Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: How to Make your First Affiliate Sale (No Matter Your Niche)

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Are you brand new to affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is one of my favorite ways to create passive income from my blog and it works really well no matter your niche.

It’s also great for beginners because you are selling someone else’s product that already has an audience and a sales page set up for conversions.

You don’t have to create a product and you definitely don’t have to have a large audience to make money with affiliate marketing.

Of course, it’s not as easy as it often sounds and does take some strategy.

If you’re ready to start making money with your blog, I highly recommend affiliate marketing even if you are a beginner.

Today, I’m going to dive into how to actually make your first affiliate sale with your blog no matter your niche as well as how to promote your blog to drive quality traffic.

disclaimer: this post contains affiliate links which means I may receive a small commission if you purchase using that link at no extra cost to you. and if you do, I appreciate you!

1. Understanding Your Audience And Their Problem

Affiliate marketing is about solving a problem your audience has with a certain product or service that can make their life easier or simply give them the answer.

To make any kind of money blogging, you need to understand your audience.

Think about why someone would come to your blog.

It may not be as obvious at first but your audience is coming to you for something. So take a look at what your blog is and dig into what pain point your blog is focused on.

Are they looking for the best gifts for dog lovers for the upcoming holidays?

Or maybe they’re coming to your blog for advice on the best cribs and blankets to buy for a newborn.

Getting a clear understanding of why someone is coming to your blog and what they are looking to find once they get there can help you pick the correct affiliate products and programs once you want to start promoting.

2. Choose What Kind of Blog Post to Write

Not all blog posts are great for affiliate marketing and that’s fine.

Some posts you write will be geared towards getting people to your blog, especially as a beginner and others will be geared towards making money through affiliate sales.

I go into detail on the best blog posts for affiliate marketing in this post but here is an overview of them:

How to’s/Tutorials- These types of posts are simply showing your audience how to do something meaning, they came to that post with a problem and they’re looking for a solution.

You are either showing your audience how to use the affiliate product or how to solve a problem using the affiliate product.

One of my highest converting “how to” posts is this one.

Why?

Because it starts off with a problem, (learning how to blog) and gives people a solution with the right products to use as well as valuable information and step-by-step instructions.

Reviews- Review posts are great for promoting online courses or a particular product because you are showing your audience the results you got from that product.

These work really well if you share your story, give a little background on the product and mention how it worked for you.

Gift Guides- With the holiday’s quickly approaching, gift guides are fantastic for affiliate marketing because all of the guesswork is done for your audience.

You compile a list of products that are perfect for someone specific and write about them.

This is great for your audience because they get all the information compiled into one post instead of having to search the internet for presents to buy.

List Posts/Round-Ups- List type posts are similar to gift guides but can be used for pretty much anything.

A roundup of the best free courses for new bloggers.

Or a list of the best jeans to wear for fall under $50.

Your affiliate links can easily be added to these lists posts with each product. Just make sure to write a small blurb under each product and not just a straight up list.

Read this post for a breakdown of how to write affiliate posts that actually convert.

BIG TIP: Only promote products you have personally used or done extensive research on. The point is to provide the best possible products to your audience and if you lose their trust, affiliate marketing will not work for you.

3. Get Eye Balls on Your Affiliate Post

Marketing is key when it comes to driving high-quality traffic to your blog and if you want to make your first affiliate sale that’s what you’re going to need.

I am all about Pinterest for marketing my blog posts because it drives 80% of my daily blog traffic. But, like everything else on the internet Pinterest marketing isn’t as easy as pinning all of your blog posts like a madman.

You need a strategy.

And the point isn’t to get the whole world on your posts, you only need the RIGHT people. The other thing about Pinterest is that you can even use Pinterest to make your affiliate sales whether you have a blog or not. I personally use this as another strategy to make money with affiliate marketing and it works every time.

You can grab the exact strategy to make money with Pinterest from this course by Elise of House of Brazen.

Create Multiple Pins for Pinterest

There are a few different ways I like to promote my blog posts and of course the first one is Pinterest.

For every single blog post, I create multiple pins to be pinned on Pinterest because you want to try out different wording to see what resonates with your audience so they click through to your blog.

I recommend pinning your different pins for the same posts scattered throughout the week using Tailwind.

This will help to reduce the look of spam, give yourself more chances for repins and click-throughs and make sure more of your audience sees your pins.

Add Links To Other Relevant Blog Posts

Go through your other blog posts and add a link to your new blog post that has the affiliate links.

Of course, only do this where appropriate.

This can also help with your bounce rate and keeping people on your blog longer because they are looking at multiple posts per visit.

You can also add affiliate links to older posts where it’s appropriate and remember why your audience is visiting that post.

Utilize Social Media

Don’t forget to use your other social media platforms to promote your blog posts.

I like to share my blog posts to Twitter right after I’ve posted them, then I share to my other social media platforms throughout the week to ensure my post is being seen by my audience.

You can also utilize Facebook groups to help get your blog posts out there if you are a new blogger.

If you want more organic social shares on your blog posts (who doesn’t) check out this post.

Send It To Your Email List

Whether you write a monthly or weekly newsletter to your email list chances are you can easily slip in your latest blog post.

And it can be as simple as a blurb and then a link to your new blog post or you can create an entire mini-lesson in the email and then send it to your list.

If you haven’t started building an email list check out this post.

Serve Your Audience

The point of affiliate marketing and blogging is to serve your audience.

Give them a reason to trust you and to actually decide to purchase a product you promote.

Do that and you will be able to make your first affiliate sale and continue to make sales.

I heard a quote the other day that’s really helpful, “nobody who bought a drill wanted a drill, they wanted a hole. So if you want to sell drills, advertise information about making holes, not making drills”.

Basically just meaning, your audience has a problem such as wanting to make a hole, use your blog post to tell how to make a hole with a drill and make that drill an affiliate link.

You solved your audience’s problem with your affiliate link. That’s how you make consistent sales regardless of the size of your audience.

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