3 Things I did to increase my affiliate sales by 481% in one month

Are you keen to increase affiliate sales on your blog?

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money with your blog, but there is more to it than just adding a few affiliate links to your posts.

In this post I’ll show you 3 things I did to increase my affiliate sales by 481% in one month.

Let’s have a look.

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I may earn a small commission for affiliate links in this post at no extra cost to you. Please read my disclaimer  for more information.

How to make money blogging with affiliate marketing

First of all, to make money through affiliate marketing, you need  a blog. If you haven’t started a blog yet, you can learn how to set one up here. Or you can take my free course: Kickstart Your Money Making Blog here.

The next step is to create quality content. You need to write blog posts about topics that are in demand and solve a problem for your target audience. It helps to really niche down on your blog topic and audience so you can be very targeted about who you help, and what you help them with.

A great way to increase affiliate sales is to link to an affiliate product that helps solve your reader’s problem. This way you don’t feel like a sleazy sales person because your affiliate product will genuinely help your reader.

“How to” articles, product reviews and roundup posts are all great post types that are helpful to your target audience, plus these types of posts make it easy to naturally link to affiliate products.

Once you have some helpful blog posts on your blog, you need to promote them again and again. The best way to grow blog traffic is with Pinterest. If you want to know how to drive traffic to your blog for free with Pinterest, please grab my Free Pinterest Marketing Guide here.

How to increase your affiliate sales

I had been doing all the steps above but after about 10 months of blogging, I would still only make a few affiliate sales here and there. Nothing consistent, just the odd sale maybe one or two a month and some months none…

I was getting impatient and frustrated and started wondering if it was worth all the effort.

Let’s have a look at my affiliate earnings for one of my affiliate products for the month May; I was getting 35 clicks but only made 1 sale.

June was about the same with 31 clicks and only one sale.

But in July my sales increased by 481% with 36 clicks and 5 sales,

As you can see, the amount of clicks did not really increase but the amount of sales did.

This means I didn’t get extra sales because of more traffic, I got more sales because of a different strategy.

And this wasn’t a freak one off incident either, because in August I got 5 sales as well. (The payout amount is less because one buyer must’ve already been signed up to their newsletter.)

So what did I do to increase my sales?

Keep reading…

What I did to increase my affiliate sales

I did three things to increase my affiliate sales:

1. I Took An Affiliate Marketing Course

As you might know by now, there’s more to affiliate marketing than just slapping a few links in a blog post and hoping you get a sale.

Affiliate marketing is a subtle art and there are a lot of little things you can do to increase your clickthrough rate and sales. But when you’re a new blogger it’s hard to know where your weak spots are and what you need to improve.

This is why taking an affiliate marketing course is a great investment for your blog.

I’d heard a lot of good things about this course Making Sense Of Affiliate Marketing by fellow blogger Michelle Schroeder-Gardner.

Michelle started out just like the rest of us, with a small blog and knowing nothing about blogging. But now she is consistently earning around $50.000 a month from her blog, all through affiliate marketing!

Michelle has clearly become a pro at affiliate marketing and the fact that I increased my affiliate sales by 481% in only one month by using her strategies, proves that her system works.

This course is very thorough and Michelle’s tips and strategies are easy to follow and implement. Before I even finished the course, I went back to my old blog post and noticed how much I could improve them! It was insanely eye-opening!

I thought my blog posts were already great (ahem, I’m obviously full of myself) but there was clearly room for improvement.

> READ MY FULL AFFILIATE MARKETING COURSE REVIEW HERE

As a new blogger there is so much to learn that knowing what to focus on can be hard. This is where you can really benefit by taking a course and learning from someone else’s experience. You can literally skip months of average affiliate sales and fast track to a consistently growing blog income.

So if you’re ready to increase your affiliate sales, I highly recommend checking out this course.

You can check out the course info here or you can read my full course review here.

2. I Created A Freebie

Another thing that helped me increase my affiliate sales was a freebie that I created. A freebie, or lead magnet, is a great way to entice your readers to sign up to your email list.

New blog visitors are not that likely to buy from you the first time they visit your blog. People like to buy from someone they know and trust, this is where email marketing comes in.

Through seeing your emails pop up in their inbox, your readers will become more familiar with you, they might visit your blog to read another post and eventually they may click on an affiliate link and buy something.

If you haven’t started an email list yet, I highly recommend you start soon!

You can start your email list with Mailerlite or Convertkit. These are the best email marketing platforms in my opinion. I use Mailerlite and I think it’s great, I can create several optin freebies and automated sequences on the free plan.

Convertkit is great too, it has lots of features especially for bloggers and they recently released a free plan as well. So check them out and see what suits your needs.

Whatever you do, don’t use Mailchimp. Mailchimp is super clunky and not intuitive to use at all, and to create more than one optin form or an automated sequence you need to upgrade to a paid plan. So, save yourself a headache and avoid them…

Once you’ve got your email marketing set up, you need to create a freebie. If you need help creating a freebie read: How To Create Freebies For Your Blog.

And if you need help setting up email forms and automations in Mailerlite check out my course Easy Email Set Up In Mailerlite.

Your freebie doesn’t need to be an elaborate ebook or a course, it can be as simple as a checklist. Think of it as a small but useful gift in exchange for their email, like a short ebook, a planner, an email challenge or anything else that solves a problem for your reader, just make sure it’s a quick fix that they can’t resist.

Here is my freebie for you:

Affiliate Bonus Tips Cheat Sheet

In your freebie you give additional tips to solve the problem that you addressed in the blog post. Now you have the perfect opportunity to mention your wonderful affiliate product again that will help them solve their problem.

Seeing your affiliate link on several occasions will greatly increase the chance they click  through and buy the product.

3. I Created An Automated Email Sequence

The third thing I did to increase my affiliate sales is create an automated email sequence.

An automated email sequence is a great passive way to keep your blog and your content at the forefront of your reader’s mind.

You write a series of emails once and every time someone signs up to your email list it triggers this series being sent to them automatically.

You can configure it in such a way that they get an email as soon as they sign up, this one will have a link to your freebie in it. Then you can send another 3 to 6 emails after that spaced apart with one, two or more days in between.

Again, if you’re not sure how to do this, my Easy Email Setup Course is super detailed and will show you step by step how to set this up.

> CHECK OUT EASY EMAIL SETUP IN MAILERLITE HERE

In your automated sequence you give more tips that are still related to the problem you solved in the freebie and you include your affiliate link again where relevant.

Did you know that on average it takes up to 7 interactions for someone to buy your product?

Your automated email sequence makes sure that your audience sees your affiliate links on multiple occasions, giving them more opportunities to click through and buy your product.

And with the brilliant tips from Making Sense Of Affiliate Marketing, you’ll be able to write high converting content for both your optin freebie and your email sequence.

This is how I increased my affiliate sales by 481% in one month!

I hope this post has given you some ideas on how you can increase your blog income through affiliate marketing. If you have any questions please drop a comment below and make sure to grab my Affiliate Bonus Tips Cheat Sheet here.