Affiliate Marketing Archives - Page 2 of 2

3 Ways to Find a New Affiliate Program to Join

October 3, 2022August 29, 2022

We've talked a fair bit about affiliate marketing here at This Week in Blogging, ranging from how to improve your affiliate marketing to product reviews (like the Pretty Links Pro link cloaking plugin), and so much more.

But for this one, we wanted to take a step back and answer a rather pressing question- “how do I find affiliate partners to begin with?”

Thankfully, there are numerous ways to do this that we can discuss today including direct programs, 3rd party affiliate networks, and via customized partnerships!

Niche Product Site Case Study #2 – Shifting Focus to Meet Goals

September 14, 2021

At the start of COVID quarantine, I decided to start new niche sites that were focused on products with the goal of making money via affiliate sales and, if possible down the line, ads with networks like Mediavine.

Six months back, we shared an update on what we were doing with each niche product site and gave some goals for the future. As it has been a while since that update, I thought it was time to share more information on how things are going and share some changes that we are considering making to improve our sites outright.

As a quick recap, we have two product sites with a bare minimum number of articles, Doctor of Coffee and What is Sous Vide, as well as a more robust wine blog called The Grape Pursuit. The former two were designed to be low page count sites to push products, with the sous vide site trying to tap into the exact match keyword as well. The wine blog is run more like a traditional blog with posts every week or so on general wine topics as well as focused wine reviews.

With that recap out of the way, let's talk about the status.

Niche Product Site Case Study #1 – Introducing the Sites

September 14, 2021March 24, 2021

During quarantine, we saw a severe drop in traffic on our travel blog and local blog. As we knew that these sites were not going to rebound for quite some time, rather than doubling down in new topics on these established domains, we decided to start new blogs outright.

This was done for two reasons. First, the topics we wanted to write about didn't fit all too well with the established branding. Second, we know that new sites take a long time to establish themselves such that, while they weren't going to make much money during quarantine, we would be diversifying our portfolio for the long-haul across many unique domains.

At first, we had every intention of making these sites personality-driven blogs much like our travel sites (think full social media, multiple posts per week, a story involving us somehow, etc.), but we quickly realized that would be too time consuming. In fact, when we stopped to assess how things were going, we realized that we had started three sites all were niche products focused. Our ideal monetization model was not display advertising (although we'd certainly take it), but rather affiliate sales for a few core items.

As we are approaching each of these sites just a bit differently, we thought it'd be fun to share a periodic case study here talking about the sites, how we plan to monetize, and update their progress over time. So today, let's do a quick introduction to the sites and our monetization goals!

Pretty Links Pro Review – Link Cloaking and Affiliate Monitoring

July 21, 2022March 15, 2021

Pretty Links Pro is an interesting WordPress plugin that is designed for a simple purpose- to cloak links.

While this premium plugin has a very niche use, for those who consistently use affiliate links that are, well, ugly, Pretty Links Pro helps solve a problem that has plagued our industry for years.

In this one, we wanted to dive a bit more as to why bloggers cloak links, when you should and shouldn't do so, and go into a bit more detail in how Pretty Links Pro works to solve this issue.

As a bonus, we'll also talk about a way you can do this without a plugin at all (but even here, we still pay for this one all the same and will share why as well)!

Why Your Affiliate Marketing Stinks (And 3 Ways to Fix It)

December 15, 2020December 14, 2020

Affiliate marketing is a tough nut to crack, and I would know.

Three years ago, in my 9th year of blogging, I was barely making $100 per month on affiliate marketing, despite having over 150,000 monthly page views on my two sites combined ($0.66 on an RPM, revenue-per-1000, basis).

After many months of testing, optimizing, re-optimizing, and learning about best practices, I've overhauled my process to consistently make $1,500 to $2,000 per month in affiliate marketing on 225,000 monthly page views ($6.66 to $8.88 on a RPM basis- over a 10x increase!).

During this process, I learned the reason why my affiliate marketing sucks, and realized it is the reason why most blogger's affiliate marketing sucks. So today, I wanted to share more about this, and give the three biggest lessons learned in the entire process- whether you're a beginner looking for how to start affiliate marketing or are a bit more advanced and want to increase your earnings.

Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers with Kayleigh Zara

December 7, 2020December 7, 2020

Affiliate Marketing Advertising Commercial Concept

It's difficult to imagine a blogger being able to turn their passion into a profession without harnessing the power of affiliate marketing. It's probably not the very first thing you think about when starting a blog, but once you start to gain traction an audience, then utilizing affiliate marketing in your content strategy is almost a no-brainer.

For those who may be closer to the start of their blogging journey, affiliate marketing is simply the commission you earn from promoting somebody else's product. This can be a product for a company, or for an individual, and the rates and agreement will usually be a little different depending on what it is you're actually promoting.

Of course, the larger your site is, and the more traffic you have, the more potential there is for your affiliate marketing partnerships to pay off. That's why utilizing SEO best practices is vital, as well as continuing to learn about blogging best practice from experienced bloggers.

We'll step aside and stop talking about affiliate marketing, so that we can let today's expert shine. Today, we're very fortunate to be joined by Kayleigh Zara.

Kayleigh is a 24 year old full time freelancer based in the UK. Her main blog can be found at Kayleighzaraa.com, but she currently runs and manages three blogs in total. She, like us, has the belief that with a little bit of guidance anyone can make money online. When she's not blogging, she's a PhD student, and really enjoys black and white movies, caffeine and martinis!

We like her style.