If you’ve ever wondered how to earn passive income from your website, this post is going to become your new Bible.Not only am I going to teach you the basics of affiliate marketing, but we’ll also dive into some real examples from professional affiliate marketers who are making thousands or even millions of dollars per year.

If you’ve been listening to us for long, you’ve learned that bloggers make money by building an audience that trusts them, and then offering products or services that will genuinely help that audience.

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Affiliate marketing is really just a quicker way to offer products and services without creating them yourself. In practice, it’s a modern interpretation of a very old idea getting a commission on a sale. You introduce your readers to products or services from trusted companies or individuals and get a commission on any sales to customers you send their way.For bloggers, that means you find a product or service that you like, promote it to your readers, and earn part of the profit on each sale that you make.

In our WordPress hosting post, we give readers the ins and outs of how to choose an excellent host. A portion of readers want to know who we recommend based on those criteria, and so here’s what we say:

The arrow is pointing to an affiliate link. If anyone clicks on that link and buys from them, we earn a commission Bloggers can include links like this in blog posts, emails, social media posts, and much more. We’ll get into all the possibilities later.

For now, though, it’s important that you know exactly what affiliate marketing means as well as its potential for you as a blogger.You share a link with your readers and that’s it. You don’t have to worry about tracking sales, providing customer service, setting up payments, or anything else.

If you already have a list of at least a few hundred people and are planning to sell services like coaching, consulting, design, writing or other professional services (as in legal advice, finance, or real estate) in the short term, it’s probably best to hold off on affiliate marketing.
That’s because for service providers, your best bet is selling services first. It’s simply your most profitable way to start monetizing.You can consider adding affiliate offers into the mix once your money-making machine from services is running smoothly.