How To Start Your Affiliate Blog- The Step By Step Guide
Note: If you want to skip straight to how to setup your blog scroll to the bottom. I’m going to cover the most important aspects of creating a blog before teaching you how to create your affiliate blog.
I did this for a reason because most people start blogging before they haven’t a clue of what they should be doing. My goal is for you to avoid all of the mistakes I made early on and prepare you for exactly what you should be doing right from the start.
If you haven’t started a blog yet, you’re missing out on a lot of traffic, money and creating a long term business model. I see many people neglecting to start a blog simply because they’re afraid of the work, but I see that as a big mistake.
If I could go back 3 years and tell the newbie “Jagan Rao” to start blogging earlier I would. I would have had endless amounts of traffic and It would only add to the paid traffic I run. Search engine traffic is some of the best traffic you can get.
When someone types in a keyword like “how to blog” they’re looking for how to start a blog and if you’re an affiliate for a hosting company this could equal a lot of extra income.
But…..that’s not the real benefit of creating a blog.
The real benefit of creating a blog is to build a following and tribe of people who like and trust you.
When people like and trust you, they will buy from you naturally without having to convince them or even pitch them on your business model.
It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, YOU NEED A BLOG PERIOD!
In this post I’m going to teach you how to create a blog, how to get people to like and trust you and how to monetize the blog.
Let’s face it, when you’re making money from your efforts you will stick with it and put passion into every piece of content you create.
Table Of Contents
- How To Start Your Affiliate Blog- The Step By Step Guide
- How To Start A Blog: Overview
- How To Blog- Market Research First
- Step 1: Find Niche Forums To Do Research
- Step 2- Find Your Audience Demographics
- Step 3: Find All The Top Blogs In Your Niche
- Step 4: Keyword Research
- Using SEMRUSH
- Build Your List And Do It Right Now!
- On Page Search Engine Optimization
- How To Create Content People Love
- Social Syndication
- How to Start A Blog The Easy Way
- Step 1: Website Overview
- Step 2: Domain Name Basics
- Step 3: Web Hosting Basics
- Step 4: Purchasing A Domain Name and Hosting from Bluehost
- Step 5: Install WordPress
- Step 6: Install A WordPress Custom Theme
- Step 7: Setting Up Your WordPress Settings
- Step 8: Customizing The Header or Menu and Adding Widgets
- Step 9: Using Plugins
- Step 10: Setting Up Pages
- Step 11: Setting Up Posts
- Step 12: Adding A Email Optin Form
- Step 13: Putting The Finishing Touches On Your Website
- Conclusion
How To Start A Blog: Overview
I’m not going to give you the typical advice I’ve read over and over which is create epic content and people will naturally find your blog. I see people repeating this over and over, but I take a different approach.
A blog is place where you bring people into your world and you build trust and relationships.
What do you need to do in order to get people to like and trust you?
You create content that answers problems they’re having in the niche, you create tutorials that teach them something and you constantly add massive value to their lives.
Most people create blogs with only one goal in mind— To benefit themselves.
If you learn one thing from this tutorial it should be to focus on helping people in your niche before even asking for a dime. I’ve built several businesses online and I always believe that lead in with “how can I help you”.
When you take the focus off yourself and you stop trying to get rich quick and focus on the people reading your content the money flows like water.
You no longer have to pitch or try to sell, they will buy from you because they feel connected with you and feel in debt to you for helping them.
So if you’re a newbie blogger with no experience, how do you add value to peoples lives?
Solve their problem first, check what they are struggling with and help them get over that burning issue which seems to be holding them.
So Lets move on and see what are the basics to do before you start a start a blog.
How To Blog- Market Research First
I want to know who my target market is, what are their problems, what are they searching for, what can I do to add value to their lives and I want to know what my competition is doing.
Whenever You enter a niche the first thing YOU do is market research.
Step 1: Find Niche Forums To Do Research
The first step to creating a blog that people love to read is to figure out what people are talking about.
Since my market is internet & affiliate marketers I will head over to the two biggest forums where my target market hangout. No matter what niche you’re in you should start this process before ever starting a blog.
The biggest internet marketing forum is warrior forum. At any given time you will find 20,000 + members online regardless of what time you login.
Now the first thing I notice people are asking things like “how long does it take to start making money”, “how will you know when it’s time to quit”, “go for short term money or long term money”, “traffic not converting”, but if we dig deeper you will find many different topics people are having trouble with.
Next I will head over to Affiliatefix which is the next biggest affiliate marketing forum and very active too.
The first thing I see people asking about is “What is affiliate marketing” What are my Affiliate Marketing opportunities”, “who do you model yourself on”, “what is your biggest obstacle in affiliate marketing”, “struggling affiliate market’ers looking for advice” and the list goes on and on.
I will usually spend 1 whole day doing nothing but writing down topics of what people are having trouble with, searching for and looking for answers.
Note all these topics down, we will go into detail about what to do with this later.
Step 2 - Findi Your Audience Demographics
Now that we have ideas for content to create, we now need to figure out the demographics of our target market.
I want to know what race they’re, how old they’re, whats the average income and anything else I can get my hands on.
So I will head over to Quantcast to figure out who I’m dealing with.
So now I have my demographics and know a lot about the people I’m marketing to.
I wasn’t expecting to see that most of the people I’m marketing to are 65 +.
Now do you see why it’s important to figure out your demographics?
If you go creating content before you have a clue who you’re marketing to you could be totally missing the target.
Step 3: Find All The Top Blogs In Your Niche
Now the next step is to find all the top blogs in my niche. I want to know what my competitors are doing, what content are they creating and how are they interacting with their audience.
You also can see how they’re monetizing their site to get ideas for your own site.
The easy way to do this is to do a simple google search on your niche.
So for me I would type in internet marketing blogs or best internet marketing blogs.
Now from a simple search I already found two posts where I have 175 blogs to flip through to find ideas for content to create.
When going through blogs I like to narrow it down to my 5 favorite. I look for bloggers who constantly put out top notch content and not just crap content to rank for the search engines.
Remember, we are going for value to build relationships with our followers.
Here’s a great too to help you do this without pulling your hair. Get SEMRUSH
Once I find my top 5 bloggers I like to go through their archives and find blog posts I like. I will then save them in a google docs file. If you don’t want to create a google doc file you can bookmark them to come back to later when you need ideas for content to create.
Note: I want to make it clear you should never steal or copy any ones content. I read other peoples content to get ideas and then create my own unique versions, YOU should too!
Step 4: Keyword Research
Now you remember when I told you to jot down all the different questions and searches from the forum?
Now we will use these for ideas to create our content around.
We need to head over to the Google Keyword Planner to do some brain storming.
Now if I was writing a blog post for affiliates for example I would refer back to the person asking is there a way to find people looking for affiliate marketing opportunities.
Hmmm…..let me type this into the google keyword tool and find out ; )
Note: Make sure to click the tab that says keyword ideas. It should turn white when it’s selected. You also should make sure that the keyword tool is switched to exact match. See the arrow in the picture for reference.
Now as you can see there are plenty of people searching for high ticket affiliate marketing opportunities. You can get hundreds if not thousands of ideas for keywords to form your content around.
You want to always write your content with the visitor in mind, but to ignore SEO (search engine optimization) is just silly. If you want to be found you at least need to follow basic on page optimization which I will teach you later in this post.
This keyword would be rather hard to rank for, but you can see my process for finding easier keywords to rank for with the tool below.
I use SEMRUSH for keyword research. This all in one tool not only makes my life easier by finding keywords I may have missed just using Google keyword planner, but it also helps me gauge competition
Using SEMRUSH
Most people go after keywords they would never have a chance ranking for, but SEMRUSH helps save your time and frustration so you find keywords you can rank.
Spend some time getting familiar with keyword research because finding the right keywords make all the difference between getting traffic to your blog or having a blog with lots of content and no one reading it.
I did a post about a review of a high ticket affiliate offer which ranks on the first page with just a few backlinks and no authority as a blogger, but the main reason it ranks is because I focus on good on-page optimization which you will learn later in this post.
This post brings me traffic on a regular basis with no work other than when I originally created it.
See the power of a blog?
A blog is a powerful tool to build your business, drive traffic and even make money when you structure it the right way.
Now that we have our market research done it’s time to talk about what I think is the most important part of running a blog and I neglected to do this with all my websites from the start.
If I could reach my foot to my head I would kick myself in the face for not doing this sooner.
Build Your List And Do It Right Now!
If there is one thing over the last 3 years I regret the most it would be not building my list sooner.
You see when you have an email list of targeted people in your niche you now have an ATM as many people like to call it.
I used to think this was just chicken scratch and I didn’t need to do it, but boy was I wrong. Any day I decide to promote a product, sell my own product or send traffic to a blog post or youtube all I have to do is send out an email to my subscribers.
Now if you don’t already know you’re going to need an email autoresponder that will allow you to collect these emails and have the ability to mail thousands of people at once without your email landing in the spam box.
My favorite email autoresponder is GetResponse. I have both Aweber and GetResponse, but I’m now moving my subscribers all over to Get Response because of the cost savings and great options on autoresponder which are not provided by other.
The most important part is that Get Response is affiliate marketer friendly and does not have strict policies on email offer being sent to end customers.
Get Response has better deliverability and all of the tools you get for only $15.
If you think you can skip this phase and don’t need to build a list, think again. If someone goes to your blog and reads your content and then leaves, how will you market to them in the future?
How will you get them to come back to read your content?
When you capture their emails it gives you the ability to email them when you have new content to let them know to come back and read your blog.
Whatever you do make sure your main focus with your blog is to get people onto your email list.
Put a optin form on the sidebar, link to your squeeze page in your content or do like I do and use a system like GetResponse to build your list.
So if you didn’t get the point yet, BUILD YOUR LIST!
Now we need to move on to the phase where we create the content. So we need to talk about how to create the content and make sure we set everything up properly.
On Page Search Engine Optimization
Now I know you have all the ideas to create content and you’re probably ready to get going, but before you waste your time writing content until your eyes bleed you want to make sure you understand how to structure your content to rank in the search engines.
Title of Your Post
When writing content one of the most important factors to on page SEO is the title. It tells the search engines what your post is about.
You want to make sure the keyword you’re doing the blog post around is in the title. I try to make this look as natural as possible for the title.
Example: The title of this post is- How To Start A Affiliate Blog– The Step By Step Guide
The keyword is how to start aa affiliate blog, but just having how to start an affiliate blog looks a little odd to the search engines and it also doesn’t grab the attention of people as well as adding the step by step guide.
I always write for people first, search engines second.
Make sure to download this wordpress plugin which will allow you to setup your on page SEO the easy way.
You will place the title in the normal spot for a wordpress post, but also in the all in one seo pack which I will show you shortly.
Meta Description
The meta description is exactly what it sounds like— the description of what the post is about. This is a small snippet that helps the search engines and viewers when searching in google. See below for an example.
You want to type a relevant description that tells what the post is about, but sprinkle the keyword inside the description as natural as possible so it makes sense and captures the viewers attention.
Meta Keywords
The next step is to actually put your keywords we did research on earlier into the post that way it tells the search engines what your post is about.
Remember the plugin I told you to download. This is where you will enter the keywords as well as the description and title. See below
One you install the plugin in wordpress the all in one seo pack will show up below on every post and page. This is where you will put all of the information we just talked about above.
This will tell Google what your post is about and help them index your content properly. If you do this for every post you’re already leaps and bounds above 90% of bloggers. Most people create endless amounts of content, but never do any on page optimization so there blogs are dead and their content doesn’t get found.
Permalinks
This step is what you will actually do on every blog post you create.
If you just type the title of your blog post into WordPress by default it will look like this.
Notice in yellow the link shows exactly how the title of the post is.
So in the search engines it will look like this for the URL:
“https://prosperousaffiliate.com/how-to-start-your-affiliate-blog-the-step-by-step-guide”
Now this isn’t bad because it has the keyword in the title, but I change it to the keyword of exactly what the post is about.
So here’s how to change it. Click the edit button and delete everything after how to start a blog so it has just the keyword like below.
“https://prosperousaffiliate.com/how-to-start-your-affiliate-blog”
This is more search engine friendly and will help you show up higher in the search engines.
Optimize Your Images
Now this is something most people don’t do, but if you go to google and type in any program you want to promote always have the images tagged with the offer name and you will find when people search for the term these images will serve as links to your offer. Take this additional step and optimize all your images(alt tags) for the keywords.
You will get extra traffic from people searching for images and something grabs their attention.
You can optimize your images when you upload them. Before uploading your images change the name of the image to your keyword.
Example: affiliate marketing with jags.jpg
Once you upload your images you will arrive at the screenshot below. You need to type your keyword into the alt tag section. You keyword should be in the title as well.
Now when people search the images section your images will be optimized and show up in the searches.
Just doing this simple trick will bring you extra traffic you weren’t expecting.
Now that we’ve talked about how to optimize our content and how we will add value, I want to talk to you about something that has helped my rankings tremendously.
Now I’m not going to go into this topic extremely detailed, but instead will give you the link to learn more about how to implement it on your blog.
I highly suggest you do this because Google is giving a lot of credit for people who take ownership of their blogs.
These days it’s very easy for people to hide behind a persona and nobody knows who they’re dealing with.
Have a clear about me page and your profile pic . if you can have a video that would help too. If you want to pursue this seriously and have a local address it would be great to have a google local listing.
How To Create Content People Love
Now I believe in working smarter not harder.
I like to focus on creating content people love and will share on social media channels.
Now my favorite example of this is creating whats called top list posts or tutorial posts.
A tutorial post would be exactly what you’re reading right now. So if you can find a way to turn a post centered around a keyword into a tutorial post this will be the type of content people like and will share with their friends.
I try to write posts at least 1500 words and up. For the longest time everyone did the industry standard of content around 500 words and eventually Google caught on and knocked people out of the searches for gaming the system.
I no longer have a set word count, but I know Google awards posts that are detailed and actually focus on ending the search the person is looking for.
So you’re better off creating one awesome post that people love over 100′s of crappy low quality posts.
The second example of posts I like to create are top list posts. These are the type of posts people love reading and sharing with their friends. I focus a lot of my blogging around Facebook because thats where my audience hangs out.
A few examples of top lists posts I’ve written are What is a Sales Funnels , How to grow your email list?,
Now these types of posts take a while to create, but you will get better results if you create content like this and focus your efforts on promoting it and submitting to social bookmarking sites, twitter and places where people share content to go viral. This can end up getting you lots of visitors, email subscribers and loyal fans.
Most people want to take shortcuts and not create content worth reading, but they end up spinning their wheels.
I would rather focus on one high quality article over writing a bunch of content people hate. I also find it relaxing and fulfilling to write these posts, but it could just be me ; )
Now I want to talk about the last step thats important before teaching you how to setup your first blog. Thats getting your content syndicated.
Social Syndication
Now if you followed this tutorial this far than you will understand why I’ve taught you all of this before teaching you about setting up your blog.
I want to make sure you avoid all the costly mistakes I once did. This will allow you to get better results with your blog and people won’t think twice about doing what I’m about to teach you.
There are plenty of places to submit your content like social adr to make your content go viral, but the best way is to simply ask your readers to share the content if they enjoyed it.
If you did your job and focused on creating content that helps them they won’t even think twice about sharing your content. They will be happy to share it with their friends. If you took shortcuts and created content just for the sake of ranking in the search engines, they won’t even read your content.
Just like I will ask you to do at the bottom of this post, this is what I do with every single post I make.
It’s really that simple, when you create good content it makes it much easier to have real people help you syndicate your content over trying to use spammy methods or using bots that Google can detect.
Now that I went over what I feel is the most important aspect of blogging and you understand how to create a successful blog the right way I will teach you how to actually get your blog up and running.
How to Start A Blog The Easy Way
Now the one thing I see many people doing is wasting months trying to make their blog perfect.
They dabble with colors, plugins and trying to make sure everything is just perfect. When I got started I had just a plain Thesis skin and started blogging.
As you can see I’ve reverted back to a simple theme because it works well. I’ve had plenty of fancy designs, but at the end of the day the only thing that matters is a website that converts into leads and sales.
The most important thing is to get people to your blog. You can have the best looking blog on the net, but if no one reads it then it won’t do you much good will it?
So in this step by step course I’m going to go through exactly everything you want to do to get your website up and running fast and get start blogging.
If you want to skip building a website yourself then I suggest just using Top Earner Transformation Course to start as an affiliate.
You don’t need
To build your website
To create any products
To create any sales funnels
To create any autoresponder sequence for follow-up emails
Well 90% of the toughest tasks are done for you. But unlike other programs you get to learn how to get out of your comfort zone and do work which makes you look like an authority.
You will need to do the basic task which is a must for anyone starting to test the waters for affiliate marketing.
Here’s the catch. Instead of tiny commissions of $30 , $50 or $100. You have the opportunity to earn $1500 per sale.
You even get a phone sales team dedicated to close sales for you.
If you decide to join this coaching program as a bonus i would get Your WordPress Blog up and running with tips and tricks to get your content for the long run.
All you need to do is contact me in my Facebook Group here.
If you’re starting in internet marketing then this choice is perfect for you. This is one of my main sources of income and I highly suggest it to anyone just getting started out or experienced marketers as well.
If you want to build the website yourself then let’s get started ; )
Step 1: Website Overview
Step 2: Domain Name Basics
Step 3: Web Hosting Basics
Im going to skip the part on explaining domain and domain names as Bluehost gives you a free domain name with each new purchase.
So when you are starting out it would be a lot easier to get this done and try to get a domain name at a different provider and different hosting provider.
Now if you ever want to purchase an additional domain name the i would recommend Namecheap as you can get a domain name under $10 and it is one of the best.
If you are just starting by as Bluehost gives a domain name free when you purchase hosting and we want our WordPress site from someone who is reliable and recommended from WordPress.org
Step 4: Purchasing A Domain Name and Hosting from Bluehost
Step 5: Install WordPress
Step 6: Install A WordPress Custom Theme
Best Themes : Thrive Themes
If You are Serious about building your blog into full time business I wouldn’t use anything other than Thrive Theme
My Free Theme: Kadence Theme.
Step 7: Setting Up Your WordPress Settings
Step 8: Customizing The Header or Menu and Adding Widgets
Step 9: Using Plugins
Step 10: Setting Up Pages
Step 11: Setting Up Posts
Step 12: Adding A Email Optin Form
Note: If you don’t have a autoresponder yet I would highly suggest GetResponse over Aweber for cost savings and the extra tools you get for the same price. You also will get access to my coaching and training by purchasing GetResponse through me.
>>Get GetResponse Autoresponder<<
Step 13: Putting The Finishing Touches On Your Website
Conclusion
There You have it. If you need any support at any time feel free to contact me at my Facebook Group and ask your questions there. If you liked this post please feel free to share it in your social media.
