One thing I have had to go over with a ton of different people is how to write a blog post that makes money, especially with using Affiliate links. It also ended up starting a contest for one of my clients. Here is how you can win the $5 bonus.
By joining this program, or even if you are already an Affiliate and active, all you have to do is write a post (that is not targeted at ranking for their trademarks, urls or extensions), is at least 350 words, and drive two sales from it before April 30th, 2013 at Midnight EST and we’ll give you a $5 bonus on May 1st. The post also has to be dated after 4/15/2013.
So if I was given this contest, I would say it’s a pretty easy way to earn an extra $5 and give me motivation to write a blog post that will make money with Affiliate Marketing. There are a ton of ways to do it, but the easiest (at least for me) is this. It may sound tricky or like a lot of work, but it really isn’t that bad and it is something that could potentially rank and drive sales for a long time. This is a strategy I use which works for me, but may not work for you…you just have to keep trying. (BTW, I did not use this strategy for this post, this site never ranks because I purposely never optimized it for the search engines.)
How to Write a Blog Post That Makes Money
Here is how to write a blog post that makes money with Affiliate Marketing (as long as it ranks well and can create a good and relevant user experience) using affiliate links. I will go through my process and steps and then go into a bit more detail. I am going to write the post like I am an Affiliate for my client above and being given the chance to earn a bonus from something I would have done anyways.
1. Find a product to promote or a topic you want to write about.
Once I have a topic, I can find a way to tie in a product. It’s not that hard. If I find a product that is really cool or an impulse buy, then I just need to think about how to talk about it. Once I have that done, I begin my keyword research.
2. Keyword research.
Once I know what the terms that are relevant for the product are, I start to figure out how to tie them into the post. Instead of going after the actual product terms which could have a ton of competition with big box retailers, I find a few of them and add on modifiers to go for the long tail, but focus more on answering questions about these products. That is the key to generating long term revenue online and backlinks if the person has their own site, is a blogger or links from social media sites. The two quick sales are easy for some merchants, but writing the post to generate money in the long run is much more profitable. I use the bonus as a way to motivate me to get to write the post. If you decide to do a post about blue widgets, do your research and think about the audience that comes to your blog.
3. Create an outline for SEO and to answer questions for your visitors.
Now create an outline with your H1 tags for the main phrase and then your H2 tags for the next sub headers within the post. It could be about blue widgets being safe for pets, why blue widgets are better for people over 40 than red widgets and the last one could be about how long a blue widget may last for. You have to remember that Google’s algorithm is there to answer questions. By figuring out what people who are looking to buy a product are thinking about, you can now get yourself in front of them and help provide accurate information that will let them know what to worry about and then help to ease their concerns, you can now sell the crap out of the product, cross sell other products that compliment them and start making money from the post. One thing you have to make sure that you do is only use facts. You cannot make things up. If you actually own the product, you may want to create a video and show yourself using it so you can help to show what you are saying is to the best of your knowledge.
4. Adding in Affiliate Links
This is where you have a ton of options. Do you go for a direct sale by showing a product, do you just add in a link, do you place a random banner in the post or do you show a widget, a storefront or even a search field or video. There are a ton of ways to add in Affiliate links and combinations of Affiliate links to blog posts in order to make money. Here are the most commons ways I add affiliate links to blog posts to make money.
Direct off of product names – If I talk about a product, I’ll usually take the name of the product and use a deep link affiliate link from it. Other time’s I’ll say click here to see the product or buy the product to let the reader know what to do. If I have a page dedicated to that product, I’ll link to that page to help create a stronger internal linking structure for SEO.
With Widgets – If I have a general post with a lot of products or complimentary products, I’ll use a product widget. I’ll show all of the complimentary and directly related products and place it inside the bottom of the post. If I have sales copy in the title or towards the top, I’ll place the widget at the top of the post. It depends on the goal of the post, type of post and how I am writing it.
Storefronts – If I am doing a storefront I usually place it at the bottom of the post. Right now Google tends to favor posts like these. Because a log of my posts are to help answer questions, people will read and stay on my site. Because of this it shows a positive user experience for Google. If the person comes to my site and instantly leaves through an Affiliate link because they found the product on the top of the page, it looks like a bad user experience. The other reason I usually place store fronts on blog posts at the bottom is because I can cross-sell and up-sell other products and why the person will need them. This helps to increase my AOV and increase my commissions.
Banners – If I am talking about a service or specific types of services, I just include a banner at the top of the post. If it is multiple services I’ll place banners by where I am talking about each. I’ll normally include one or two text links for those services in the post as well.
Product Links – If I talk about specific products in the post, I’ll sometimes include product links with a call to action in the post, paragraph or across the bottom so people can buy them all without getting distracted. Product links tend to work the best for me when selling products through blog posts.
5. Promote via social media
Once your post is written, Tweet it, Pin it and Share it on Facebook. You don’t want a scraper site to get your content first. By tweeting your post out and also sharing on sites that index well in Google like Pinterest, you can get the search engines to come and crawl your content helping them to know they found it on your site first. Although Facebook doesn’t index well in Google or call Googlebot, it can drive traffic and sales so you may also want to share with your fans and followers on Facebook.
That is pretty much the basic way I’ll write a blog post and make money. I have a ton of variations and strategies that I use across different niches like tying in video and creating a store to link to, but this is the basic way that I do it. It has worked well for me many times and sometimes failed. There are a lot of other people who use this to rank and drive sales so there is a chance it may work for you too. Feel free to share your own ideas or strategies below if you’d like. Thanks for reading and I have another program announcement to make soon.
