start an affiliate marketing blog

In this post – you will learn how to start and create your own affiliate marketing or money-generating blog from scratch.

Right now. In a few minutes. In 5 easy steps.

Even if you are a complete beginner in the online blogging or affiliate marketing space.

I have used this same process in creating over 30 WordPress affiliate sites within the last 6 months alone.

Mine and that of students.

In fact, this is the same process I used in creating a niche-focused blog that did the figures you’re seeing below:

Clickfunnels affiliate dashboard

The above dashboard might look familiar, as that’s just one of my income streams from blogging alone! Oh yes! that’s ClickFunnels affiliate dash.

Note that showing you this is not to brag or showoff.

But, I just want you to see the possibility of having your own blog and gaining free traffic from search engines.

But I’m not going to lie.

Making money online is not easy… Like the way, most “Make Money Online” artists and course creators make it sound.

BUT HEY,

Looking at it from another angle, IT IS!

When you take ACTION and follow the already established blueprint. The BIG question is; are you ready to take action and make it WORK?

If you’re not ready – please close this page right now and go about your 9-5 job.

(oh God I hate jobs!)

If you’re a beginner in affiliate marketing and or new to blogging, then this actionable post is going to serve as your new HOLY BOOK to making money online from blogging via affiliate.

I’ll try as much as possible to stay basic with the whole terms so even a beginner can catch every bit of this affiliate blogging guide, tutorial, walkthrough…

…or call it anything you like.

My aim here is to make sure that you start up your own online business without having any writing, marketing, and promotion skill. With at least $100 (might not be even up to that). 🙂

I’m not only going to help you start your own affiliate marketing blog (read till the end) – I will also make sure that you start earning from it as soon as possible. IF YOU ONLY TAKE ACTION.

Or maybe you’d like to network or get a step-by-step roadmap after reading this guide?

Then, make sure you still read till the end.

Your hunger to learn is all what I need. Not neglecting (again) ACTION

Before You Launch Your Affiliate Blog:

  • You don’t need any programming skills at all to make money online
  • You don’t need hundreds of dollars to start
  • You don’t need to be a good writer before you start blogging (I’m not and never was)
  • No special SEO skills needed (I didn’t make my first from search engines)
  • You need money to make money (This is business too)
  • You need to put in your time (More important than money)
  • This is not a get rich quick rich scheme (Please leave now if that’s what you seek)

I guess it’s clearer to you now this isn’t a big deal. It might be for you if you’re the lazy type looking for quick means.

Below are the steps we will use in launching your new blog:


Step #1: Getting a Domain and Hosting

Your domain

Choosing a domain is the first line of action in setting up your affiliate website. This will be your unique URL for example, that of this blog is “khrisdigital.com”.

It’s always advisable for your domain should be:

  • Easy to understand and pronounce
  • Related to what your blog is all about

You don’t have to overthink choosing your domain name, just make sure it makes sense to write, pronounce and once anybody sees the address, they can be able to at least tell what your blog is all about.

How do we acquire a domain name?

Hosting

This is where we build our affiliate blog or website. Without a hosting solution, there won’t be anything like a website.

With the help of a hosting solution, we would be able to broadcast our website all over the internet and get discovered by people.

Now, there are lots of hosting solutions all over the internet, but it’s very important you choose the right one for your affiliate marketing blog.

For this, I highly recommend you use Bluehost for hosting your blog. I will explain why you should use them:

Remember we needed a domain, right? Ok

It cost about $12 to get a domain separately from a registrar like namecheap.com, however you get it for FREE on Bluehost. And that’s not all!

  • The cheapest you can get out here!
  • They host over 2 million websites globally
  • Free setup
  • Pre-installed WordPress (no stress no hassle)
  • Free SSL certificate
  • Loads faster and smoothly
  • 30 days money back guaranteed (nothing to lose)
  • The only hosting company recommended by WordPress
  • 24/7 technical support for free

So, as you can see Bluehost is the real deal when it comes to setting up your affiliate marketing blog and installing the best Content Management Platform (CMS) which is WordPress, with just a single click and you’re good to roll.

To Begin our affiliate site setup…

Visit Bluehost.com and click “Get Started now”

Secure Reliable Hosting - Bluehost

You’ll be brought to this next page where you are to choose your plan. Here you go with the basic plan (You do not need others):

Web Hosting Plans and Packages - Bluehost

Next is where we choose our domain (you’re not paying for this!). But if you already have a domain fine just proceed and enter your domain in the second box then “Next”

Sign Up Now - Bluehost

Now you’ll need to create an account with Bluehost by filling out all the details required.

Like:

Personal account details

Create Your affiliate blog - Bluehost

Package information: Here you choose the account plan, either 12, 36 or 60 months. The longer it is, the lower you have to pay,

Also, make sure not to tick other nonsense there (you basically do not need it)

Create Your Account - Bluehost

Payment details: Enter your credit card details (or select PayPal as your payment option) to complete the process and get your blog up. Tick the “Terms of Service” button and submit

Create Your affiliate marketing blog Bluehost

Wow!

If you made it to this point… Then CONGRATULATIONS to you first of all for getting yourself a domain name and a hosting service for your online business.

Before we proceed, I do like to implore that you complete the above steps so you’ll find it very easy following up. I don’t want you to get overwhelmed and become confused.

Got my point?

Go to bluehost.com to complete the above steps now.

Next…

Go check your mail

After the submission, you shall be sent a welcome email by Bluehost, go ahead to create your password before logging in to your account.

The great advantage of using Bluehost is that WordPress would be automatically installed for you. This makes the whole affiliate blog creation and setup less stressful.

For other hosting providers, you’ll have to go through the process of installing it yourself which can be time-consuming and confusing.

The next phase is for you to pick your theme, I normally ignore and skip this aspect because I always prefer to select my theme after accessing my WordPress dashboard. So, feel free to skip.

Select your theme

Next, you will be shown a screen that says “Start Building”, click that button and you’ll be brought to here:

Blog dashboard

It’s time to launch your website. Just choose what your site would be used for then…

Give your site a title and description.

Site Title and description

And congratulations once again! Your blog is ready and it’s time to customize.

Step #2: Customization of Your Affiliate Blog

If you’re new to WordPress then I think you’ll need to familiarize yourself with WordPress dashboard, and if you’re not – then skip this part.

It does take some time to get around WordPress, but no need to worry because you don’t need any coding knowledge or technical skills in order to use WP.

It’s all about clicking and navigating around and once you start using it, you’ll get used to all the menus.

If you open up your domain in another browser, you are going to see something like this below (a blank site):

New WordPress site

Now go back to your WordPress dashboard >> “appearance” >> “theme” and Add New to install a theme (for now start with free). There are unlimited free themes you choose from.

You have to search for the theme name and activate…

Add theme to blog

You can pop up your blog URL in another tab to see how it looks after the theme installation…

For theme options:

I use Kadence for this site. You can get it at Kadencewp.com

I also use Astra on a few of my other sites. Get it at WPastra.com

Now it’s time to install other useful plugins we need to make our affiliate blog ROCK. Here are the basic WordPress plugins and affiliate tools we have to carry out before we customizing our new site:

  • Yoast SEO plugin: Used for optimizing your blog posts for on-page SEO
  • Sassy Social Share Plugin: A social sharing plugin
  • UpdraftPlus plugin: For backups
  • WP Super cache plugin
  • Contact form plugin
  • Thirsty affiliate plugin: For cloaking affiliate links

The process of installing the plugins are the same, just go the Plugins menu and Add New, then search for the plugin you wish to add.

Add Plugins WordPress

Changing permalink for SEO

You definitely need to have an SEO friendly URL for easy ranking and user-friendliness. On default, your URL will look like this: myurl.com/?p=1234

Which doesn’t make sense to eye and to search engine? So, for you to change to something like this: myurl.com/post-keyword

Go to “settings” >> “permalinks” and select the “post name”.

Permalink Settings WordPress

Connect Google Analytics and Console

You have to sign-up for Google Analytics and Google Console so that you can be able to view and optimize your affiliate blog for more traffic and conversions.

First, go to Google webmasters (console) and connect your site.

By heading over to search.google.com/search-console and add your website. To get the complete idea of how to quickly add your site to Google console read this article by Yoast and connect your affiliate blog fast.

Then go to google.com/analytics to sign-up for analytics to start tracking your website visits

Now it’s time to start our keyword research for our posts

Step #3: Keyword research

I’m assuming that you’ve already decided what affiliate marketing niche you want to blog about. If not then you don’t need to worry about that.

Talking about a niche:

I personally prefer going for subscription-based tools because of its lifetime recurring commissions. You shall continue earning for life if the users enjoy and keep using the software.

How sweet?!

There are lots of other lucrative niches out there, with just a few research (Google your “niche” + “affiliate programs”) you will discover more of them. But for the sake of this post, we shall base our keyword research on web-based software.

Starting our research

Since your blog is a new one and it’s going to take a while ranking on search engines, we shall be going for the “low hanging fruits” by targeting lots low volume keywords that are low competitive. Why?

This is for you to be able to rank faster and start getting traffic in no time.

We shall be using the term: “Blogging tools” for our research. (That’s just an example)

Here are the tools I use for keyword research:

First of all lets input keyword in Google suggest and see what we can get…

Blogging tools search - Google suggest

As you can see above, those great keyword ideas for you can target. And our Keywords everywhere extension has already helped us with the search volume, CPC and competition. You can also check on the right-hand side to get more keyword ideas you can write on.

If we scroll down the page you’ll also see these:

blogging tools - Google related search

These are the related keywords you can (individually) write and rank for.

And for Keywordtool.io, there are much MORE ideas!

blogging tools - keywordtoolio

In order to know how difficult and easy it is for each of these keywords to rank, head over https://kwfinder.com and input them. Once they are below Keyword Difficulty (KD) 25 (easy to rank), then you go over to the next step.

Enter your keyword below to see how difficult your Keyword is:

To get more ideas on how to perform complete keyword research – below are my recommended read:

Step #4: Writing of our content

This is the part that scares most of you who want to start an affiliate marketing blog because you think writing is such a hard task. It is actually.

But not as tedious as you might have thought it is. I’m a terrible writer myself but it just keeps getting better as the days go by.

My good friend Sam Rexford of ChillReptile published an epic guide on How To Write a Blog Post a while back – I think you’ll find it very useful.

Another great guide on writing blog posts I recommend you check out is that of SmartBlogger. Read it here.

However, if you want to quickly create lots of content without the hassle of going through tons of research – iWriter article outsourcing platform could be a great reliever.

In fact, there are quite a few content writing platforms out there, but to find the best one, just ask in any of these affiliate marketing groups.

If you plan to hire a writer, follow these tips:

  • Write a very detailed project instruction
  • Always save your favorite writers for a more future project
  • Do not expect amazing content from the cheapest
  • The more you pay the more quality content you get
  • Request that the writers use a third-party tool to spot-check their submissions using (Grammarly) to improve writing quality.

On-page SEO

The Yoast SEO plugin you installed initially makes it possible for you to be able to optimize your posts for SEO, you don’t have to overthink Search Engine Optimization, just follow few principles and you’re good to go.

Once your articles are ready just copy and paste them to your blog.

Go to “Post” >> “Add New” then paste your post. Make sure you input the post title and edit by following Yoast’s on-page recommendations beneath the editor.

Yoast on-page optimization

For advanced On-page SEO tactics follow this guide (On-Page SEO: Anatomy of a Perfectly Optimized Page) by Brian Dean.

What I’ll advise is for you to get at least 5-10 posts up and running (depending on niche) as fast as possible so as to build a kind of trust and with Google and users as well.

Step #5: Content Promotion

Oh yes! SEO takes time and effort – we know that – so we shall first take a look at some of the non-SEO strategies I personally used (when I started) to grow my blog from 5 daily visitors to 50 daily visitors before I started getting organic traffic to my posts.

Facebook groups

This is one of the methods I used in driving lots of traffic to my blog and it works great. How this works is that when you join groups related to your niche on Facebook, make sure to participate, interact and add value to every discussion.

But how do I drive traffic to my blog from FB groups? Good question!

Three ways:

One is dropping your blog post link (ethically) that addresses an answer to a question being asked in the group after a few write-up (don’t just drop links anyhow).

Here’s an example of a group question where I dropped one of my blog post links (with a write-up):

Answer a Facebook group question

Two is when the group owner or moderator opens up a thread for self-promotion. Here you can post your blog link plus what it’s all about (I do this a lot by including a very click-baity write up).

Check the example below:

FB group promo

Three is adding your blog link to your Facebook profile and go into the groups to start dropping massive valuable posts. This makes people to check out your profile and probably checking out your blog. This strategy might sound kind of lame, but it has worked a lot for me.

Quora (my profile)

More than 68% of the traffic I got within my first 3 months of blogging came from Quora.

What I did was signed up using my Gmail account, then selected the categories that interest me and filled up some necessary details and started providing answers to suggested questions – dropping my blog links within my answers.

As simple as that? Oh yes!

Khris Steven - Quora

Some of the few things I so much like about Quora is that your answer remains there forever and can be discovered by millions of individuals. There are chances that your answers might also rank on Google.

And at the same time, you’re building yourself as an authority in your industry.

Don’t forget to also have your blog link on your profile, some of the users can check up your profile and see what you’re all about then straight to your affiliate site or landing page.

Comment on niche related Blogs

This helps your blog traffic-wise and SEO-wise. Find blogs that are related to what your blog and contents are all about and drop a reasonable comment there.

First is that – you’ll get nice traffic within a while and a nofollow backlink to your blog.

How do you find niche-related blogs to comment on?

Go to Google and do a basic site search with “Computer gaming blog(s)” I used “Computer gaming” as the niche example. You can input your niche followed by a “blog” to discover blogs in your industry.

You will definitely find thousands of blogs to comment on and there should be a section where you input your blog address. My advice is to keep things natural and don’t turn yourself into a spamming machine.

Get your affiliate blog on a few social sites

Here’s is what I want you to do:

Go sign-up on at least 10 social media sites and leave your blog link pointing back to your site from those platforms. Then go crazy with at least two social media platforms where you can keep promoting your posts on.

There are lots of blog promotion platforms out there but whichever you choose, make sure you get PostPlanner for scheduling your social media updates and keep your contents evergreen.

I also recommend Missinglettr. I use this tool to drip-feed my blog contents to several social media platforms on autopilot up to a year.

Backlinks

This is the hardest part of it all – but the truth is that when you publish great contents people will naturally link to you.

Honestly, I don’t want you to overthink this – Even though backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors. What matters the most is for you to keep publishing valuable content on your affiliate blog.

One of the great ways you can get free backlinks is by using lots of images and infographics on your blog. It’s very easy to get an Infographic ready without any coding and design skills.

People share interactive content a lot. Especially infographics.

I recently started playing with Visme and I found it super-cool a lot. Oh, and it’s also free to use.

Still on getting backlinks for your affiliate blog:

There are different strategies you can employ to get backlinks, but that shouldn’t be your major priority. Once you go for the ‘low hanging fruits’ picking organic traffic becomes easier.

Backlinko is my number one SEO blog where I get lots of strategies and implement them to my blogs. Here is a very detailed and actionable guide on how you can get backlinks to your blog.

Or you want to learn from an expert directly?

Check out this free training on how to build highly profitable authority blogs and websites from industry experts!

Or read and follow along with how they did it here.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Long Does It Take Before I Start Earning After Starting An Affiliate Blog?

I got asked this question countless times by a few of the people I help in the initial setup of their affiliate blog. What I always tell them is:

Have patience.

Remember I told you initially that this is a business, right?

It takes effort to succeed in business. I’m not going to sugarcoat things here by telling you that it’s going to be easy. It is not.

Although it took me 3 months after I started my first affiliate marketing blog to make my very first dollar which was as little as $4.5.

First affiliate earning

And as at the time I wrote this I’ve started making a roughly recurring monthly income of about $1,500 – 3,500 per month from affiliate marketing. Using a few of my blogs.

In my more than 2 years as a marketer and fewer 18months as an affiliate.

These are pure organic traffic from blogging and SEO.

Frankly, I should have surpassed that milestone but one of the great mistakes I made initially was not using forms on my blog to build up my lists. So, I lost a lot of potential leads due to that.

I was also hesitant about investing in myself. Plus I neglected retargeting visitors using paid Ads.

But, what I want you to do to get GetResponse (the most affiliate friendly email solution). It’s free for the first 30 days and $15 per month after that. If you’re on a budget then start with MailChimp.

But I want you to know that you won’t be able to send affiliate offers to your MailChimp subscribers because it’s against their terms of service. With GetResponse you can do that freely without being banned.

Then get a lead generation form tool like Sumo (free) or ConvertBox (paid) so you can place the form anywhere on your blog to collect email contacts.

Can I Do Affiliate Marketing On Blogger?

I would not recommend using Blogger for affiliates, as there’s a limit to what you can do on a free blogging platform. And it’ll be very hard for you to monetize such a blog. The best is using Bluehost and set up a self-hosted blog where you have no limit whatsoever.

And you will highly be more favored by search engines than free blogs.

How Do Affiliate Marketers Make Money For Beginners?

If you’re a complete newbie in the affiliate marketing space – the best route should be sticking with one traffic source, promoting one or very few affiliates offers until you become successful with it.

It is very easy to get overwhelmed when starting out, so it is best to shut other doors and do ONE thing.

Also, join these affiliate marketing groups to network and build a relationship with other affiliate marketers.

Conclusion

I think I’m going to end here because that’s all to my tutorial on starting an affiliate marketing blog and making money from it.

See anyone can do this. YOU CAN DO THIS. Trust me!

You just need to stay focused and consistent (you’ve probably heard that thousand of times already). It does take a lot but it’s worth it in the long run, buddy.

If I (a bad writer without any marketing skill) can do this I don’t see any reason why you can’t.

  • Just start by Getting your domain and hosting from https://bluehost.com
  • Customize your site within a few minutes
  • Start your keyword research and go for the low-hanging fruits.
  • Start blogging/writing
  • Optimize for on-page (Yoast got you on this)
  • Answer questions on Quora and use other promotion tactics
  • Publish more contents
  • Let the traffic + Money come

I hope you found this affiliate blog creation guide useful? You have questions, need help, or support setting up your very first affiliate blog?

Let me know if you need any help in the comments.