Affiliate Marketing: 7 Innovative Ways To Earn Money As An Affiliate

by Mia M.

Hello, gorgeous humans and welcome to the post that’s going to benefit your bank account. Today, we’re going to be tackling one of my favourite parts of blogging – monetising. And today’s monetisation method? Affiliate marketing.

Firstly though – what is affiliate marketing?

It’s a really simple concept – if you refer a product and someone buys it, you get a commission. (This usually ranges from 1-20% depending on the retailer.) Pretty much all big businesses online offer affiliate programs – if you guys want a comprehensive list of my favourites, let me know and I can write a post up.

This post, however, is going to assume you’re already signed up to a few . . . and share some creative ways that you can start to earn through them. (And start to earn more!)

1. Sell how you spend

This is by far my biggest tip – and the one I find the most success with. Take a look at your own habits and think “how do I spend my money?” What’s your buying funnel? And once you figure that out . . . well, you know how to recreate it.

A prime example of this for me  is one of my biggest earners: beauty and skincare. Something I identified in my own habits is reviews from people with skin like myself strongly influence me to buy things. Now I don’t particularly enjoy solely-skincare blogs and don’t follow that many . . .  so where was I finding these reviews? Pinterest.

In fact, the Pins that strongly influenced me to click through and then buy?

They tend to look like this – Snapchat/Instagram stories with writing explaining what the product does and the effects it has.

If you guys remember my post on the simple way I sky-rocketed my Pinterest traffic, you’ll remember that changing my old beauty content’s images to a format like this absolutely boomed my Pinterest stats . . . And my earnings.

This is just one example of how you could examine your own spending habits. Also look at search terms you use, the information you try and gather? Social media you visit? Content you consume? Which leads me nicely to my next point . . .

2. Optimize for SEO

I make about $0 from my core audience. (Okay, I don’t know if that’s strictly true, but I don’t make much off you guys.) I make at least 90% off my income from one-time visitors to my site who are looking for something specific, find it and buy it. How do I reach these people?

Search Engine Optimisation.  SEO allows you access to much larger traffic than your site will reach on your audience alone – and it gives you targeted traffic. 

Do you think you’re going to make more sales from 5,000 people searching for “cute dog collars” and landing on your post “12 stylish and affordable dog collars” than you would posting that same post and only your core audience seeing it?

There are a lot of things you can do within your posts to optimise them for Google . . . but that would make this post real chunky. I do have an extensive guide to search engine optimization here that I highly recommend reading. But, just so that this point has a little more of a value add, here’s an infographic I made explaining how you can use keywords to your advantage for SEO!

SEO Essentials For Bloggers - KEYWORD PLACEMENT! Keywords Are Absolutely Essential Is Driving Traffic To Your Blog; Do You Know How To Utilise Them? Here's An Infographic Sharing A Few Of My Top Keyword Placement Positions.
SEO Essentials For Bloggers - KEYWORD PLACEMENT! Keywords Are Absolutely Essential Is Driving Traffic To Your Blog; Do You Know How To Utilise Them? Here's An Infographic Sharing A Few Of My Top Keyword Placement Positions.

SEO also links into our next point –

3. Sell to people who want to be sold to + tap into needs

We live in a consumer world. Rather than spamming your audience and lowering your content quality (which, by the way, reduces time on page, return visits and all sorts of other things Google takes into account) – sell when people want to be sold to.

Because there are ample opportunities. We all love to buy stuff.

An example of this? Gift guides. 

If you’re familiar with my blogging journey, you may recall that I sold my first website. I did this because I built up an annual view-count of over a million views on one post . . .  and that was a gift guide for teen girls. Come Christmas, every Tom, Dick & Harry needs to buy gifts – so gift guides are a big traffic driver. This is just one example of something people search when they’re actively looking to purchase something. Think reviews, case studies, FAQ about a product . . . if you can position your affiliate links in front of people who want to buy, it’s far easier to convert them.

4. Or make people want to buy (wishlists!)

Alternatively, you can try to create that urge to splurge. Sharing things like wishlists, OOTDs and hauls is a great way to share cool shit that people may want to buy! Posts like these require less effort to create – and have high share-ability on platforms like Pinterest too.

5. Have a links page!

Another idea is to create an affiliate links or a “shop my links” page. I’ve not seen this done too often, but a cool idea could be to have a page set for affiliate links. If you’re a large influencer especially, this is a great way for your audience to support you without donating any money.

6. Refer other content creators to affiliate programs!

In fact, if you guys found this post useful and would like to earn some extra cash . . . here are some of the affiliate programs use that you can sign up to. Once you’ve signed up, you can share your unique URL to gain some referral bonus!

VIGLINK – VIGLink is one I’m really excited by.  Rather than having to manually apply and be approved by merchants, Viglink have existing relationships with 70,000 merchants (big names like Amazon, Nike and Ebay, too!) and automatically convert outgoing links to affiliate links. Especially if you have an established website, this saves you the hassle of having to go through all your posts and monetise all your links. Even better? You get 35% commission for the first year of any referrals. 

AWIN – Awin is one of my most profitable affiliate programs. They host big names like Etsy, ASOS, Beauty Bay and more! If you refer an affiliate who earns any revenue, you earn $30!

SHAREASALE –  This is one of the affiliate programs I’ve been with the longest! For every affiliate you sign up that earns $20, you earn $30. They’ve got a massive range of affiliates on shareasale.com – and some big names like ROMWE and SHEIN.

If you sign up for any of those, I’d love you forever if you used my link. I like commission.

7. Link to high conversion sites like Amazon

Because they do all the hard work for you! In the past 30 days, I’ve referred 282 links to Amazon and got 50 orders out of it. That’s a conversion rate of 17.72%.

For comparison, on ShopStyle Collective (also one of my favourite affiliate programs), I drove 722 links and only got 7 orders out of it – which is a conversion rate of 0.97%.

 Okay, beauties, this post is now pushing past the 1,000 word-count mark, so I’m going to round off here!

This was a really fun exercise in trying to identify what things work well for me in my affiliate marketing – and, honestly, it gave me some exciting ideas for new things to try. If you guys have any affiliate marketing tips, please leave them down below because I love learning more about it. Are you guys using any of these methods? Do you think you’ll start? Let me know your thoughts (or questions) down below!

Peace,

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About Mia M.

I'm going through a bit of an existential crisis right now, I'll tell you about myself when I figure out if I'm real or not.

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hey, i’m mia

tattoo lover, plant hoarder, DIY addict and overall stoner grandma

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