In the first and previous Pillar of my series on How to Monetize a Book Blog about how to make money as a book blogger, we focused on professionalizing your blog through upgrading to a good web host, owning your own domain, moving to WordPress.org, developing a solid content strategy, and creating shareable blog graphics.
In this series, I’ll provide a guide on how to monetize a book blog through three simple steps organized into pillars:
Part 1: Professionalize
Part 2: Endorse – you are here!
Part 3: Create – coming soon
You can access the first Pillar here for a refresher:
Now that we’ve covered that ground (and it’s a lot!), let’s talk a little more about monetizing your blog through affiliate marketing or what I call “Endorsing with Trust.” Like the opening installment in this series, I’ve divided up the content in this Pillar into three steps. This Pillar is for those with beginner or intermediate knowledge of affiliate marketing. We’ll go over three key steps to mastering affiliate marketing for your book blog. If you’re wondering how to make money from book blogging, you’re in the right place.
Let’s get to it!
This article contains affiliate links
First… what’s affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a way to promote products and receive monetary compensation in return. If you’re wondering how to monetize a book blog, you definitely want to develop an affiliate marketing strategy. Essentially, a blogger endorses a product and includes a custom link to the item that tracks the earnings that result if the consumer chooses to purchase it. The blogger receives a portion of the profits as a result.
This blog post will be tailored specifically to book bloggers, but I whole heartedly recommend the course “Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing” for all bloggers who want to learn the basics of affiliate marketing. After taking that course, my affiliate income tripled in one year.
No, that’s not a typo; following the steps in “Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing” tripled my blog income in just one year.
Here’s my link to my review of “Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing”:
And now that we’ve introduced affiliate marketing, let’s take a deep dive into how to make money as a book blogger by harnessing the power of affiliate income.
Endorse with Trust—Step 1: Leverage your unique expertise by joining affiliate partnerships
The first step in this Pillar is to leverage your unique experience and expertise by researching and joining affiliate partnership opportunities.
Even though this Pillar guide to monetizing a book blog is about affiliate partnerships, the keyword here for this post is “endorse.”
Affiliate marketing works best if you personally endorse products or services that you have personally used or markets that you have had a good experience with. I would never endorse a brand, shop, or item that I couldn’t personally stand by. That’s the difference between icky, transactional affiliate marketing and endorsements your readers can trust.
If you’re not sure where to begin looking for affiliate marketing opportunities, think about what products, services, and tools you use on a regular basis. For ideas, check out my Resources for Bloggers page here on Broke by Books. This epic page on my blog lists a ton of products, services, and brands that I collaborate with because of how useful they are and–here’s the important point—I endorse.
In my guide to blogging resources, I’ve compiled a list of products I personally endorse, like Bluehost, Canva, and Create and Go courses. I am an affiliate for each of these brands and most of those included in the page. When you’re an affiliate (sometimes called a “brand ambassador”) it’s easy to talk up what products help you on a daily or regular basis because you already know how great/useful/essential they are. You don’t need to spend a lot of time researching what you’re endorsing. You’re already a fan and just want to tell more people about it (and earn a commission).
To brainstorm what potential affiliate partnership opportunities you might be able to join while you’re learning how to make money as a book blogger, make a list of what helps you blog every day. Who’s your web host? Where did you get your blog theme? Which email newsletter service do you use? What product lets you create blog images? What course have you taken that has led to big blogging breakthroughs?
Next, look into whether those brands have affiliate partnerships. Apply and, if accepted, leverage your experience in posts that promote the products.
It’s as easy as that.
To get you started, I’ve profiled three major affiliate marketing resources for bloggers. These opportunities are suitable for beginning, intermediate, and advanced bloggers alike.
Amazon Associates
Undoubtedly, my major source of affiliate comes from Amazon Associates. This affiliate program is super simple to use and, since Amazon sells basically everything you can think of, full of endless potential products to recommend. As you’re exploring how to make money as a book blogger, you’ll find that Amazon is a paradise of books to recommend on your blog. It’s easy to find the link to your product thanks to the SiteStripe affiliate link generator once you sign up and are approved.
There are two main ways to earn money from Amazon Associates: commissions and bounties.
Commissions are what you earn as a percentage of the price of the product you recommend—or whatever products you purchase within 24 hours. Yep! You can earn money for just about anything a customer buys within 24 hours of clicking on your affiliate link. It doesn’t even matter if what they bought was what link brought them to Amazon. The sales that do result as a direct purchase from your links are known as your “conversion rate”
The second main way to earn money from Amazon Associates is through bounties. These are set fees that cash out as a flat rate. For example, in the screenshot above, you can see I earned a $2.50 bounty. That came from someone signing up from Prime Video Channels Free Trial. Other flat rates include bounties for enrolling in Kindle Unlimited, Amazon Prime, and more.
You have to earn $10 in order to cash out. If you’re an Amazon Associates novice, this might be hard to accomplish right out of the bat. But stick with it, and you’ll soon see the rewards to your efforts.
Amazon Associates is great for beginner bloggers. Plus it’s not hard to get approved. I strongly recommend signing up for Amazon Associates to launch your affiliate marketing strategy.
ShareASale
ShareASale connects brands to partnership opportunities with affiliates. Through ShareASale, you can search for brands you might want to endorse, making it perfect for people researching how to make money as a book blogger.
With 16,000+ merchants, ShareASale has an affiliate partnership for everyone. For example, I’m an affiliate for Bookroo, which I reviewed on this blog before. ShareASale is pretty intuitive to use and beginner friendly. I definitely recommend making an account and exploring what partnerships are a good fit for you and your blog.
CJ Affiliate (Commission Junction)
CJ Affiliate, which used to be called Commission Junction, is another affiliate partnership marketplace like ShareASale. Through Commission Junction, you can apply for countless affiliate opportunities. There are many affiliate programs on CJ that are of interest to book bloggers, like Barnes and Noble. Join the site and explore what partnerships make sense based on what brands you want to endorse on your blog.
And now that we’ve discussed where to find affiliate partnerships to join, let’s move on to the next step in this guide to making money as a book blogger…
Endorse with Trust — Step 2: Get in the habit of asking the consumer-conversion question
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to monetize your book blog. With a huge number of affiliate programs available, there’s a product or service out there that you can endorse on your blog and earn a commission from sales.
But a lot of people think that monetizing a blog with affiliate marketing is as simple as dropping a link next to a book title as if that guarantees your blog.
If you really want to effectively monetize your blog with affiliate marketing, you need to understand the fundamental truth to making your blog profitable.
Let’s do a quick recap of this important and essential component to monetizing your blog via affiliate marketing.
I remember reading some variation of this on the Reddit r/Blogging forum and feeling like a lightbulb in my mind finally went off. Because this is the truth: people are driven to click on an affiliate link when it solves a consumer problem for them. In other words, they are thinking they need to consult an authority (you and your blog post) on whether or not to purchase something you endorse.
For the purposes of this blog, we’ll call this the consumer-conversion question.
I went over this step at the end of the first article in this series about how to make money as a book blogger (How to Monetize a Book Blog: Pilar 1 – Professionalize) when I talked about “strategize to monetize,” meaning getting in the monetization mindset of how you can help your blog’s readers make a consumer decision. If you haven’t checked out that overview yet, be sure to take a look now.
Essentially, the main question of the “strategize to monetize” mindset in affiliate marketing is the consumer-conversion question:
“Will this content help a consumer make a purchasing choice?”
Broke by Books
When you’re working on your content strategy, lead with writing content that helps visitors make a consumer choice.
Now let’s turn to the final step in Pillar 2: Endorse: brainstorming what kind of content you can create on your blog to maximize affiliate income…
Endorse with Trust—Step 3: Create a content strategy that supports your affiliate marketing method
Once you’ve signed up for affiliate partnerships and have a firm grasp on the consumer-conversion question, it’s time to start crafting a content strategy that will maximize your affiliate income.
To do this, let’s combine Step 1 and Step 2:
Step 1: Leverage your unique expertise by joining affiliate partnerships
with
Step 2: Get in the habit of asking yourself this question: “Is this content helping a reader make a consumer decision?”
The key is to join these two concepts together to craft an editorial strategy that marries your affiliate partnerships to purposeful content.
I will divide this content strategy into two types of affiliate content:
- Content that promotes an affiliate partnership first and foremost
- Content that organically includes affiliate links
Let’s start with the first type of content, meaning content that features and promotes an affiliate partnership.
To do this, let’s review some of the ways you can endorse affiliate programs in a single post:
Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Product reviews (like my review of Bookroo)
- How-to tutorials using an affiliate product or service
- Posts that show just how much a product has helped you (like my post about how “Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing” tripled my affiliate income)
- Articles that answer “Why” readers should use a product
- Resource pages or roundups that might help connect bloggers to relevant products, services, and brands that you personally endorse (like my Resources for Bloggers page)
Now it’s your turn…
What ways can you promote and feature an affiliate product in your content? Jot down a few ideas of how you can put the spotlight on the products, services, and brands that you personally endorse.
Don’t forget the consumer-conversion question. How can your content help readers make a purchasing decision for something you endorse as an affiliate?
Let’s now turn to the second type of affiliate content, meaning content that organically includes affiliate links.
This is different than the first type of affiliate income because you’re not featuring the affiliate partnership as the main focus of the post. Instead, this content includes affiliate links in an organic, natural way.
To do that, we’ll break down one of my most successful affiliate posts to see how this affiliate and content strategy converge into one high income converting article.
One of my highest-earning posts is my list of the 10 best numerology books:
Nearly every day, I open my Amazon Associates dashboard first thing in the morning and see that someone (or more than just one person) has purchased books I’ve recommended in my post.
Let’s back up… Why are people buying numerology books?
One way I decide what articles to write about is through consumer research. I regularly consult with articles that list niche interests, like this one from AliDropShip. These are interests that people are engaging with and making consumer decisions to support their niche(s) of choice. One list I consulted included New Age hobbies like tarot reading, numerology, palmistry, and dream interpretation. I already had two lists of tarot books (one with books for beginners to advanced and a list just for advanced tarot readers) and saw my affiliate income spike after their publication. If those posts have been successful, I thought, I could replicate that success with these other niche New Age hobbies. I’m a tarot reader myself, so it’s not a stretch for me to be endorsing New Age topics.
And you know what I found?
People are willing to shell out a lot of money to learn new things, especially new hobbies or interests that fall into niche categories, or areas of interest with low competitive content potential. It doesn’t matter if the books you’re promoting are $1.99, $9.99, or $29.99. I’ve seen people buy books at all price points—even books that cost upwards of $20.00. And a lot of books about niche topics are not cheap. In my experience it’s not uncommon for these books about learning a new skill or hobby to cost more than $20.00. Sound expensive? It doesn’t matter. People will pay for education.
So what’s the function of this article that makes it so monetizeable?
It’s all right there in the title of the article:
[Learn Numerology] + [with] + [The Best Books about Numerology]
The beginning of the title ranks for people hoping to… yep, you’ve got it, to learn numerology. In other words, consumers seeking to learn a new skill or hobby.
[Plus…]
Then the headline closes with the content in the article… [with] the best books about numerology.
So here we have it, a post set up for affiliate success. This list of the best books about numerology helps people learn numerology, a new skill or area of interest that people don’t mind paying for the education.
Essentially, I’ve curated a well-researched consumer guide to the best books about numerology for numerology students, hobbyists, and others who count numerology as a niche interest. The information in this article, then, operates as a buying guide to making the consumer decision of what books to purchase to learn numerology. We have answered the consumer-conversion question and are ready to promote the content.
You can see, then, how all three steps in this Pillar come into play to create a successful post monetized with affiliate marketing. Let’s go through each question one by one to see how this article draws on all the steps in this article about how to make money book blogging through endorsing affiliate partnerships.
First: Leverage your unique expertise by joining affiliate partnerships – Check! I’m promoting Amazon books as a book blogger. In other words, I’m endorsing a brand and products I believe in as a book blogger who regularly buys from Amazon with a great customer experience. People can rely on my word as a book expert and someone who has previously written about New Age-adjacent topics.
Second: Get in the habit of asking the consumer-conversion question – Check! This article functions as a buying guide to the best books someone learning numerology might want to purchase. This list will definitely help readers make the decision whether or not to buy one or more of the books featured in the article.
Third: Create a content strategy that supports your affiliate marketing method – Check! This post is strategically designed to bring in affiliate income while also providing high-quality content useful for readers. The post was conceptualized as a topic that could benefit from organic linking to Amazon through the affiliate marketing partnership I have with the site. This subject of the post was thoroughly vetted through keyword and industry research to be a viable topic of interest.
And so all three steps synthesize for the perfect affiliate post. If you follow the same guidelines, you can soon see your affiliate marketing strategy bring you sustainable passive income. So if you’re researching how to make money as a book blogger, you’ll for sure want to follow these steps in my guide to monetizing a book blog through affiliate marketing, or endorsing with trust.
Homework! Before you go forward to the next Pillar (coming soon…), answer these questions to implement what you’ve learned about affiliate marketing:
- What products, services, or brands could you endorse in an affiliate partnership?
- How can your content help readers make a consumer decision?
- Brainstorm three different post ideas that feature a product you endorse.
- Conduct some keyword research to find content ideas that would organically include affiliate marketing.
Again, I’m going to give a shoutout to the “Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing” course for anyone looking to level up their affiliate income game:
If you enjoyed this blog post and are looking for more book blog strategy, take it further with my book, Book Blogging Hacks, which contains not only a list of 365 book blogging prompts but also valuable information about book blogging strategies.
Curious? Learn more on Goodreads.
If you’re interested in purchasing it, you can find Book Blogging Hacks on Amazon as an eBook and in paperback.
Okay, folks! That’s all I have for now! See you in the next installment in this series: Pillar 3 – Create, which will give you all you need to know about how to make money as a book blogger through creating original projects. We’ll go over creating information products for book blogs in much more detail so you’ll leave the article with plenty of ideas on how to incorporate original products into your monetization strategy.
See you then!
