How to make affiliate sales: How I got my 1st affiliate sale on a blog

How do you make your first affiliate sale?

Can you really make money with affiliate marketing?

Up until it happened, I didn’t know if it would be possible to make money through affiliate marketing on a blog.

I had seen blog income reports showing earnings within the first, second and third month of blogging.

I couldn’t picture it as a new blogger with no blogging experience. And then to add to that – start with zero followers.

Let me explain what I mean.

Some bloggers use their network for blog promotion. They post their blog on their personal Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram.

They already have the trust of their family and friends who are following their social media accounts.

Getting traffic and affiliate sales is naturally faster and easier.

If you’ve decided to not use your network – tell little to no family and friends about your blog – your website has no followers.

It has no credibility. You’re starting all of your social media accounts from scratch.

I just did this. The truth is it’s not easy to make money from your blog this way.

It can be done.

How long did it take to make affiliate sales?

For me, it happened in the 3rd month of starting my blog.

If you’re a blogger in a similar situation who is struggling to make money from your blog, this account of what I did to get my first affiliate sale might help.

Related Blog Tip Articles:

• Strategies and tips to start a blog
• Affiliate marketing programs for New Bloggers
• The Ultimate Blog Post Checklist (+ FREE printable): 11 steps to make the perfect post

This post may contain affiliate links, meaning if you make a purchase, I may earn a small commission, at no cost to you. Please read the disclosure for more information.

I started my blog in October.

I know bloggers define their starting month differently. In my starting month, I registered my domain name and purchased Siteground hosting for $3.95/month.

By mid-November, I started promoting the site.

I joined Pinterest Group Boards and Facebook groups for bloggers and my niche. I read books and took courses on Pinterest and SEO.

I was applying different strategies I was learning. Every day, I would check the analytics and see minimal traffic and $0 in affiliate sales. It was discouraging! I didn’t know what I was doing incorrectly.

And then it happened.

There was a sudden boost in my traffic.

It was a turning point. The most activity that’s ever happened on my site.

From that traffic, I generated $2.75 in Amazon commissions.

It seems ridiculous to get excited about $2.75, but I was doing the happy dance! I couldn’t believe I had made money from a blog.

How did I get this sudden increase in traffic?

I went through Google Analytics to investigate.

The source was 1 pin that generated over 300 clicks.

What made this pin different is because I created it after applying what I read in Pinteresting Strategies about SEO for Pinterest.

I was actually only part way through the course when this happened.

Pinteresting Strategies is taught by Carly Campbell who is a blogger that earns over $10,000 per month blogging.

In her 7th month, she had over 200,000 page views.

Now that I’ve finished the course, I can tell you that it covers everything about Pinterest. From setting up your profile and boards for success to what makes a pin do well on Pinterest. It goes well beyond the basics.

She shows you her Pinterest strategy. In a video, she goes through exactly step by step how to pin including where to find the best pins to repin.

She goes through what a typical Pinterest session is for her. Everything in the course is valuable, but her Pinterest routine is the gold nugget you need to watch!

Here are what other blogger’s have to say about her course:

“Carly’s Pinterest strategies have exploded my Pinterest traffic. I started to implement her strategies in November and by January my Pinterest reach has gone from 700k to over 1 million. This ebook has really changed my Pinterest game.” – Sireesha at crowdworknews.com

“Carly put together a strategy I’ve never seen (and I’ve read and devoured everything), and brought me the results I wanted. I literally got my first pin to go viral! When I woke up one day and saw I had 200 people to my site before 8:00 am, and I usually had maybe 20…I couldn’t believe it. Then, it kept going to 500, then 800…I hit a huge milestone for my blog, and I accredit everything I learned in her book. I’m very serious when I tell you its worth your time and money.” – Katie at joyfulmesses.com

“Since reading, ‘Pinteresting Strategies,’ I can’t wait to log in and check my Pinterest followers every day! Before I started implementing all of your secrets, I would go weeks without gaining a follower and now I am getting 30-40 new followers every DAY!!! The best part?? Pinterest is now driving traffic to my blog and I’ve gained 40 subscribers in the last 24 hours!! I’m only half way through the book! I can’t even imagine what finishing it will bring! This is a must read for sure!” – Amber at allnaturaljoy.com

I’m extremely frugal! I knew I had to focus on Pinterest as it is often the #1 traffic driver for bloggers.

I’ve read through dozens of blogging courses and books recently including many about Pinterest. This course is in-depth! It had valuable information I hadn’t seen elsewhere. It GOT me my first affiliate sale!

For the quality of information in this course and especially when compared to similar products in the $100’s, the cost is reasonable!
Check the current price here.

If you’re struggling to make money from your blog and frustrated with your Pinterest progress, I highly recommend you go through her course!

She has another course that’s very good – Affiliate Marketing For Bloggers: Everything You’re Missing. She uses her previous articles as case studies. It includes videos so you can see exactly how she’s applied her affiliate marketing strategy.

I initially thought that affiliate marketing was just putting links in an article. Carly goes through exactly WHERE to strategically put these links to generate sales.

If you are new to affliate marketing, here are the affiliate programs I got approved for and rejected from as a new blogger.

If you don’t have a blog, here are the strategies and steps I used to start and make money from a blog.

Other blogging resources I recommend:

Siteground

When I was looking for web hosting companies for WordPress, I first came across Bluehost. It seemed that everyone was recommending them.

Then I came across articles of bloggers who had difficulties with Bluehost from speed load time to customer service. That’s when I started noticing Siteground coming highly recommended. I haven’t had issues since.

You can sign up for as little as $3.95/month here.

Kadence

If you want to be able to customize your site, but you don’t know the first thing about coding, look into Kadence.

It’s a drag and drop builder so you don’t need to code. You have access to 80+ themes or you can create your own site. If you have questions, you can contact their customer service team.

This theme has a FREE version and it is known to be one of the fastest themes (it won’t slow down your site).

Stencil

Stencil makes it easy and fast to create images for your website.

There are over 2 mil royalty-free photos, 680 templates, 1 mil icons, tonnes of preloaded sizes or easily create your own etc.

Starting and maintaining a website involves a lot of learning and time. I love using Stencil because it saves you so much time for the image creation part of the process.

Stupid Simple SEO

This is one of the costliest blogging courses I’ve taken. It honestly took me a few months of thinking about it before I felt comfortable enrolling. Now that I’ve taken it, I don’t know why I waited so long. It’s been 500% worth it!

As a new blogger, SEO is one of the most important things you should focus on.

I used to think as a beginner blogger that SEO was just installing Yoast and making sure you get all the “green lights”. There’s so much more strategy and execution to SEO.

Now SEO accounts for 80% of my traffic. I’ve realized that SEO traffic converts way better than Pinterest traffic. It’s still important to focus on Pinterest because you can get easy wins.

If you take the time to build your SEO, you can get a lot of organic traffic and make money passively.

There are a lot of SEO courses out there. Stupid Simple SEO is one of the most comprehensive courses available, discussing both on-page and off-page SEO in actionable detail.

Here are my favorite parts about the course:

• It shows you how to set up your site structure so that it’s optimized for SEO.
• You learn how to do keyword research efficiently through the Ahrefs. You don’t even have to subscribe to the full membership. Mike Pearson, the course creator, teaches you how to get hundreds of applicable, rankable keywords using just the 7-day Ahrefs trial for $7.
• He walks you through the behind the scenes of one of his niche sites from day 1. That’s an interesting case study you don’t want to miss!
• His course Facebook Group is filled with veteran bloggers. I’ve learned a lot just by browsing the threads.
• He updates the course regularly! It’s the course that keeps on giving! Every few months it seems, he adds a new module with valuable information.

Even if you don’t take the course, I highly recommend checking out his FREE SEO training. This training has a lot of unique nuggets you can apply right away to boost the SEO on your site.

Related Blogging Tips Articles:

• Affiliate Programs I was approved and rejected from as a New Blogger
• Strategies to Start a Blog
• The Ultimate Blog Post Checklist (+ FREE printable): 11 steps to create the perfect post

How did you get your first affiliate sale? What strategies have you tried that’s working well for you?

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