How To Make Affiliate Sales (How I Made My 1st Affiliate Sale)

Ever since I started blogging, I’ve been churning out the tactics to figure out “what works” so I can start generating my affiliate income. Until one fine day, I was advised (by my good friend Nikola Roza) to tweak my blog to make my blog more appealing and trustworthy.

And that’s exactly what I did. In this post, I will give you the three blogging tips I used and you can leverage to increase your affiliate income. 

I am Mudassir, owner of BloggingExplained.com, a blogging tips blog.

Let’s start.

Affiliate Sale
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1) Master Your Niche

I had about eight categories on my blog with little valuable content around each topic.

Although I did not know about the topics, the money-making desperation led me to blog in such a way. Every time an algorithm update happens, my blog performance would go down.

However, it was not late for me to realize that “authority” is the new king in the market.

I thrashed more than 600+ articles and 8 categories so I could work on one niche, master it and earn authority.

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Why Multi-Niche Blog Is A Bad Idea?

Just like patients go to a cardiologist to solve their health-related problems, the audience will prefer visiting an authority blog to find the solution.

Imagine a user visited your stock market blog post, enjoyed reading it, subscribed to you on social media and email.

The next day you post “10 best gardening practices” on your social feed and send it to your email list. Can you imagine how annoying it is for the user who subscribed to you to read stock market tips?

You will also find it hard to rank your content on search engines since the topical authority is dominating the SEO game. Beyond all, advertisers prefer niche-specific blogs to advertise their products or services.

What To Do Instead?

When you dedicate your efforts to one niche, you will have time to researching and crafting quality and in-depth content for your audience

Take your time to decide the right blogging niche. Else, you might have to suffer as I did.

As you establish authority over the time with efforts you put, it will be easier to win audience trust and generate affiliate income.

2) Don’t Ignore SEO

While you must create content for the audience in the first place, it is also important you optimize it for search engines.

You don’t get thousands of page views or conversions just like that. You will constantly need to invest your energy and money in improving tools and resources that can improve your blog.

If things aren’t working for your blog, you need to analyze and improve. Here’s what you can do:

  • Audit your blog on SEMrush to find and fix issues related to backlinks, technical SEO, and content.
  • Invest in tools like Grammarly or Hemingway to write better.
  • Outsource blog related work for a freelancer when you find difficulty doing
  • Optimize on-page elements; importantly, speed (1 of 4 users leave your blog if it is taking more than 4 seconds to load) Source
  • Build authority links to your content

SEO is to stay here for a long time and dominate blogging success. So it is up to you to understand the fact and leverage it.

You will be surprised when I say most popular bloggers outsource their work to top-quality freelancers and build their blog success. It will be no wrong if you do it too.

To generate a consistent affiliate income, bringing a lot of quality traffic to your blog is important, meaning, achieving organic rankings with a perfect SEO strategy is the key.

3) Know Your Affiliate Product

Too often, bloggers use a shotgun approach to promote affiliate links they believe will be of interest to their audience without getting to learn about them.

Don’t signup and start promoting the product just because it is paying high commission, it is a thin practice and ends badly for sure.

Know your niche, find relevant products, find your audience interest, look at the product reviews, take a trial, try yourself and then promote.

If you

  • Want to stand out in the competition and make big affiliate sales, you need to be seen as an expert by recommending quality products only.
  • Are just getting started with affiliate marketing, stick to one product, learn it’s all-about and promote.

While it is exciting to signup for affiliates that you see around, it can hurt your blog income if they’re not adding value to your audience.

So, do testing and identify what works best for your blog.

How I Made my First Affiliate Sale?

I hope you will find my advice useful. I had to do a lot of research myself and stick to the right tactics that I mentioned above.

My first affiliate income was with Siteground hosting which happened in November 2019. However, I had to quit promoting Siteground as it drastically increases their plans which was quite discouraging. 

But hey, I didn’t give up on finding the right products that fit my audience. I have been making $400-500/mo for quite a time through my launching a blog in India guide and other resources.

Conclusion

Did it take a month for me to make my 1st affiliate sale? No. It took almost two years as I had been doing some horrible blog practices and was stopped as I realized.

You don’t have to wait that much time, you can just start earning in less than a year if done right. Go and implement the above tactics, learn from the pros, tweak your strategies, and importantly love doing it.

How did you achieve your first affiliate sale? What has been working for you? Please share in the comments.

Thanks to Chayan, one of my closest and early blogging friends, for allowing me to write this post on his super blog. If you enjoyed reading this post, consider sharing it on your social accounts.

Mudassir
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Mudassir

Mudassir – a professional full-time blogger and owner of Blogging Explained, a blog dedicated to bloggers who want to build and grow their blogs into profitable businesses.

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23 thoughts on “How To Make Affiliate Sales (How I Made My 1st Affiliate Sale)”

  1. Hey Chayan

    I also started my blog 2 months back and desperately looking for the first affiliate sale.
    These tips will definitely help me to achieve this.

    Thanks for sharing bro

    Reply
  2. Thanks for sharing your thoughts here, Mudassir.

    Would say that i have learned from your mistakes and will follow the right steps you recommended on my blog.

    i wish you more earnings and myself too.

    Reply
  3. Thank you for sharing your tips with us on how you made your first affiliate sale.

    A lot of bloggers, especially the new ones, make mistakes with blogging. There is no set formula I think kg for blogging success or making money online.

    Some blogs will make money in the first month of launch, while others make take a little bit longer time.

    Just have to keep writing long detailed and informative article.

    Awesome article.

    Reply
  4. Hey Mudassir,
    you’re doing great!
    Half of the battle is won once you realize the mistakes you used to made and never will again. Once you don’t make mistakes then all that’s left is doing the right things and with it comes the sweet reward of ranking in Google organically.
    I’ve been to your blog many times and I know how much you’ve improved.

    You can do this blogging thing!

    Reply
  5. Hello Mudassir.
    This is really an inspiring journey. I am going through initial stages as i have started blogging a few months back. Your tips are very powerful and will definitely help me in the long run.

    Reply
    • Hey Yash,
      Thanks for reading and commenting here. Mudassir is one of the generous bloggers that I have seen. Making an affiliate sale is not hard, it’s hard to continue it with the same spirit. All the best.
      Cheers,
      Chayan

      Reply
  6. Hi Mudassir, Good to see you at Chayan’s space with an informative piece.
    Yes, Affiliate marketing is indeed a vast subject to deal with, though I am in with few things I am still a babe in this field and I could pick a few lessons from this post.
    Thanksfor shring
    Have wonderful time to both of your
    Stay Home Be Safe
    Regards
    ~ Philip

    Reply
  7. Keep learning and thriving, Yash 🙂 Feel free to ask in Chayan’s Facebook group if you have any questions about affiliate marketing. I wish you all good.

    Reply
  8. Glad to see you here adding your valuable thoughts, Philip. We look forward to learning from you as much as possible. Have a great day there and be safe 🙂

    Reply

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