Blogging Vs. Affiliate Marketing: Which is better? What is the difference? How can you do any of them? And can you combine both in order to make money online?
These and other questions are what we will be answering today in this article.
And in the last section of this article, I will show you how to start with any of the two with the proper training, tools and support that you will need in your journey if you want to make money online with blogging or affiliate marketing.
But first of all, let’s start with the most important question related to affiliate marketing and blogging:
What Is The Difference Between Blogging & Affiliate Marketing?
Blogging is the process of building an audience and gaining readers for the content that you publish on your own blog about a certain topic or niche, while Affiliate Marketing is a money making model that allows you to make money by promoting others’ products to people who need them, and get paid a commission on every new sale or customer that you bring.
From the above statement we can understand that both terms: Affiliate Marketing & Blogging, are not opposite to each other, as they don’t fall under the same category of concepts.
You don’t have to choose between affiliate marketing and blogging if you want to make money online, but instead, you can combine both methods together in order to make money with the affiliate marketing model, by getting people to see the products you promote through publishing helpful content on your blog.
How To Combine Affiliate Marketing & Blogging In Order To Make Money Online?
In four simple steps, here’s how affiliate marketing and blogging work together:
- You research and choose a niche that you want to work on (a group of people with a common interest, skill, hobby, passion, problem, …etc.).
- You create a blog and publish content about the topics that people in the chosen niche are interested in learning about, or about solutions for the problems they suffer from, and you optimize your blog posts for SEO.
- You find relevant affiliate programs and join them in order to promote their products that could help your audience solve their problems or improve their lives, and you promote those products in the content you create through a unique link (affiliate link).
- You publish the content on your blog in a way that people will find it when they search for information or solutions on Google and other search engines, and when someone clicks on your affiliate links and purchases something, you get paid a commission from the merchant.
And that’s how you combine affiliate marketing and blogging in order to make money online.
It is by creating a place (a blog) where you can help others through the content you create, and make money (with affiliate marketing) by recommending useful products, like in this chart:
However, At the same time, you don’t have to do both together: affiliate marketing and blogging, as there are many ways to build an audience for affiliate marketing without blogging, and there are many ways to make money with a blog without affiliate marketing, as you will see below.
Blogging & Other Ways Of Doing Affiliate Marketing
There are many ways for making money with affiliate marketing that are sometimes promoted as “copy and paste links to make money” methods, and here are some of the most popular ones:
1 – Paid Ads
Using paid ads, especially search ads on Google and other search engines can be a very effective method of doing affiliate marketing as you can promote affiliate products directly to people searching for them without having to create your own content, website, or social following.
However, there are some downfalls to this method as not all affiliate programs allow you to use paid ads to promote their products directly, such Amazon’ affiliate program for example, while others, such as ClickBank, allow you to do so.
But another downfall is that the ad networks such as Google have strict rules that might prevent you from using certain types of affiliate links or landing pages in your ads, which means that you need to create your landing pages in order to become compliant and get your ads approved.
2 – Affiliate Marketing With Vlogging
Doing affiliate marketing with YouTube through vlogging by creating YouTube videos and monetizing them through affiliate marketing is another effective method, because YouTube works as a search engine and people go there to look for information and for solutions to problems.
With Vlogging on YouTube, you can create helpful videos in your niche and promote products through your affiliate links that you place in the description area of the videos.
However, this method also has its cons as YouTube blocks many affiliate links when they notice that some affiliate marketers have spammed YouTube with them in the past.
This means that you might, once again, need to create your own landing pages (or bridge pages) in order to place your affiliate links in them, and then direct people from YouTube to your landing pages.
3 – Email Campaigns
Another great way for doing affiliate marketing that can work with or without a blog.
With email marketing, you can promote using products as an affiliate to your list again and again as long as you are showing them how they can benefit from these products.
However, the difficulty here is in building a responsive email list in the first place, which is a bit difficult without having a blog in your niche where you can show your audience that you know what you are talking about, and from there, you collect their emails and start sending them helpful emails with affiliate promotions.
4 – Social Media
This is another good way of making money with affiliate marketing with or without blogging, but again, some platforms ban affiliate links of certain types or from specific affiliate networks, which means that in order to have more options to promote as an affiliate on social media, you need to have your own website where you build your landing pages and drive people from social media to there.
5 – Forums
Some industry or niche forums are still alive and active even today, and you can find there questions from people in your niche who need help or answers for their questions, and you can give them helpful answers and, in your answers, you can recommend relevant and useful products through your affiliate link.
This might be a fast way to do affiliate marketing, but it is also limited as not all people visit forums, and every forum has its own rules and terms and you might not be allowed to promote on some of them.
6 – Q&A Platforms
Question and answer platforms such as Quora are popular today, and some of them get also traffic from Google and other search engines.
You can use these platforms in the same way as you would use forums by helping others and answering their questions and recommend products to them, but again, platforms like Quora might ban affiliate links from getting posted there, and therefore, you need to create your own website and landing pages and drive people there instead.
7 – Affiliate Marketing Through Blogging
Blogging for making money with affiliate marketing is still the most effective and evergreen method, and that’s why I chose this method to make money with affiliate marketing.
And it is the method that allows you to create a passive income source with affiliate marketing if you create quality blog content and optimize it (through seo) to appear in the search engine results whenever people are looking for stuff that you wrote about.
This way, the content you create remains there and keeps getting organic traffic as long as it is still relevant.
Also, you can place affiliate links on your blog that you can’t place on social media, forums or in paid ads.
This means that you have more options this way in promoting affiliate products when using a blog, and it is a more long-term approach as you don’t have to keep posting on daily basis like it is with social media.
Now that we have talked about blogging and other method of doing affiliate marketing, let’s talk about the methods of monetizing a niche blog.
Affiliate Marketing & Other Ways For Monetizing A Blog
There are many ways of making money with a niche blog, and here are some of the most popular ones:
1 – Google AdSense
Probably the most sought after method with beginners who want to make money blogging.
This method is where you agree with Google to place banner ads on certain spots on your website, and you get money whenever someone clicks on that ad.
Although this is one of the most popular methods and one of the most passive ones as you don’t have to worry about it since Google will choose what ads to show on your blog, but it has its own downfalls as you need to achieve a minimum number of page views before you apply for Google AdSense, and you don’t guarantee to get approved.
Also, you don’t have much control over which ads will be show on your website, which means that there might not be many clicks and you might not get paid a lot with this method.
2 – Sell Ad Space Directly
This is similar to the method above, but instead of using Google AdSense program, you offer the space on your website directly to advertiser who might be interested in using it in order to drive people from your website to theirs.
You can get paid with this method per/day or per/week fees for renting out every banner/ad space to others.
The nice thing about this method is that you cut the middle man such as Google AdSense network that takes part of the money, but the downfall is that you need to find advertisers by yourself.
3 – Sponsored Posts
These are advertorials (posts with commercial intent) that either you, or the advertiser writes and they get published on your websites in return of money that you receive.
The intent of these posts is to eventually direct people to others’ websites (the advertiser’s website) in order to take some action such as buying their products or services.
This method might be more effective for advertisers compared to buying ad space as written content can seem more genuine and trustworthy than banner ads.
The sponsored posts should be relevant to your website’s audience in order to be effective.
The same downfalls exist here like it is with directly selling banner ad space as you need to find advertisers or they find you, but it has the same advantage as well as you don’t have a middle man that will take their own share of the money.
4 – Sell Membership
This works well if you have specified knowledge that you might sell to others through a paid membership where you either offer video tutorials, live webinars, access to an exclusive forum, …etc. in return of a monthly recurring payment that members have to pay.
The good thing about this way of making money with your blog is that this can bring you a recurring income as long as you have more value to offer all the time, but the downfall is that this needs an active work and constant presence and it is not that passive like it is with affiliate marketing through blogging.
5 – Sell Your Products
Similar to the previous method, but here you can sell your products through your blog and get one payment for each product sold to every customer.
You can sell either digital products such as: ebooks, checklists, video courses, software programs, …etc. or anything that your audience can benefit from.
You can receive payments on your blog by embedding a PayPal buy button, or by integrating your blog with a third party platform like Sellfy.com that allows you to host your digital products their, and allow you to get paid through different ways.
The downfall for this is that you need to provide customer support for people who buy your products, and you need to create the products yourself or outsource creating them from others and paying them money in advance.
6 – Sell Your Services
This is another good method to make money with your blog if you have the ability to do some activities that people in your niche.
For example, if you have a blog about programming, then you can offer creating programs to others and get paid for it.
And if you have a blog about knitting and crochet, then you can offer creating needle work products, or you can sell patterns to people who need them.
7 – Monetizing Your Blog With Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the best way to monetize a blog in my opinion.
This works by recommending relevant and helpful products that you promote as an affilitae through reviews, or by writing how-to kind of articles in order to help your audience, and by strategically placing your affiliate links inside your blog posts, which people might click and buy what you recommend and get you a commission for every sale.
The reason I like this method is that you can start with it even if you have little traffic to your website, unlike it is with Google AdSense for example.
Also, with affiliate marketing through blogging, you have more control over what is promoted on your website.
Also, this method doesn’t need customer support or active engagement like selling your own products or services, or like selling membership, which makes it the most passive method of making money online.
Conclusion – Affiliate Marketing Vs. Blogging: Which Is Better?
None is better than the other. Affiliate marketing and blogging are not rivals to choose one over the other.
Blogging is how you get in front of your targeted audience, and affiliate marketing is the model that allows you to make money with your audience.
You can create a blog and monetize it in different ways, including affiliate marketing, and you can build an affiliate marketing business and get people to what you promote using different methods, including blogging.
Your Next Step
My advice here is not to choose between blogging & affiliate marketing, but rather, it is to combine both concepts in order to build a successful online business that brings you a sustainable income on the long run.
Blogging is the best way for doing affiliate marketing because you own your blog and no one can take it from you, unlike a YouTube channel or a Facebook page that might get taken down due to some violation of the platform’s policies.
And blogging can bring you more traffic and people to see your promotions on the long run through Google and other search engines without having to post everyday on social media.
And using affiliate marketing to monetize blogging is the best way to make money with a blog as you have more control over what you promote, you can do it with a little traffic volume, and you don’t have to do customer support like it is with selling your own products or service.
And most important, the affiliate marketing blog income can be higher, and with less effort compared to what you get with other methods of doing affiliate marketing or through other methods of monetizing a blog.
Therefore, my recommendation here is to:
- Create an affiliate marketing blog in a certain niche.
- Optimizing it for search engines in order to get the free traffic on the long run.
- And monetizing your affiliate blog it with relevant and useful products through your affiliate links.
And don’t worry if you don’t have any experience with blogging or with affiliate marketing. I got you covered.
I personally make money with affiliate marketing through blogging, and I started without any experience with any of the two concepts.
But I was lucky to have found a great place and community that taught me how to combine both concepts and how to do affiliate marketing on a blog in order to create income online through their detailed, easy to follow, step-by-step training.
Not only they taught me how to do combine both, but they also provided me with the tools I needed in order to create my affiliate marketing blog, and they provided me with the website building and hosting platform that doesn’t require any experience or technical knowledge in order to use in building my first blog.
And that’s why I recommend this platform for you to join it and learn from it.
And this platform is called Wealthy Affiliate.
Wealthy affiliate is a platform that provides affiliate marketers at all levels with all what they need in order to start an affiliate marketing business in one place, such as:
- The step-by-step training.
- Weekly live webinars with Q&A sessions.
- Advanced Keyword research tool.
- Affiliate programs research tool.
- Web hosting for up to 25 websites with free SSL certificates and premium support.
- A community of 1.5 million of like-minded online entrepreneurs who are willing to support you along the way in your journey.
- And much more.
And to be honest, this a paid platform that costs a monthly subscription to join, but it also offers a free membership plan that will give you the first ten lessons of the training and will give you an access to some of the great tools they offer, and will give you up to two free websites to start with.
And even the premium membership is really affordable and it justifies every cent you would be as they provide you with all the tools that you need for no extra cost other than the cost of the training and without upsells.
If you are still not sure about what to do, then you can read my detailed Wealthy Affiliate review and learn about this platform before you join it, and you can join it for the free membership and get the first ten lessons in order to understand how to start with affiliate marketing through blogging.
==>>Click here to learn about Wealthy Affiliate through my review!
And from there, you can either stay in the free plan forever, or you can upgrade anytime, it’s completely up to you.
So, if you are ready, go to my review through the link above and start your journey with blogging and affiliate marketing today.
And if you have any questions or any opinion that you want to share about affiliate marketing and blogging, then please, share it below in the comments’ section and I will be coming back to you asap 🙂