Have you tries affiliate blogging only to come up short? That was me for an entire year. Until I finally broke through. And no, it didn’t come from SEO or Ads.
In this blog, I’m going to let you in on how I finally started making money with affiliate blogging.
But before I do that, I need to clear up some myths you might’ve heard about how to be successful affiliate blogging.
1. The only way to score blog traffic is to play the SEO game and appear in search results (Google, bing, yahoo)
If this were true, there is no way you’d ever make it. Ranking organically on Google is hard. Like, really hard. If you’re just starting out, have no authority, and are in a competitive niche, it may take years before you ever see the top 10.
There are agencies that make millions of dollars earning their clients the top spots in the search war.
Do you honestly think you can make it?
Fat chance.
The good news is there is a way around the organic ranking game. A way that takes no authority, no backlinks, no keyword optimizations, and no SEO audits. Just decent content shared in the right places.
2. The more content your write,or the better content your produce, the more likely you’re to be seen
I’m not saying content shouldn’t be good. What I’m saying is that good content alone isn’t good enough. The trick is putting the right content in front of the right audience at the right time.
The Breakthrough
I was falling for all of these. In fact, about 10 months in I hadn’t even made my first dollar. I had spent around $500.
I was about to call it quits after a year when suddenly…
I earned a commission. It came from an unlikely place.
Honestly, I would’ve written it off as luck if it weren’t for one thing..It kept happening.
Check out my first money-making week.
$42.03 for the first week of September. Not bad, huh?
So I reversed engineered my first success
Guess what? The more times I repeated what I’d done, the more often I’d get sales.
Check out a few weeks later..
$102 in the final week of September! Woohoo!
Then something crazy happened. Check out the first week of October.
You read that right. $486.19 in a single week.
And a little while later…
The amazing thing? I was still not getting ANY traffic from Google.
This was all coming from what I thought was an unlikely place. None of this came from following the conventionaly blogging wisdome of playing the SEO game.
Notice anything? Maybe let’s try ‘Best Underwater Camera’
Or let’s try “best running shoes for beginners.” Thats a competitive niche.
In each of these searches Google ranks and directs traffic to Reddit
And boy do they get traffic. Billions a year.
So why would you try to play the SEO game, when Reddit has already done it for you?
Once I started tapping into this, things started getting interesting.
In this guide I’m going to show you the exact system I used to build my site to thousands of views a week and thousands of dollars a month. Step-by-Step.
The System
Step 1 – Have a Niche
The first thing you’ll want to do is choose a popular niche or trend. It should be general enough to create lots of content about but still specific enough to be able to build authority
Here are some examples of niches, at different granularity
- Sports
- Outdoor sports
- Fishing
- Fly fishing
- Fishing
- Outdoor sports
- Technology
- Security
- Home security systems
- Security
- Fashion
- Women’s Accessories
- Purses
- Italian Handbags
- Purses
- Women’s Accessories
You might already have a niche in mind.
Ask yourself – Is my trend popular enough to reach audience demand?
Is there a community in forums and chat rooms?
Step 2 – Research your Niche on Reddit and Quora
Once you’ve got a topic you can research your community on Reddit and Quora.
Important: I highly recommend creating a new Reddit user for this purpose. Ideally one user per niche.
If you need a primer on how Reddit works, check this out.
Join subreddits and spaces
A subreddit or sub is a community of Reddit users that revolve around a specific topic. You’ll want to join any relevant subreddits in your community.
To search for subreddits, you can try Reddit directly or search Google.
Review the rules
Each subreddit and Quora space has its own rules. When you join a subreddit make sure to read the rules carefully. Some subreddits might not even let you post, or may limit posts. .
As soon as you join a Reddit community, it’s important to start meaningfully engaging to build karma.
- Ask relevant questions
- Comment on threads
- Share experience
Remember, READ AND ADHERE TO THE RULES. Failing to do this can get your account suspended or banned from a subreddit, and that’s not what you want!
Step 3 – Create and Launch your Website
If you don’t own a website, I’d create a simple one through wordpress, but it’s not the end of the world if you choose something simpler. You don’t have to spend a ton of time on design, and by now – AI will do it for you.
All you need is a blog page and a brief about page.
Consider one of my blogs, healthydadproject.com – does it look like a pro designed this thing? No.
Step – 4 Find High-Value Questions People Are Asking
This is where I got stuck when I first started – coming up with what to write about. There are plenty of SEO tools out there, keyword generators, and tactics. But ultimately, none of them tell you what your audience is really asking.
That is why I built Whazzuup.com – the app that turns questions into content
You see – most people who buy things ask opinions from other people – it’s almost always part of the buying cycle.
You need to be the person that answers them. It’s that simple.
But not all questions are money making questions.
Whazzuup tells you what questions to answer and categorizes search results by ‘intent’ so you can target high value questions. We also surface which items are already on the first page of google, so you don’t have to dig around.
These are the questions we base our content around.
You can favorite and tag search results as you find them. We use AI to help brain storm related questions so you can get as many of these ideas possible.
Collect and favorite a few dozen high-intent questions and move to the next step.
Step 4 – Create Content and Distribute
Now that we have our first dozen topics, and have signed up for the right affiliate programs, we can start writing our content!
Most of our content will probably be reviews. For example, the “best fly fishing rods” can be an article titled “Top 10 Best Fly Fishing rods.” If you need help coming up with ideas, use Whazzup’s Content IQ to quickly get the best suggestions for articles and replies and threads you can distribute them too.
You can save your analysis and manage your content creation process from draft to completion.
Promote your Blog on Reddit and Quora (Carefully)
Method 1: Replies
Now, here’s the fun part. Remember all of those questions we asked Google? We’re going to share our article in the replies of the relevant Reddit threads.
At this point, we’ve built enough Karma to leave replies, and know enough about the community to meaningfully engage. Here’s an example of what you can post
“I’d recommend “x rod” because A, B, C. Here are some other good ones [link to article]”
Promote the article with every other relevant thread, keeping the message similar, but not exactly the same. The goal is to try to sound authentic, and to add something valuable to the conversation.
Keep track of where you share each article (we can help with the Whazzuup)
Method II: Repurpose your Content as Posts
This next method involves repurposing your blog content as a post. This would basically be summarizing your article in a non promotional way, and linking to it.
Keep in mind, some communities do not allow links or forbid affiliate promotions, so you need to be careful.
Here’s an example of one of these posts
You’ll notice the author keeps it informational, each one of his hyperlinks points back to their blog, which has the affiliate link to the product. It’s important you don’t link DIRECTLY to the affiliate product, Reddit prevents this. So does Quora.
Google ranks this Reddit post at the top of the list when you search “walking pads”.
The best part?
The author didn’t have to do any SEO, he or she simply just let Reddit do it for him.
Post, Measure, Repeat
Now create content, reply to Reddit posts and answer Quora posts – and post your repurposed content across multiple subreddits in your community until you’ve answered all your bottom of the funnel questions.
As you keep adding posts, you’ll want to measure your affiliate performance. In all likelihood, every post won’t be a huge success and that’s ok. Focus your energy on the articles that are getting the most action. Add more products, make the content more robust, share with similar subreddits. In short, double down on what works.
Ready to Stop Guessing and Start Answering?
Start using Whazzuup.com to find real questions from real people with real buying intent.
It’s the tool I wish I had when I started.
Create a free account and get your first high-converting blog topic today.
