Hi mamas! Are you wanting to earn an income with your blog? I mean who doesn’t! It’s the perfect side hustle for stay-at-home moms and there are about a million ideas to make money with your blog.
I want to serve you as much as I can to help you become a successful mompreneur, so I’m starting a series on how to make money online using your blog.
My first in the series was how 11 Freelancers Make Money Online With Their Blog.
For today’s post in this series, I wanted to see how other bloggers – especially mom bloggers – use affiliate marketing to make money on their blog.
How do you start earning an income with your affiliate posts? How do you figure out which companies to work with?
When I first started Twins Mommy, I knew I wanted to generate an income from this blog. I tried my hand at affiliate marketing last year, but I didn’t earn much. That’s because I wasn’t focused and didn’t have a strategy.
But, it all changed this year. With a new strategy I generated $200 my first month! And I am on track to make more the next month.
Before we get into the nitty gritty of this post, I have a free resource on 12 rockin’ ways to promote your affiliate products. These have helped me to triple my affiliate income, so make sure to sign up below to grab your free guide!
Learn from the best bloggers about how to make money with your affiliate products.
1. Michelle | Making Sense of Cents
I earn around $50,000 per month through affiliate marketing on my blog Making Sense of Cents.
I’ve been interested in affiliate marketing since just a little bit after I started my blog back in 2011, but I never thought it was possible before. I always thought that you had to have a huge following and a ton of page views in order to earn affiliate income and to even earn passive income through a blog.
Well, one day I decided to give myself a goal of earning affiliate income through Making Sense of Cents, and I worked towards reaching my affiliate income goal.
I started by making a little bit each month, and then it just continued to grow month after month. I now know that you don’t need a ton of page views or a huge following in order to make a great income through affiliate marketing.
I love affiliate marketing because it can feel quite passive and I don’t have to have a blog that is full of advertisements. You can create just one blog post or social media post, and potentially earn money from it years down the line, as long as you maintain it and keep generating traffic to it.
With affiliate marketing, I can enjoy life more and know that I am still able to earn a great living promoting products that I use and enjoy. I now travel full-time and affiliate marketing makes that possible. Plus, I get to help my readers find quality products that I know they will enjoy.
My best piece of advice for those who are interested in affiliate marketing would be to just try! I waited so long to try affiliate marketing, and I still regret waiting so long. Even if you have a low amount of followers or if you are a brand new blogger, you can still be successful at affiliate marketing. My course Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing will teach you exactly how to earn affiliate income and there are over 1,400 students who have bought it.
1. Lena | What Mommy Does
I have been doing affiliate marketing almost since the beginning of my blog.
At first, it was just throwing a few links in my posts here and there and hoping for some sales. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I knew others were earning money this way!
Over time, as I got better at serving my audience, I also got better at doing affiliate marketing. I think that’s because affiliate marketing is a relationship thing. Kind of like when you notice your neighbor has a lovely garden and you ask for her advice growing roses, then she tells you all about her favorite nursery nearby that will actually teach you about caring for each variety of rose you buy there….so you go there later that week to check it out.
Your neighbor is recommending a company just like a blogger would recommend a company – giving a specific recommendation she trusts in answer to your question.
I would say I’ve been really into affiliate marketing since the end of 2015. I implemented a lot of links that fall, and saw good results through January. When my traffic dipped after the new year, I noticed that my affiliate income did not!
So, I did some investigating and realized that I needed relatively fewer page views to make more money if I was to focus on affiliate marketing, so that’s what I did starting early 2016. I have been able to grow my traffic and income a lot since then without working any harder because affiliate marketing is just so effective.
To start marketing my affiliates, I choose my blog topics first because I only write about what interests me. Then once I have enough to say about a topic to make a series, I’ll research solutions (products and services) to offer my readers.
Every once in a while, I will find an affiliate product that I know will fit 100% into my content, then I will craft some posts around it, but for the most part, I let my content dictate my affiliate connections. More products and services have affiliate programs than I ever imagined.
I have yet to start a blog series and not be able to find a related affiliate offer for it. For instance, I recently decided to try the Ketogenic diet. After I got into it, I realized how good I felt doing it and wanted to write a blog series. And wouldn’t you know, the eBook I was reading on the subject had an affiliate program! It was a perfect fit. 100% relevant and I could recommend it based on personal experience.
My affiliate income varies month to month, but it’s from $3,000 – $9,000 depending on the season.
The best thing I could recommend if you’re interested in affiliate marketing is to take it seriously. Most people are not successful from one affiliate post. I find that it takes 3-4 posts related to a single topic and a little bit of time before you can even tell whether or not the affiliate will do well for you. This goes back to making recommendations based on personal experience – your affiliate products need to be ones you can recommend wholeheartedly and write about often.
Join me over on Facebook!
2. Caroline | Swaddles n’ Bottles
When I started Swaddles n’ Bottles in October 2016, my goal was not to make money. My goal was to share my trials and triumphs of motherhood with other new moms in hopes that they would be able to make their lives a little easier.
However, as my passion for blogging about mommin’ continued to grow, so did my pageviews. That’s when I began to think, “This could be my dream job in the making!”
I had read so much about how stay-at-home-moms made a full time income blogging and I didn’t even really want to make that much.
If I made $100 a month that would be amazing! When it came to choosing a way to make money, I wanted to be smart about it. I had built up an amazing following of moms and I didn’t want to put a price tag on their loyalty.
When I read about Amazon Affiliates, my heart did a little skip because I knew it was the perfect way to monetize the site without “selling” something to my readers.
I cannot even begin to tell you how much I LOVE Amazon. It’s a healthy obsession and I have found even more appreciation for it since becoming a mom. THIS was it; this is how I would monetize my blog!
What I loved most about this program was the small kickback I earned from selling a product did not affect the reader’s price. The referral fee is paid by the seller, NOT the buyer! Plus, Amazon is trusted by so many people, including me. I didn’t have to worry that I was referring a product that gave my readers the short end of the deal.
I didn’t have to do any searching when it came to what products I would sell. I would simply blog about the products I use in my home on a daily basis, 99% of which come from Amazon.
I also use Amazon Family to have my baby’s diaper, wipes and other household products delivered to me each month, and there is an affiliate program for that too! One of the products that I sell the most of each month is lactation support supplements. I struggled with my lactation quite a bit when my daughter was born; I still do even at 6.5 months! I have tried dozens of products to help boost my supply and have blogged about my journey.
In those posts I link the products to Amazon. The same product that earns me the most money each month is one that I am also buying on a monthly basis to solve a problem I currently have in my life. I do not have Amazon links in every post, some do not have any!
I think it’s important to have a balance to maintain the image of your blog. It isn’t about selling things, it’s about helping people. I promote my posts with affiliate links the same way I do all other posts. I use Pinterest and utilize group boards. I also promote on Instagram and Facebook.
I have only been blogging since October, so while I don’t have many months of data, the last three months have consistently been over $1,000.
- November- $1,119.54
- December-$1,781.41
- January so far- $1,875.19
My greatest piece of advice for anyone wanting to start out with affiliate marketing is to find a way to connect your passion to a product. If you are a fashion blog, there are SO many brands that have affiliate programs. If you have a cooking/ food blog, promote the products you use to make your time in the kitchen easier. I have been contacted by 2 or 3 online gyms since I started blogging asking me to join their affiliate program, so there is even something out there for fitness bloggers! Share what makes you successful in whatever your niche is.
Find and follow me on Facebook!
3. Aly | What Moms Love
For our site, What Moms Love, affiliate marketing is a natural fit. We keep busy moms up-to-date on all the latest (and coolest) products for their kids, including fun gift guides, fashionable finds, and the best baby gear – plus great tips and advice on how to make their journey through modern day motherhood a little easier.
We began using affiliate links from the outset, realizing that we could seamlessly integrate them into our product recommendations.
We use Amazon wherever possible as it’s the most widely used site and the barriers to purchase (shipping costs, delivery timing) are the lowest, making it much more likely for a transaction to occur then from other sites.
A few other affiliate programs we use and recommend are Share-a-Sale, Affiliate Window (Etsy!), Commission Junction (Minted, Zappos) and Impact Radius (hello, Target!).
Our #1 tips for bloggers interested in affiliate marketing is to take a course like Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing. We learned all our best practices from this course and are so thankful to Michelle for sharing all of her amazing tips and secrets in an easy to implement manner.
After only 7 months, we are now making upwards of $8,000 per month in affiliate revenue – mostly fueled by our successful Non-Toy Gift Guide and Ultimate Toy Gift Guide for kids. These guides have been extremely popular because we have carefully curated the products, and extensively tested them on kids over long periods of time – moms appreciate that we’ve done the leg-work for them, and we include detailed descriptions and photos of almost every product we recommend, helping them make their purchase decision.
Although most of our posts bring in some affiliate income, we use a unique Amazon Tracking ID for each new post so we can closely monitor which ones are getting the most clicks and transactions.
We then amp up our promotion of the best affiliate-performing posts via our social media platforms (Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram), and even update them to include more recommendations and links. In addition, if we see a particular item selling really well on the site, we make sure to make a Pin of that product on Pinterest with an affiliate link leading directly to Amazon.
If you’re a mom looking for high-quality pins focused on Family and Kids, join us on Pinterest!
4. Kristin | Believe in a Budget
Hi, I’m Kristin, the creator of Believe In A Budget! When I first started my blogging journey, I really wanted to make blogging into a career, but wasn’t sure quite how to do that. I did a lot of research on how to earn money from blogging, but it didn’t click for me right away!
Initially, I focused on Pinterest freelancing as my main method of earning a living online. While the income was great and I was really happy, I realized I was working a lot of hours helping other bloggers and businesses grow.
Over time, I really wanted to focus on building my blog and brand, so I allowed myself to spend 50% of my time freelancing and 50% of my time growing my business.
One method of growing my business included creating courses and products for my clients. My freelancing business as a Pinterest manager was growing too quickly! I was turning down clients on a regular basis, which was really hard to do. I wanted to be able to offer my services as well as earn the extra income, so I need to come up with a solution!
I decided to create Pinterest Presence, which was essentially my exact same strategies I applied to my clients, but with content packaged into a course. This changed everything! I essentially listened to what my clients wanted and create a solution.
Outside of spending the time to create the course, I was able to earn a passive income without doing any additional freelance work!
Motivated by this shift in how I was earning income, I decided to focus on my blog and figure out how I could better serve my blog audience and make money at the same time.
After spending countless hours reviewing my Google Analytics, re-reading blog posts that received the most comments and tracking which emails performed the best, I was able to get a pretty firm understanding of what my audience needed.
For example, a large portion of my readers want to know how to save money. Obviously, an affiliate program where the reader has to spend a large amount of money on a product or an affiliate link to a luxury brand isn’t going to appeal to them!
Instead, I focused on finding affiliate programs that would be free, helpful and valuable. A perfect affiliate program for this group of people would be Ibotta, where readers can earn cash back and rebates just from grocery shopping. Once Ibotta became a success with my readers, I started searching for other like-minded programs that would provide my audience with even more valuable tips on how to save money!
Today, my blog audience is pretty diverse. I have three different target markets visiting my website, so I’ve had to research each group to see how I can best help their needs.
Fortunately, this means I have three different markets that I can use affiliate products to grow my income. Last month, I earned over $10,000 in affiliate income alone!
If you are just getting started with affiliate marketing, I can’t recommend researching your audience enough! I assumed I knew my audience, but when it came down to the statistics, I realized I was totally wrong. Once you have a clear understanding of your audience’s wants and needs, the possibility of earning affiliate income is endless!
Find me and follow me on Facebook!
5. McKinzie | Moms Make Cents
I started my blog Moms Make Cents in the summer of 2016, with the goal of empowering moms by teaching them how to start their own businesses. I started three profitable businesses in my first year as a mom and it helped keep our family financially afloat during a tough financial time.
I knew that affiliate marketing would play a big role in how I would monetize my blog. I get to share products that I use and love and I get to make a commission from it?! How great is that! My income is pretty evenly split between my course Pinterest to Profits and my different streams of affiliate income. Overall, selling my own products and promoting affiliate products have gone well together.
When I first started I wasn’t sure what I should promote. But then I asked myself these questions.
1. What products do I use every day?
2. What product/service helps me run my business better?
3. What product would I talk about even if there wasn’t a monetary incentive?
I like to think that each of my readers is my friend and I would only want the best for my friends!
In the first month of my blog, I made $.22 from affiliate marketing. By my second month I made almost $400 and in my third month, I made over $1,000 via affiliate marketing. Since then I have made between $1,000 to about $2,000 per month on my blog through affiliates. It has been absolutely incredible!
My number one tip would be to promote only products you’ve used and loved! Your readers will appreciate you being genuine. Also, remember to promote your affiliate posts on Pinterest. Over 80% of my traffic comes from Pinterest so I heavily promote my posts there and create two pins per post especially when it is an affiliate post or review!
Find me and follow me on Facebook!
6. Jenn | Best of Budgets
I’m Jenn Leach and I blog over at Best of Budgets. It all started about 4 years ago. I was working a corporate banking job and was just miserable. I had always dreamed of being an entrepreneur but I didn’t know where to start. The internet really got me nowhere. I started trying different things to make money online including:
- Selling Twitter fans
- Freelance writing for content mills (note from Elna, there’s a better way to freelance write!)
- Reselling used electronics
And more! I started an online store on a whim and a year later, I was earning enough to replace my full time day job income so, I quit! Fast forward to now, I have started and sold many successful e-commerce and content websites and I currently blog at Best of Budgets, educating readers how to make extra money, save money, and pay off debt!
Blogging is really about sharing something you are passionate about, whatever it may be. For me, I’m such a frugal fanatic and I also have a ton of knowledge about making money online and side hustling so I decided to focus on those topics for my blog.
I have been blogging for less than a year and have sold 2 successful blogs!
Blogging + Affiliate Marketing
There are many ways to earn money online but blogging and making money through affiliate marketing has been one of my most lucrative outlets. With affiliate marketing, your income earning potential is really unlimited. While I’m not earning $50,000/month (yet!) from affiliate offers, I have no doubt that I will reach that milestone in the future.
I looked into affiliate marketing many years ago. I signed up to Peerfly, Clickbank, and a few other networks but I really didn’t know how to use them. Today, I’m a member of several networks and I have the knowledge and expertise to carefully select products and services based on my audience.
How I Pick My Affiliate Offers
I think it’s super important to only promote products that you believe in so, many of the affiliate offers I promote, I have firsthand experience with. I love to test out offers and share my experience in a blog case study. Readers really connect if they see you have used or currently use the product. It really speaks volumes, versus shoving a random offer in their face.
Currently, I earn $800-$1,200/month from affiliate offers. I belong to several affiliate networks including Flexoffers and Shareasale. I also participate in private affiliate programs direct through the merchant like Shopify.
How I Get Readers to See My Affiliate Posts
To get eyes on my posts, it boils down to promotion. I spend a good bit of time promoting my content. This includes being active on social media, email marketing, participating in collaborative events, and paid ads.
Affiliate marketing is a great source of income and has afforded me the opportunity to work from home, spend more time with my family, and provide for my family.
My #1 tip for bloggers who are interested in affiliate marketing is to promote products that you believe in. Being authentic is invaluable and will help you create an audience of loyal readers.
Find me and follow me on Facebook!
7. Jenn | The Art of Better Blogging
I’ve run two different blogs for a few years now, The Art of Better, about women’s self-development and The Art of Better Blogging about the business of blogging.
Although my main income source from my business blog is coaching based, I’ve taken to affiliate marketing in a big way in the last year or so on both blogs, and it’s quickly become my most productive secondary income stream with very little effort.
Deciding to start with affiliating was easy since I love to shout from the rooftops when I discover a product or service I believe in anyway, but the biggest challenge was learning how to do it well.
So many new affiliate partners want to go after every single affiliate network out there and become an affiliate for as many products and services as possible. That’s not the way to be successful!
Choose only those products/services that you actually stand behind and use yourself so you can maintain the trust factor with your audience because that’s essential to maintaining decent long-term income as an affiliate. Once the trust is gone, the payouts will dry up quickly.
Be selective in who/what you promote otherwise it gives the appearance of selling anything to make a dollar. One last piece of advice for bloggers looking to start as an affiliate: always, always, always disclose according to FTC guidelines. Unfortunately, people not disclosing properly (or at all!) casts us all in a sleazy light and, again, is a quick way to lose the trust of your readers.
I promote my affiliate links all over my blogging universe but focus mainly on blog posts, social media (especially Pinterest), and in my emails to my list. In my self-development niche, Amazon has been lucrative because there are a million different related products that I’m able to offer my audience.
Plus, they’re always ordering from Amazon anyway. For my blogging niche, I mainly share the services and products that I’ve personally used to build my business like social media schedulers, hosting, themes, etc. You’ve got to know your audience well before deciding what products or services are going to work the best.
Although I’m not making five figures a month though affiliating, having an extra $1200 to $3100 a month coming in that’s just gravy on top of my coaching business has been wonderful. Being an affiliate doesn’t require crazy amounts of effort, and most of it is somewhat passive income, especially links in blog posts or review blog posts that continue to get traffic regularly from Pinterest.
I also make it a point to schedule additional social media posts around a launch of a program or course that I affiliate for to get a nice little bump in commissions.
Please follow me on Twitter!
It’s Possible to Make an Income with Affiliate Marketing
I always thought it was hard to make money with affiliate marketing. But, I learned you really need a strategy to benefit from your affiliate products.
Once I figured that out, BOOM! Income was coming. These amazing ladies learned how to generate income from posts they wrote long long ago.
That’s the best thing about affiliate marketing. One post can generate you consistent income and it was a post you wrote a long time ago!
Over to you, make sure to pick up my guide of proven ways to promote your affiliates and let me know if you’re doing affiliate marketing!
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