Starting an affiliate marketing blog has become easy to do thanks to WordPress and the abundance of done-for-you blogging templates. However, getting people to come to your new affiliate site is another challenge in itself!
I know this far too well.
It was only 2 short years ago that I started this affiliate marketing website you’re reading right now. Like many other beginner affiliate bloggers before me, I thought if I build it, then eventually people would come.
That was not the case. At least not at the beginning. Growing my blog traffic proved to be a lot more challenging than I had expected. It was mainly due to my inexperience, not my work ethic.
Fortunately, I did figure things out and after a few tweaks I was able to increase my blog traffic from an estimated 50 organic search visits per month to over 2,900 per month.
If you’re in the business of making money with a blog, then you know that increased traffic means more potential to make affiliate sales. It’s the difference between having a passive income asset that pays you vs. a blog that ends up costing you money.
With that said, the tips I share in this article on how to increase your affiliate blog traffic come from my personal experience. So you can feel comfortable knowing these strategies work and are not just based on theory.
(Hey! Before you dive into this post on increasing your blog traffic, **PIN THIS IMAGE** on Pinterest so you can come back to it again!)
Do You Need a Blog to Do Affiliate Marketing?
No. You don’t need a blog to do affiliate marketing. Nowadays, there are many ways to do affiliate marketing without a blog that don’t require you to publish content to an affiliate blog.
When I first got started on my affiliate marketing journey, I used free Facebook traffic and effective storytelling to make high ticket affiliate sales.
This strategy only required having a Facebook profile, affiliate links, and a Paypal account where I would send invoices and collect payments from students interested in high ticket affiliate marketing coaching.
The strategy works extremely well by leveraging the powerful principles of influence, and it doesn’t require you to have a blog.
7 PRINCIPLES OF PERSUASION!
When I moved on from this method of affiliate marketing, I gave away my entire six-figure Nurture System Sales Framework for free on my YouTube channel.
The other method I used to make affiliate sales prior to having a blog was with Pinterest affiliate marketing. I’ve also leveraged short video reels for lower ticket affiliate sales.
I breakdown these strategies in my following blog posts:
Feel free to check out these articles if you want to learn about other effective strategies to making money with affiliate marketing.
Benefits of an Affiliate Marketing Blog
There are many benefits to creating an affiliate marketing blog that would entice any long-term affiliate marketer to get started with one today. Below are just some of these benefits that moved me to start an affiliate marketing blog.
- Ability to own valuable online real estate that increases in value the more you work on your blog and increase organic traffic to it.
- Affiliate websites can often sell for as much as 30 – 40x monthly net profits.
- Low start up costs
- Performance based model
- You can remain semi-anonymous behind an affiliate blog (if you want)
- No dealing with clients – The affiliate programs handle that for you
- No more trading time for money – Your affiliate blog is open 24 hours a day making passive income for you
- Ability to scale by outsourcing content creation
- Opportunity to create additional streams of income by adding digital offers, coaching programs and masterminds to your affiliate marketing blog.
Personally, all of these points align with the type of online business that I was looking to build. For these reasons and more, I decided to go all in building my affiliate marketing blog.
Learn How to Build a Profitable Affiliate Website
(Free Step-by-Step Video Tutorials to Making Money with a Blog!)
6 Steps to Increase Affiliate Blog Traffic
In order to increase your blog traffic, you need to have a good foundation to build upon. This includes having a fast website hosting provider, such as WPX, which is where I host this affiliate marketing site.
You also want to make sure you’re using a lightweight WordPress theme, such as GeneratePress or Astra. Once you have these in place, then you can use a website builder such as Elementor Pro to create beautifully designed, lightweight affiliate websites.
Update Old Blog Posts
One of the most important things I did that had the biggest impact on my Google search ranking was to update old content on my site. I had started this journey nearly two years ago as a beginner affiliate blogger, and undoubtedly there were many things I didn’t know back then that I do know now.
For example, some of my older blog posts had a lot of good information in them, but lacked basic H2 and H3 blog structure that could help it get found in search. Other articles were written in a way that didn’t match the search intent for the query. In those cases, I had to completely rewrite the original blog post.
Ahrefs has a great article on how to go about updating old blog posts for SEO, and I would definitely recommend you give it a read. It certainly helped me prioritize which blog posts I should get started on first.
These were others changes I made to old content:
- Updated internal links to include new and relevant content I had written
- Unlinked anchor texts that had little relevance to the linked page
- Swapped out images for newer ones
- Added missing ‘Alt text’ to images
- Increased the length of the blog post as needed
- Better optimized post content for target keyword
- Added more long-tail keywords
After you republish your post, give it a couple of days for Google to re-rank it. Then check it again in Ahrefs or SEMRush to see how the article is performing. You’ll usually be able to see changes nearly overnight.
It’s literally one of the best things you can do right now to rank your affiliate marketing blog higher in the Google search results.
Write Higher Quality Product Reviews
Google will periodically update their product review guidelines to ensure that shoppers find the most helpful content related to the product or service. As an affiliate blogger, high ranking product review posts can be a big driver of affiliate sales.
In many cases, it’s an affiliate blogger’s bread and butter.
So when Google updates their product review guidelines, it can have a huge impact on affiliate websites that are heavy on product review posts.
This was the case with a recent update. Many affiliate websites lost their ranking nearly overnight, and with it their affiliate earnings potential.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have my review posts gain in ranking thanks to the latest Google product review updates. I attribute this to closely following Google’s guidelines, in particular being a consumer of the product and having first-hand experience with it.
With this being the case, I can write more in-depth blog articles that include intimate details about the product. I can also easily compare the product to other similar products as well as show examples of the product in use.
Ultimately, you want your review post to have all the information necessary for the end consumer to make a purchasing decision. If they have to leave your site to search for another review post, then that lets Google know that your review post is not the best to show in search results.
Read more about Google’s Product Review Guidelines.
Build Content Hubs
Content hubs, commonly referred to as topic clusters, is the next best thing you can do to gain traction with a small or new affiliate blog. The way it works is you have a central piece of content, known as a Pillar post, that covers one main topic or subject matter.
From there, you create a cluster of pages with subtopics related to your pillar content and interlink between all the pages. By doing this, you’re building an authority blog that lets Google know you’re the expert on the subject matter.
With SEO tools, it’s easy to find long-tail keywords that you can use to write supporting articles, which point back to your pillar content post. For example, an affiliate marketing blog looking to make affiliate sales of beanie hats can create a Pillar post such as: ‘How to Wear a Beanie: The Ultimate Guide.’
SubTopics can look something like this:
- How to Wear a Beanie with Long Hair
- How to Wear a Beanie with Short Hair
- Beanie Styles for Guys
- How to Style a Beanie for Women
- How to Wear a Beanie Like a Skater
- Beanie vs Skull Cap: What’s the Difference?
- How to Double Fold a Beanie
You can continue creating topic clusters and branch out even further. In this beanie example, another Pillar post can be: ‘Different Types of Beanies’
Blog posts can be written about each beanie type, such as: Fisherman beanie, cuffless beanie, slouchy beanie, cuffed beanie, high top beanie, etc. You can even go into the differences of each brand name beanie.
You get the idea.
Now if you’re already thinking this sounds like the most time consuming work to do, then you’re right. It takes a long time to write individual blog posts on all these subtopics. If you prefer, you can spend money to have this work outsourced for you.
This makes it all the more reason to start an affiliate marketing blog that’s going to pay high commissions on each sale conversion.
Create More Evergreen Content
Something I recently discovered that completely changed the way I look at content creation is the importance of creating more evergreen content. Let me explain with a couple of simple examples.
Not long ago, the Pinterest Creator Rewards program and Pinterest Creator Fund were the hot topics on the social media streets. Pinterest was dishing out free money to qualified creators for creating short video reels on the platform.
After applying and getting accepted into one of the programs, I quickly jumped on the opportunity to create content for my affiliate blog. My articles immediately ranked on page one of search results and organic traffic was coming my way.
Then out of nowhere, and roughly 3 months after I’d been accepted as a paid Pinterest Creator, Pinterest abruptly closed the programs. Traffic to my blog posts took a nosedive and eventually flatlined.
People had essentially stopped searching for information on the programs since it was no longer available.
Frankly, I probably wouldn’t have changed a thing if I knew this was coming down the line. I still managed to drive people to my email list as well as to my affiliate offers on each page.
Though what I have learned is that in order to keep increasing traffic to your blog overtime, you need to create more evergreen content. These are search queries that people are generally always searching for and that need to be updated less frequently by you.
For example, answering simple search queries in your area of focus such as ‘Is Affiliate Marketing Worth It?’ or ‘Is Affiliate Marketing Profitable?’ can prove to be more beneficial to you in the long run.
Write Click-Worthy Blog Titles
One area I really struggled with early on in my affiliate marketing blogger journey was in writing clickable headline titles. I would spend hours writing a well researched SEO blog post to then sit and stare at the screen trying to come up with an eye catching title for it.
Here’s the thing – If Google ranks your article on the first page of search results, then the easiest way to increase your blog traffic is to make sure people choose your article as the one to read. The best way to ensure this happens is to write click-worthy blog titles.
During the last few months of focusing on this area, I’ve been able to increase my click-thru rate from 0.03% to 1%. (click through rates vary from niche to niche, 2% – 3% is generally considered to be good)
I’m still not where I want to be yet with my blog title CTR, but I’m getting there. Below are some of my best tips to help you improve your blog title click-thru rate.
- Use Power Words to bring about action and spark emotion
- Read blog titles on the first page of search results for inspiration
- Add numerals in your title to instantly stop readers in their tracks (such as I’m doing with the title of this blog post!)
- Use negative sentiment to grab a reader’s attention (Example: ‘Which of These Pimple Treatment Mistakes Will You Make?)
- Read Copywriting Secrets to improve your catchy headline and copywriting prowess
Learn to write better blog titles and you’ll get more traffic to your affiliate marketing blog without having to do any additional work.
Turn Blog Posts into YouTube Videos
This next tip is admittedly not for everyone.
However, for content creators who wish to venture out into the world of YouTube for purposes of traffic generation, then this one’s for you!
Prior to starting this affiliate marketing blog, I was an affiliate marketer with a YouTube channel. So naturally when I decided to start a blog, it made sense to repurpose my blog content into YouTube videos.
In many cases, I recorded my blog posts word for word and ad libbed certain parts to make my video sound more conversational.
Here for example is my blog post on the differences between being an Amazon Influencer vs Affiliate, and then here’s the YouTube video I recorded for it.
The parts in the video that I read word for word from my blog post are where you see stock footage inserted from Storyblocks.
After I’ve uploaded my video onto YouTube, I make sure to place my relevant blog post link in the description of the video.
I then direct my YouTube audience to look for this link in the description area for more expanded information on the topic.
This simple method has turned YouTube into my #1 affiliate blog referral traffic source according to my Google Analytics!
Try it out for yourself to see how it works for you. Read more on how to make money with YouTube affiliate marketing.
Final Thoughts on Affiliate Blog Traffic
The tips shared in this article come from my personal experience of increasing traffic to my affiliate marketing blog. They are simple, yet highly effective tips that can help you see more traffic and consequently make more affiliate sales when implemented.
I realize at the beginning of the blogging journey things may feel as if they’re barely moving no matter what you implement. Just remember – blogging is a long-term game. Results are not always apparent at the beginning, but with a little patience, you’ll make it to the other side of having a profitable affiliate blog!
If you’re seeking one-on-one help with your affiliate blog, then feel free to book time on my schedule for more personalized help.
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