Affiliate Marketing for Beginner Mom Bloggers: The Best Step by Step Guide

You might be wondering how do you start with affiliate marketing? And can beginners do affiliate marketing? Is affiliate marketing a good way to get rich?

Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn money as a beginner. You can make a lot of money with affiliate marketing even if you only have a little time to spare. As a new mom blogger with a tiny blog, I made my first 5 sales in 3 days using affiliate marketing. But one of my favorite bloggers and new mom Michelle from Making Sense of Cents makes $50,000/month from affiliate marketing alone. She shares her strategies in her popular course Making Sense with Affiliate Marketing. In my case, I can tell you… One of her strategies made things CLICK for me and a few days later CA-CHING – I made my first sales. Please click here to check out her course. But if you’re wondering whether this is the right course for you, feel free to read my honest review.

However, affiliate marketing is not easy and it can be difficult to do it right.

So if you want to find out how to do it the right way then stick around for this step-by-step guide as I’ll show you everything you need to know about affiliate marketing from:

• How to start affiliate marketing
• The basics of affiliate marketing
• How to start affiliate marketing with no money
• The four steps to starting affiliate marketing and
• The best affiliate marketing networks.

The best thing about affiliate marketing is that you don’t need to worry about selling people’s products because with affiliate marketing you’re only promoting them.

That means you don’t ever have to deal with physically selling or shipping products, handling returns or customer support.

This makes affiliate marketing perfect for beginners, even if you’re a brand new blogger.

Additionally, you can start affiliate marketing as a beginner while being a stay-at-home mom without:

• Previous experience in digital marketing (as long as you do one thing as I’ll explain later in this guide).
• No startup costs – all you need is a blog or a website and hosting (I use Bluehost for my blog)
• Having your own products – you can promote other people’s products

According to Statistica, the affiliate marketing industry will be worth over $8.2 billion in the U.S.

So, the best time to start with affiliate marketing is TODAY!

That’s why if you want to make money with affiliate marketing by promoting people’s or company’s products and want to learn more about it, this post is for you.

How can I start affiliate marketing fast?

As a mom blogger (with an active one-year-old), I understand that you don’t have much time in your day. That’s why this is the only affiliate marketing guide you’ll need to learn everything you need to know in a short amount of time.

Affiliate marketing is my favorite business model, and it’s how I made my first income as a single mom between nap times and nappy changes with my tiny blog.

And if I can do it, so can YOU.

First, let’s start with the basics of affiliate marketing.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the practice of promoting a product that you are already using and enjoying to your audience. Each time they click on your affiliate links and make a purchase, you’ll earn a small commission. The affiliate commissions you earn vary depending on the product or network you promote. You should find out how much money you can make per sale before applying to become an affiliate.

How much money can you make with affiliate marketing?

You can make a lot of money online with affiliate marketing.

According to PayScale, the bottom 10% of affiliate marketers earn a whopping $37,000 through commissions. 

Your commission depends more on your affiliate partner than the platform you’re with since each compensates for affiliate sales differently. As an example, Amazon associates will only pay out a low commission from 1 – 10%, whereas other networks will pay out a commission between 25 – 75%.

The best products to promote, however, are those that suit your audience rather than those with the highest commissions.

Why affiliate marketing is the best business model?

Affiliate marketing is beloved by brands, companies, and content creators for one simple reason.

It is cost-effective.

Why? The reason for this is that affiliate marketing allows brands to pay only for qualified sales instead of investing money into ads that might not reach the right audience. An affiliate program gives brands a much better return on investment (ROI).

But it doesn’t stop there.

In order to help you promote the brand, most affiliate networks provide free resources such as banner ads that you can place on your blog or social media profiles, how-to videos, and pre-written headlines and copy.

Remember, the great thing about affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to sell anything – you’re just promoting products.

The bottom line is that brands need affiliate marketers like you to promote their products. Your hard work is well compensated by them.

The popularity of affiliate marketing is increasing year after year.

That’s why as a new mom blogger, affiliate marketing is the perfect way to earn extra cash online.

How to start affiliate marketing

Think about your audience first

The best way to get started with affiliate marketing is to think about which products or services you would like to promote to your audience.

To find the right product or affiliate partners you want to promote, ask yourself what would be helpful to your audience? And why would they buy the product from you? For example, are you a mom blogger recommending products that have helped you and your baby? Are you sharing your transformational story of how you became debt-free as a single mama? Which products did you use and can they help your audience achieve the same results?

Another great starting point is to ask yourself “Which products do I care about?”.

What if I don’t have an audience yet?

If you don’t have an audience yet, that’s fine too. Think about the audience you want to attract and what products you want to promote in the near future. Most mom bloggers start out without an audience and slowly build one up. I started AnyMommyCanMakeMoney without an audience but knew exactly that I wanted to help stay-at-home moms make money online. This helped me put together a list of helpful products I want to promote.

Have a little think right now, about which products you’d like to promote, to whom and why. But don’t worry if you don’t have any idea yet. I’ll show you some ways to find products even if you don’t know where to start yet.

How does affiliate marketing work?

After you decide which products to promote, you must apply to the affiliate program of the company. Once you’ve been approved to become an affiliate you’ll be given a unique link, which is your affiliate link, to share with your audience.

Your unique link will look something like this:

But affiliate links are not exactly pretty links to click on, right?

That’s why to increase your chances of people clicking your links you can use a link shortener like the one I am using, called Pretty Links.

Pretty Links

Pretty Links is a link shortener plugin for WordPress. With Pretty Links, you can personalize your unique affiliate links to anything you want, by shortening and renaming them. Get Pretty Links for free here!

Here’s what my affiliate links look like after using Pretty Links:

The benefit of using a link shortener is that:

• Your affiliate links look friendlier to click on
• Higher click-through rates
• Your affiliate links are easy to use on your social media profiles, like your Facebook page, your Pinterest profile, or email sign-off.

How do affiliate links work?

Affiliate links are unique, meaning they only exist once. This makes it easy to identify where each link came from. If a user clicks your unique link, a browser cookie is stored in their browser.

The “cookie” can then identify any visitors who clicked on your unique affiliate link from your website. A cookie also determines how long a visitor gets tracked. Cookies are set by your affiliate program and determine how long you’ll get credit for a sale or sign-up. The length of cookies greatly varies for each affiliate program.

For example,

Amazon Associates cookies only credit sales within the next 24 hours.

Other affiliate networks offer 30-day cookies, 90-day cookies, or even 365 days like one of my affiliate partners Elna Cain from TwinsMommy. If a visitor clicks on my affiliate link today and buys her course Ready, Set, Blog for Traffic within the next 364 days then I’ll earn a small commission from the sale. If that person however ends up buying the course after 366 days, then I won’t receive a commission for the sale.

Best products for affiliate marketing 2023

There are different things to sell with affiliate marketing. Which one you choose depends on the products you use yourself, your affiliate partners, and your audience. Let’s take a look.

Physical products – Physical products are products your audience can buy and use physically, for example, baby toys. A good example to sell physical products is Amazon’s associate program. According to Capital Counselor Amazon ships about 1.6 million packages every single day. The great thing about Amazon is there are many different products to choose from. Depending on your niche you can select products that are a good fit for your audience. For example:

• Parenting niche – If you’re in the parenting niche you can sell baby products like baby carriers, toddler books, children’s games, or homeschooling printables.
• Mom niche – If you’re blogging about mom life you can promote cleaning products, household gadgets like storage containers, scented candles, or the best fabric softener.
• Breastfeeding niche – If you’re in the breastfeeding niche you can promote breast pumps, nursing covers, nursing bras, or books about breastfeeding.

Digital products – Digital products are files your audience can download instantly after purchasing like eBooks, or Printables. For example, I am an affiliate of Julie and Cody’s E-Printables course that helps you create and sell printables. If you’re a product creator you can also create and sell your own digital products like courses, ebooks, and printables and sell them either on your blog or in your own Etsy store like my one here.

Informational products – Information products are people’s products like online courses, webinars, masterclasses, or free ebooks like this 36-page ebook that teaches you how to start affiliate marketing. Information products are great products for affiliate marketing. The advantage of informational products is that the business owners usually have a highly converting sales funnel in place. That means, even if your audience converts through that sales funnel later you receive the credit for the sale. How long you qualify to receive the sale depends on the cookie the affiliate partner has set.

Services – You can also become an affiliate of the services you use to run your blog, like hosting for example.

Best affiliate networks

Wondering how to start affiliate marketing with no money? Here are the best affiliate marketing programs that are FREE to join. Working with affiliate networks is a great idea since you get access to a huge selection of products to promote. Some affiliate networks charge money to join.

But here are the best affiliate programs that are absolutely free to join:

• Awin – One of the fastest-growing affiliate marketing platforms with over 15K+ brands and offices all over the world.
• ShareASale – ShareASale is working with big brands and has been in the affiliate marketing business for more than 21 years. Now, they are part of the Awin group and are known as a fair and ethical business partner. They are also the first affiliate marketing platform I joined with AnyMommyCanMakeMoney. And one of the reasons you should consider joining ShareASale is that many brands work exclusively with this affiliate network and the only way you can promote the brand is by joining ShareASale. It’s FREE to join and once you’ve joined you can browse the platform for popular brands and products you want to promote. Even if you’re just curious it’s worth joining to see which brands are part of this huge affiliate network.
• Clickbanks – ClickBank products aim to improve and enrich customers’ lives physically, mentally, or financially. Clickbanks offers you a huge catalog of unique products from content creators and experts. Examples include eBooks and online courses and membership sites in popular niches like weight loss, keto diets, health and fitness. One thing that stands out about Clickbanks is that many of its products are subscription based, which means you can earn recurring revenue from each sale. Clickbank also has no payout caps, meaning you will get paid as soon as you make your first affiliate sale.
• Rakuten – Rakuten is an award-winning network that helps you quickly and efficiently monetize your digital content so that you can create the best experiences for your audience. With the Rakuten network, you can connect your audience to global brands you love to promote.
• Amazon Associates – Amazon’s affiliate marketing program is the biggest affiliate program since it’s got an enormous selection of products you can promote. And the great thing is that you can apply to any Amazon associate program depending on where your audience is. For example, I am based in Australia but my audience is in the USA, hence I am part of the Amazon associates program US.

It’s a good idea to join a few different ones and then browse through their products to see which ones you’d like to promote. Keep in mind that it may take time to find the really good product that you want to promote. That’s why joining a network today is definitely a good start.

How to get accepted into affiliate marketing programs

The best practice to get accepted into these programs is to follow the application process and submit the correct tax forms. For most programs, you will have to specify whether you’re a US citizen or a non-US citizen as they require different tax forms. If you’re unsure how to fill in the forms correctly, check out YouTube or Google for how-to videos. So far I’ve found all my answers there to help me submit my tax forms correctly.

Besides joining affiliate marketing networks you can also become an affiliate for a company’s products and services you love directly.

Not sure if your product or service has an affiliate program? Here’s how you can find out.

How do you find out if a company has an affiliate program?

Once you start thinking about your favorite brands and companies you might start to wonder if they have an affiliate program. Here’s how to find out if your favorite brand has an affiliate program.

Google – A great starting point to find out if a particular brand you love offers an affiliate program is to type in the “brand or product name + affiliate program”.

The best way for you to start with affiliate marketing is to apply for products you already use and love. Because when you promote products you have first-hand experience with it shows. And that is important because promoting products you love and are seeing great results with is the best way to create trust with your readers. It’s the best feeling in the world when a reader trusts your affiliate links enough to click on it and buy the product you recommend.

Here’s a list of the products I am an affiliate of:

• Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing – Successful affiliate marketer Michelle Schroeder-Gardner, from Making Sense of Cents, teaches her strategy to make $50,000/month from affiliate marketing.
• Ready, Set, Blog for traffic – Elna Cain’s Traffic secrets on how to drive tons of organic traffic to your new blog.
• Pinteresing Strategies – Cary Campbell’s incredible course teaches you her strategy of how to pin manually. This course will save you lots of money on pin schedulers!
• Become the CEO of your dream life – Mia Fox’s mindset book about manifesting your dreams is seriously different and one that I will read again and again.

Besides products, you can also promote services as an affiliate.

Here’s a list of the services I am an affiliate of:

• Bluehost – My number #1 hosting company I highly recommend for new mom bloggers.
• ConvertKit – My favorite email marketing provider that is super easy to use and FREE for your first 1000 subscribers.
• RankIQ – A SEO tool for bloggers I absolutely love. It helped my posts rank on page 1 on Google. I haven’t written a review yet but Brandon Gaille, founder and host of The Blogging Millionaire podcast, has created a bunch of very informative videos that explain the product in more detail if you’re interested to find out more. Just click on my link here.
• $5 Meal Plan – The $5 Meal Plan helps me plan out my meal for my toddler and me for under $5. You can read my honest review here.

As you can see from my list, I am an affiliate of products I’ve tried and tested and am using myself. This works the best for me but it doesn’t mean that you can only become an affiliate of products you use yourself.

You can also create niche affiliate marketing sites like the ones I am about to show you. Here are the most popular niche sites.

Coupons – If you love clipping coupons and want to help your readers find the best deals you could start a coupon website. Your readers get a discount and you get a commission for every referral. Check out CouponMom for inspiration.

Cashback – Cashback rewards are popular because you can get cash rewards every time you shop. If you like helping people get more cash back then a cashback affiliate niche site could be worth looking into.

Price comparison – Price comparison sites are also popular as people love to shop around for the best deals. For every referral you make you’ll earn a commission.

However, the best place for affiliate marketing as a beginner is with a blog.

Blog

After you’ve selected your affiliate product the next step is to promote your affiliate links. And the best place to promote your affiliate links is on your blog.

But before we dive into this I want to hammer home something that is CRUCIAL for your affiliate marketing efforts and that is called User Intent.

User Intent will help you make money with your blog.

Because knowing user intent can set you apart from your competition and help your content hit the right nerve with your audience.

What is User Intent?

User intent is the intention a user has when they search for information on Google.

For example, is the user looking to compare, research, or buy?

The next question you need to ask yourself is how can your piece of content help the user’s intent?

When you understand User Intent, you’ll know whether you’re asking for the sale in your content, whether you send them to a freebie or to a review post for example.

At the beginning of this post, I promised you that you don’t need digital marketing experience as long as you do that one thing right. And that one thing is to understand User Intent.

User Intent is the single most important thing to consider when you do affiliate marketing, so you want to pay attention to the next section.

When you understand the intent behind your user’s search, you can create the right content for that intent. Let me explain what type of content you can create to help your user take the next step.

The next 3 examples of posts I am going to show you are the best option to create for your online business.

As a mom blogger, you have the advantage that you can promote products that you personally love and use. For example, Elna Cain from TwinsMommy earns five figures in affiliate income promoting products she loves to use as a mom to twins to her audience of moms.

Which affiliate marketing is best for beginners?

To help you promote your affiliate links here are some types of posts that work better than others and that can help you see affiliate marketing success faster.

Here are my top 3 types of affiliate marketing blog posts for beginner bloggers.

Reviews – Review posts are great. Think about it. Where is your user in the buying cycle if they are looking for a review of a product? They are most likely looking to buy but want to make sure it’s the right decision. A product review can be the last straw to swing a reader’s opinion towards a sale. And if your product reviews provide the right information your reader was looking for they might go ahead and click on your affiliate links to buy.

• Review sites – If you love writing reviews you can even consider setting up a website just for reviews.
  • Travel niche – If you’re blogging in the travel niche you could start a review blog for the best suitcases, cameras, hotels or travel insurances.
  • Parenting niche – If you’re a mom blogger in the parenting niche you could review the best baby products (nappies, cremes, cots, swaddles) or toddler games.

“How to” posts – How-to posts are popular with readers. Because a good how-to post offers a solution to a reader’s problem. However, someone looking for a how-to post might be looking for information rather than buying a product. That’s why you want to make sure that your how-to post offers information to solve a problem, along with your product suggestion.

• Mom life niche – If you’re in the mom life niche you can talk about How to post to remove stains and include links to popular cleaning products, on Amazon, for example.
• Tutorials – Another example of a How to post can be tutorials, like my How to post that helps my readers set up their blog on Bluehost and WordPress.

List posts – List posts are a great way to collect relevant information in an easy-to-read format.

How to drive traffic to your affiliate links?

One of the easiest ways to drive traffic to your affiliate site is to create high-quality content.

But what exactly is high-quality content?

High-quality content

The best way to describe high quality content is that your content has to answer people’s questions on Google BETTER. Therefore it’s important that you target all the relevant keywords instead of just one like most software does.

To rank my posts, I use RankIQ to determine which keywords exactly I should target. Sometimes those are simple keywords I wouldn’t even have thought of. But you’ll love this AI-powered SEO tool because it’s designed especially for bloggers and it does all the work for you! Thanks to RankIQ, I can create BETTER posts. As of right now, I have 4 blog posts ranking on page 1 of Google as a result of this strategy. That means, that 2 posts account for 80% of my organic traffic (which is exactly what the 80:20 rule states: 20% of your work should generate 80% of your affiliate income).

Without optimizing your content for SEO and Google it can feel like you’re tapping around blindly in the dark. Therefore I can highly recommend investing in a tool like RankIQ to help you craft the best high-quality content during the little free time you’ll have to yourself.

Because Google will likely rank your content higher and faster when it answers the readers’ intent simply better. And it makes total sense because the better Google answers questions, the more time people spend on Google, so Google wants its customers to find the best answers on Google. As a result, Google prioritizes content that specifically answers readers’ questions.

To sum up, your high-quality content needs to be:

• Factually correct and well researched.
• Answering your audience’s problem better than any other Google post.
• Tapping into User Intent so that your audience WANTS to take action by clicking on your affiliate links.

Next, let’s talk about trust, why it’s so important for affiliate marketing, and how to create it.

Trust

TRUST is the hardest to build and the easiest to destroy. Therefore you want to be careful what you offer to your audience and the way you offer it. Never try and sell anything just for the sake of selling. If your reader feels put off by your content they’ll most likely never come back. Therefore, always only promote products you think are the best fit for your audience.

To help you create great content that creates trust for your readers do this one thing:

• Put yourself in your audience’s shoes and ask yourself what is it that they want?
• And how can your product help them?
• Why would your reader click on your affiliate link?

How can you become even more trustworthy with your content to achieve more people clicking through?

What are the four steps to starting affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a step-by-step process. Taking the steps in this order will help you save time, especially if you’re just getting started with affiliate marketing. So, let’s take a look.

Here are the important steps to take the four steps to start affiliate marketing for beginner moms.

STEP 1 – Choose your niche

Affiliate marketing begins with a clear idea of what niche you want to enter. If you choose a niche, you should stick with it, since building an audience and gaining trust takes time. As a former “niche jumper”, I can attest that it doesn’t get you anywhere. You might start in one niche but then doubt it if you’re not seeing instant affiliate marketing success. And you might be tempted to try another niche. But building your audience takes time. So your better option is to make it work instead of starting over in a different niche.

One of my mentors, Sam Ovens, once said: “The grass isn’t greener on the other side. The grass is green where you water it.”

STEP 2 – Understand your audience

The better you understand your audience’s problem the better you can recommend a product that solves your reader’s problem.

And being helpful is the difference between coming across as sales-y and helpful.

Understanding your target market is key to your affiliate marketing success. But if you still need help finding your audience these questions can help.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Who are you creating content for?
• What are your audience’s problems?
• And what products can you offer as a solution?

When you understand your audience’s pain points AND can recommend a product you use yourself it’s a WIN-WIN situation.

Because…

When you’re promoting products you use yourself, you’ll come across as authentic in your content. And that’s important because your readers will be able to tell the difference whether you’re just promoting anything or if you’re genuinely invested in the product.

Another benefit of knowing the product well is that you can answer questions your reader might have.

Offer them to send you an email or leave a question in the comments to help answer their questions about the product. This might encourage more people to click on your affiliate links.

STEP 3 – Content strategy

How are you going to create your high-quality content? To help you create a solid content plan, make a spreadsheet and plan your content 2 months in advance. I know this might sound scary because you’re already so busy being a mom. But let me ask you this: Do you think you can try and plan out your next posts for the next two weeks? So start there and if you can, keep planning it out for an entire month, and even better 2. Knowing which content you’re going to create will save you a lot of time once you’re actually sitting down to create your content.

STEP 4 – Promote your affiliate links

Creating content is only one part. But the most important part is promoting your affiliate links. Something I still need to improve for AnyMommyCanMakeMoney. You can have the best content in the world but no one reading it if you’re not getting it in front of your audience.

No matter whether you’re promoting your own digital products, like printables, or people’s products, you need to market your content actively to your audience in the beginning.

So let’s look at how you can do that next.

How to promote your affiliate links

There are effective ways to promote your content, even if you don’t have digital marketing experience. Let’s look at them one by one.

Email marketing: If you already have an email list, it’s a good idea to promote your affiliate products to your subscribers, for example as a newsletter. If you’re worried that you’re coming across as too pushy or salesy then you can send your readers to a blog post that contains your affiliate links instead. Lena Gott from WhatMommyDoes promotes her online courses every time she sends an email and I don’t mind it at all. So, don’t worry about promoting your affiliate links, as long as you think they are useful to your audience.

If you don’t have an email list yet, you should start one today and collect people’s email addresses in exchange for an opt-in, like a freebie. Your email list will be your most important asset to promote your affiliate products to your audience.

Landing page: If you don’t have a blog yet you can set up a simple landing page and send traffic to a landing page instead that contains your affiliate links. You will still have to pay for hosting but setting up your landing page will be quicker compared to building an entire website or blog.

YouTube channel: One of the popular ways to promote your affiliate links is by adding video content. Why? A YouTube video is great because some of your readers prefer watching videos over reading. Creating videos takes more time. However, if you enjoy doing videos then you should definitely pursue it. Similar to written content, to promote your affiliate links are how-to videos, tutorials, unboxing, or review videos are among popular videos. And don’t forget to include your affiliate links in the description box below.

Social media platforms: Another way to promote your affiliate links is via your social networks. But first, you’ve got to make sure that it’s allowed. For example, Pinterest no longer allows promoting affiliate links directly. That’s why the best way is to promote your review on your blog in your blog post. Please check out this free tutorial on how to start a blog.

Own niche website: Ideally you want to pick a niche for your own website. The benefit of having a niche site is that you can promote related products easier to your audience than if your website was more general. For example, if your website is in the parenting niche then you can promote your affiliate links across different posts easily.

Marketing campaigns: If you have a budget to promote your content then can create ads and run marketing campaigns to drive traffic to your affiliate links. However, as someone who’s worked in marketing for some of the world’s biggest brands, I would only recommend for you pay for ads once you’ve got a solid foundation and good experience with your target audience. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting your time and money.

But what about SEO (search engine optimization)? Can optimizing your content for SEO help you promote your affiliate links? Find out next.

Search engines

Optimizing your content for SEO (search engine optimization) is super important for your content to be found. Because the better your content ranks the more people find our content in search engines. And the more people land on your blog, the more are going to click your affiliate links. It’s a numbers game.

Using the right keywords is key – It’s also important to optimize your content for the right keywords. Therefore you need to have a keyword strategy in place. To find the right keywords you have to think backward: What is your audience typing into Google to find your content? As a rule of thumb for beginner mom bloggers, you want to go after low-competition keywords for a chance to rank in Google.

• RankIQ by Brandon Gaille saves you a ton of time as he hand-picks the best low-competition keywords you need to go after. It’s the easiest way for beginner bloggers to create content to promote your affiliate links with the best chance to rank.

Especially when you’re only just starting out with affiliate marketing it’s important to find low-competition keywords to rank for. The more low-competition keywords you rank the more you’ll improve your domain authority (DA). Your domain authority is a number assigned by MOZ or Ahrefs that indicates how strong your blog domain name is. The higher your DA is, the more people will trust you to click through to your blog.

If you need help deciding which products you should promote, Google Trends can help with your research.

Search for trends with Google Trends

Google Trends can help you find products that are in high demand. Because looking at what’s trending will give you a better idea of what type of products people are looking for. You want to make sure that you’re getting your product right and not waste your time trying to promote the wrong products. But also if you’re looking to create your own products to sell, Google Trends is a good starting place. There is a good chance that doing your research with Google Trends will save you a lot of time and help you only brainstorm ideas for the right products in the long run.

Start your own affiliate marketing business

If you’re already selling your own digital products, then you can also consider starting your own affiliate program and letting other small businesses and content creators promote your products.

And finally, let’s talk about the long-term financial benefits of starting an affiliate marketing side hustle business.

Do affiliate marketers make money?

Affiliate marketing can become a passive income stream over time. That means you can generate an income with minimal work to keep your affiliate links updated. Some bloggers like Michelle, even make a full-time income from their blogs. But don’t forget that bloggers who are making seriously good money from their blogs now probably started their blogs a long time ago.

Another source of income could be Google ads. If your affiliate marketing content is driving enough traffic to your blog then you could also consider running ads to monetize your site.

There is no set-in-stone number as to how much traffic you need to make your first affiliate sales. I made my first sales with under 800 sessions/month. Rather than focusing on a traffic number you want to focus on driving the right kind of traffic to your blog.

Closing thoughts

Building up your affiliate marketing business to be passive will take time for a number of reasons:

First, you need to build your audience. But then you also need to drive enough traffic to your blog.

But just like with everything, you’ll become better the more you do it and affiliate marketing is no different. At first affiliate marketing takes hard work and it might even take a long time before you make your first sale. But don’t forget that once it’s set up and you’re focusing on driving traffic to your blog, it can become a passive income stream for years down the line. Definitely check out this FREE eBook by affiliate marketing Queen Michelle.

And let me know how you’re getting on with starting affiliate marketing. Do you have any questions? Please leave me a comment below.