace and Shopify. It’s been many years since I compared the different website building platforms.

But I can safely say that WordPress powers over 33.6% of all websites on the internet. And if you limit the sample to websites that use a CMS (content management system), WordPress powers over 60% of the web.

WordPress.org is an open source platform so there are no licensing requirements (which is where the bulk of costs otherwise come in) and it’s programming code is available for anyone to use freely.

Please don’t confuse it with wordpress.com which is a managed web hosting platform and a going concern (Automattic, Inc US), in business with the objective of making profits like any other business.

You can build ANY kind of website on WordPress and you don’t need any special technical knowledge to do so.

Domain Name

Prior to Google’s EMD (exact match domain) algorithm penalty update, webmasters were buying domains that matched the keywords they wanted to use and were ranking higher in Google SERP on the back of thin content.

There’s really no longer a need to buy exact match domains.

What’s more important as a Google ranking factor is to buy a domain for a term of at least 4 to 5 years. This shows Google that you’re serious about your online business.

Make sure you stick with a top level domain (TLD) and avoid spammy extensions such as .biz.

The .com domain is the most popular TLD you can buy. It enables you to target worldwide traffic.

Other popular TLD’s such as .co.uk (United Kingdom) or .com.au (Australia) are country specific. You can use these to target local traffic if you wish but there’s also nothing stopping you from using a .com domain locally. You can then set Geographical targeting in Google search console.

It’s also best to buy a domain that has never been used before. One way to check this is on the internet archive site, although this is not absolutely foolproof. A used domain can take some time to have impressions appear on archive.org

A previously used domain name could have a Google penalty attached to it and this can have a very detrimental effect on your business.

I’ve found that Namecheap is not only very user friendly but also offer savings of up to 93% on some of the best TLD’s. The savings will help you buy a domain for a longer term.

Hosting

Hosting is the most crucial speed factor listed in the WordPress Optimization Guide. It’s also critical for ranking your posts #1 in Google SERP.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re about to set up a website or you’re a seasoned entrepreneur, Cloudways offers superb value for money and dedicated resources.

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Cloudways Review And Setup Guide.

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Install WordPress

Before installing WordPress, please install your free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate.

It’s much easier to have this in place so that when you start your WordPress installation, you can immediately install onto an HTTPS protocol. You’ll select this option during installation.

Choose A Theme

This is the next biggest decision you need to make when setting up your blog.

I made some hugely time consuming mistakes myself way back when I started my first online business. And at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter which way you slice it, time is money.

If you want to make money from affiliate marketing, the last thing you need is theme customization bogging you down at a crucial time.

What I’m about to tell you has nothing to do with free or paid themes. It has everything to do with functionality.

If you want to start off on the right footing, please refrain from using:

Any of the free themes from the WordPress repository.
Themes purchased from Themeforest (Envato Market), Template Monster or any of the like.

Many of the developers using these portals are doing theme development part time and very often they stop updating the themes due to lack of interest or funds.

The other problem is that they’re no cheaper than the best themes money can buy. Just to the contrary. You may purchase a theme for say $79. After a year, you can only get updates if you renew your subscription. Updates are required to keep your theme current with the latest version of WordPress, which is updated regularly.

Unfortunately, thousands of unsuspecting individuals get caught by these developers.

I use the Genesis framework by Studiopress for all my sites.

The framework itself will set you back $59. You purchase it once and you can can use it to power as many sites as you wish. What’s more is you get lifetime support and updates.

Depending on the theme you choose, you’ll be in for anywhere between $40 to $60. Again, it’s a once-off payment. You can use it on as many sites as you like and you get lifetime support and updates.

Besides the money aspect, the Genesis framework is lightweight, bloat free and blazing fast!

Ask any blogger in the know and they’ll tell you that the Genesis framework is the best investment you can make.

Why Is The Genesis Framework So Highly Rated

Read The Full Review

Start Producing Content

There’s no question, you need content to support your blog. After all, content is king. But just how much content should you be producing.

There’s a serious misconception out there that you should aim to produce a post a day in the formative stages.

Big mistake!

You see, if you want to rank #1 in Google SERP, you need to focus on quality content not quantity.

There’s just no way that anyone can produce a quality content post in a day.

Well known SEO expert, Brian Dean, sent me an email message some time back claiming that he had only 44 posts on his Backlinko blog.

Every one of them ranks on Google’s first page where relevant keywords are searched for.

So here’s the thing.

Google loves the same content that your users and followers love to read.

They’re so committed to providing search results that best match the needs of their users, that user intent and user experience (UX) are becoming firmly entrenched in their algorithms.

If you want traffic you need to be mindful of this at all times.

Here are some power tips to ensure that your content stands the best chance of ranking so that you stand the best chance of making money from your affiliate marketing efforts. You’re welcome to copy and print the list so you can refer to it every time you write a post:

Know your niche and who you’re writing for.
Ensure that your content stays focused. Stick to the subject and the needs of your prospective audience.
Your content must be aimed at solving problems that your audience is having and providing solutions to those problems, or;
Your content must meet a specific need.
Make certain that your content is really helpful to your prospective audience and that it is actionable.
Ask yourself if you believe your content is the very best it can be. If not, make it epic. Skyscraper your own content if need be. If you want backlinks, producing the best content is not negotiable. It’s essential. When linked to by the right websites, the effects will snowball.
Keep your content natural. Write for your users, not for search engines. Google doesn’t like keyword stuffing. Neither do any other of the search engines.
Write power headlines (Titles) that readers will want to click on.
Don’t try to optimize for competitive keywords. You’re not likely to rank for them. Rather opt for long tail keywords. It doesn’t matter if search volume is low as long as competition for the keyword is attractive. You be able to rank for those and even if you only get low blog traffic volumes, it will grow further down the line.
Try to write evergreen content. Content that may not be valid in years to come will ultimately fall by the wayside. You want to make sure that your content is always helpful to users, not just this year.

Aim to build up your arsenal of quality posts. The more quality and helpful posts you have, the more people will find them in search results.

You can’t expect to retain visitors on your site unless you have other helpful, quality posts for them to read. Give them more reason to stay on your site for longer. Keep them entertained and engaged in all of your content. Give them a reason to return.

Some readers may not convert immediately. Very often it’s because there’s an obstacle or the timing may not be entirely right.

Keep them interested so that when they are ready to purchase an affiliate product, that they do so with you and not someone else.

Add A Resources Page To Your Site

Make sure you don’t skip over this step.

A resources page is an easy and non salesy way to make money from affiliate marketing and something that every affiliate marketer should have in their arsenal.

Add a prominent link to the page in your navigation menu and make certain to mention and link to it in your broadcast emails, automated sequences and blog posts.

Pat Flynn reckons that half of his affiliate earnings are made from his resources page. That’s how important it is.

Drive Traffic To Your Site

You can’t make money without blog traffic. Let’s dig in and take a look at the different types of traffic and how to generate it.

Organic Traffic

This traffic is not only targeted but it’s also free.

It’s the traffic that comes to you through search engine results pages (SERPS).

Generating organic traffic is a continuous process. It’s time consuming and tedious but the benefits will be reaped long after the effort is forgotten.

Aim to rank within the first three listings in SERP in order to get maximum benefit from organic traffic.

Search engine optimization (SEO) should be your number one, long term blog traffic generation goal. If I told you any different I wouldn’t have your best interests at heart.

Paid Traffic

This type of traffic comes from inbound marketing campaigns.

This may include PPC (pay per click) advertising through Google or one of the alternatives offered by Bing and Yahoo.

You may also promote posts via Facebook or some other social media platform.

PPC advertising certainly works. It’s easy enough to put an SEO campaign together. You’ll get immediate traffic, but it’s going to cost you.

Social Media Traffic

Social media has always been a good generator of traffic but this type of promotion comes with its own set of problems:

Most social platforms use algorithms which they cleverly manipulate to prevent the majority of your followers from seeing your free promotional posts, thereby forcing you to pay for advertising. Perfectly understandable because it’s their primary source of income.
The bigger issue with social media platforms is that, whilst you may have friends and followers, you still need to establish a targeted audience in order to drive the “right” traffic to your website.

Referral Traffic

Comes from links (backlinks) to your website from a third party site. Backlinks are also a ranking factor.

A link from a third party website to one of your blog posts is basically an endorsement from that site.

In essence, the author of a third party post makes a recommendation to his users to read your content because he believes it’s going to be useful and helpful to them.

Think of backlinks like this …

If you tell a friend about a restaurant it’s because you really enjoyed eating there. You wouldn’t give your friend a bad recommendation because it would make you look bad.

And it’s exactly the same with bloggers. I wouldn’t link to a post or website unless that post or website is going to provide exceptional value for my users – something that either expands on what I’m talking about or reinforces what I’m saying.

Obtaining backlinks requires a good deal of research as well as a huge amount of manual outreach, both of which require a fair investment of your time.

But you will be rewarded with traffic because backlinks are one of the two most important factors when it comes to getting your posts to rank in Google search results.

Direct Traffic

Traffic generated when users enter your website address into their browsers.

And that’s only going to happen when you’ve made a name for yourself. In other words, you need to build your brand.

Building a brand is also a huge SEO win, but it takes time to grow a brand.

Email Marketing Traffic

Traffic from promoting your posts to your subscribers (audience).

It’s a great way to drive traffic to your blog and it’s also works wonders for your organic rankings because Google will up-rank your posts if they see them attracting traffic.

It’s also the “warmest” way to promote your products or services and therefore essential for making money money with affiliate marketing.

But this is a bit of a catch 22 situation and one that I wish some internet marketers would get their heads around. It’s easy to talk about email marketing but you can’t build your email list without traffic!

Aim to generate traffic by any means you can. Then offer content upgrades to your users to encourage subscriptions.

Build And Market To An Email List

I mentioned earlier that an email list is a great way to market affiliate products to your audience.

Every time you publish a post, send out a broadcast email message to you all your subscribers with a link to your new post.

You need to be clever with the way you word your email because you need to create a solution to a problem in order to get those subscribers to click through to your blog and read your post.

Therefore, your email should contain some good introductory content.

Any traffic that you can get to your blog will be noticed by Google and regular blog traffic will signal to Google that users are finding your content really helpful.

So again, make sure your content is killer and add internal links to others posts in a very convincing way so as to reduce bounce rate.

Bounce rate is one of those metrics that can be interpreted in a number of different ways.

But Google’s interpretation is what counts here, so the more you can improve upon bounce rate, the better the long term effects will be for your blog traffic.

You can also add affiliate links into your email content. A broadcast Email is a warm way to introduce and talk about products to your audience and a great way to generate affiliate income without looking “salesy”.

Remember not to include links to Amazon affiliate products in your emails as it is againgst their TOS and will get you banned. You can, however, link to pages on your site which in turn links to Amazon Products.

One of the best ways to build your email list is to offer content upgrades in your posts.

A content upgrade is free give away (in exchange for an email address) such as an eBook, a roadmap, checklist, workbook or something similar.

I’ve never had success in getting subscriptions from an email newsletter subscription box in my sidebar, but content upgrades work.

Convertkit is the best ways to add content upgrade forms to your posts and to manage your email subscriptions, newsletters, email sequences and automations.

Promote Only Affiliate Products That You Use Or Have Used

If you’re thinking you can cherry pick and promote products that you’ve never used but relate to your niche, you’ll not make any money from affiliate marketing.

Ethics aside, it’s impossible to explain and convey to your audience, the workings of a product unless you have first hand experience with it.

You’ll not be able to write about the finer intricacies of the product, nor will you be able to use screenshots to support your content.

As a result, your content will appear thin and users will see no benefit in purchasing the product.

Before I started using Convertkit (on a personal finance site of mine) to send subscribers automated emails, I was using Mailchimp – because it was free.

I switched because Mailchimp just wasn’t able to provide me with the functionality I needed and the interface was not very user friendly.

I imported my subscribers into Convertkit and then set up an automatic sequence. I added only one (the first) email to the automation sequence which I set up to send immediately, thinking that I’ll start adding to the sequence within the coming week.

I had added myself as a subscriber in order to confirm that everything was working as expected.

The following day I added another email to the sequence but I noticed that all my subscribers, including myself, were no longer subscribed to the sequence. Once all published emails have been sent for that particular sequence, Convertkit assumes the sequence is finished and then unsubscribes people from it and moves them to the next step in the automation.

There’s no fault whatsoever with the software. It works this way for very good reason. Once a sequence finishes, you can automatically (and without intervention) add those subscribers to a new sequence with a different content strategy. I mean, why would you want to offer a product to subscribers that have already purchased it?

Not only is that a brilliant marketing option but it’s also a brilliant promotional strategy!

But without that personal experience, how would I possibly know to explain this in a post that promotes Convertkit?

It would be easy to add something like; Convertkit is the best email automation software I’ve ever used. But that’s meaningless for my audience because it doesn’t solve a problem, tell them about any useful functionality or address a need.

You’ll be better off regularly promoting one or two products that you use / have used and know really well, rather than trying to promote multiple products without the required knowledge and experience to write extensive content around them.

Just by the way, there is a way to ensure that a sequence never ends with Convertkit. Simply publish an email with an end date of 99,999 days. This will obviously never be sent but it’s a way to prevent a sequence from ending. Then you can add in more sequence emails at any time.

Convertkit also includes an inbuilt form builder that can be customized to create some of the best looking content upgrades for your posts.

TRY CONVERTKIT FREE FOR 14 DAYS AND JOIN THE AFFILIATE PROGRAM

Affiliate Disclaimers

If you’re an affiliate marketer in the US, you are required by the FTC to make disclosures to that effect.

If you’re not in the US and you’re endorsing products of an American business, the FTC may still have jurisdiction over your activities.

Irrespective of legal requirements, it’s always best to add affiliate disclaimers to let your users know that there may be affiliate links in your posts or other places where you add affiliate links, such as email marketing and social media and that you will receive compensation from purchases made via your links.

Some affiliate programs enforce this in their TOS.

I have a sentence right at the top of each and every post informing users that there may be affiliate links within the content. It recommends, by way of a link, that users read my full disclaimer page.

The FTC states that affiliate disclosures should be very clear and placed as close to the link as possible in order that users don’t have to scroll away to find it.

I’m dead against hiding affiliate links from users but it’s not always practical to include a disclosure with each and every link. I believe it detracts hugely from user experience. That’s why I make it known at the top of every post.

If you’re on the Genesis framework, you can add the code below to to your functions.php file to add something similar to your site. Remember to replace the text and links with your own.

//add affiliate disclaimer after title
add_action( 'genesis_entry_header', 'aw_disclaimer_after_post_entry_title', 12 );
function aw_disclaimer_after_post_entry_title() {
if ( is_singular('post') ) {
_e( '<em>This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my <a href="https://www.wpmediamastery.com/disclaimer/">disclaimer</a> for more info.</em>', '$text_domain' );
}
}

Final Thoughts

SEO is absolutely crucial if you want to make money from affiliate marketing. If you can’t rank on on Google, you’ll struggle to get traffic to your site.

No traffic, no clicks, no money!

That’s part of the reason that this post has taken me close on 3 weeks to put together. It’s over 12,200 words long and I hope it’s super informative and been really helpful to you.

If you want to make money from affiliate marketing, stick to a schedule of publishing one power post per week.

Don’t take shortcuts. Power posts take time and affiliate marketing is not just as simple as slapping affiliate links into your posts.

How do you feel about writing power posts?