Your question is really very broad.
I mean, there are so many different ways to do affiliate blogging.
By “affiliate blogging,” do you mean keeping a blog that talks about affiliate marketing?
Or are you thinking of tackling a specific topic, offering informative content, and featuring ads that would lead to affiliate products?
“Affiliate blogging” applies to both scenarios above.
Anyway, regardless of what you mean, let me just share with you one piece of info I wish somebody told me when I began affiliate marketing: don’t waste your time creating content that is just promotional in nature.
For example, if you have joined the Amazon Affiliate program, don’t just publish a website that is full of “product reviews.”
This is content that reviews a product and has your affiliate links—maybe you compare different products with each other, and they have different affiliate links.
If this is the only content your website has, it’s spammy.
Google is probably not going to send you much traffic, and whatever traffic you get is probably not going to be enough for this type of project to be worth it.
I ought to know; this has happened to me several times!
So how do you get around this?
Well, the key is to look for questions that people ask about your niche—start there.
Create a long list of questions that people actually ask about the problems that the products you're selling solve.
This is the first step.
The next step is to filter these questions based on whether Google actually suggests them to you.
So you type in your keyword, put in A, B, or C, and then you will see if Google will try to complete that question for you.
There are also free tools that you could use, like AnswerThePublic and similar websites.
Type in your keyword and look for all these relevant questions that people ask that Google auto-suggests.
The next step is to use some sort of SEO tool.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s free or paid—use some sort of tool and see if the question shows up.
If it does, don’t do that question.
I know this is going to freak a lot of people out on this SEO forum, but think about it—this makes all the sense in the world!
Why?
If you're targeting questions that everybody in this dog is targeting, good luck!
There is just going to be so much competing content for those questions.
But if you target questions that people think get zero traffic, you're going to lock down that traffic source.
Now, I've got to admit; this is quite a crapshoot.
Some neglected questions get a decent amount of traffic because there are different variations of it, and there's actually quite a lot of search volume.
But others get maybe 10 or 20 searches per month.
That's okay because if you pack as many of these questions into a decently written piece of content, you get all these trickles of traffic, which can produce a nice river of visitors to your site, who you can then convert with your more commercial or “spammy” content.
See how this works?
But here's the best part: when you dominate those questions with less or no competition, your domain authority goes up.
This happens slowly over months.
But, eventually, you reach a threshold, and more and more of your content (even the spammier ones) start to rank.
Don’t be surprised if you enjoy an increasing level of sales as time goes by!
That's how you play the affiliate blogging game—whether you're blogging about affiliate marketing itself or you are pushing specific affiliate products or services.