In this article, we did the heavy lifting to save you the hassle and found real offers that’ll make you real money. Let’s jump right in!

Best Pay Per Lead Affiliate Programs

We’re not here to waste your time. In the list below, all the offers are legit and can make you money if you manage to hold your end of the bargain. Also, we made sure the programs are diverse, so you’re bound to find something that works for you. Enjoy!

1. Liberty Mutual Pay Per Lead Affiliate Program

This is one of the first insurance providers in the USA and all of North America. Liberty Mutual was established in 1912, so you can imagine the insane extent of expertise this company has to offer.

In addition to being rather old, Liberty Mutual also covers millions of clients in 30 countries worldwide. Yes, it’s super legit.

Liberty Mutual provides types many types of insurance coverage including:

• Personal insurance — they cover automobiles, motorcycles, boats, properties, pets, tuition, identity theft, and life.
• Business owners — lots of options from surety bonds and commercial automobiles to general liability insurance.

In other words, you can tell your audience that Liberty Mutual offers pretty much any insurance product they can think of.

With an industry as massive as the insurance industry, you’d expect it to rain cash for affiliates. However, Liberty Mutual’s pay per lead affiliate program is on the lower end of affiliate marketing earnings, granting you $10 for each lead — and that’s as high as it gets.

That being said, the real opportunity for making hefty money through this program could be pitching it to the right audience. After all, 10$ per person can add up.

• Commission rate – a maximum of $10 per lead
• Cookie duration – 120 days
• How to sign up – visit site and follow the directions

2. Freshdesk Pay Per Lead Affiliate Program

A key to the success of any organization -whether it’s business or otherwise- is facilitated communication among its members. When there’s an interrupted flow of information across the team, your company will operate with fewer mistakes and more efficiency.

This is where Freshdesk comes in, offering an easy way for companies and customers to communicate smoothly without hiccups. It’s an award-winning customer support software that’s also cloud-based for convenience.

Freshdesk is mainly designed to accommodate the communication needs of small and medium-sized establishments. It’s also compatible with a variety of support channels including phone, email, web, and social media platforms.

So how much can Freshdesk pay you? If you become an affiliate with them, you can make $5 per lead you send their way.

You can also earn a commission between 20% to 25% on payments of the first year. However, keep in mind that Freshdesk gives increases on the number of sales you generate.

• Commission rate – $5 per lead, as well as a 20% to 25% commission on every 1st-year payment
• Cookie Duration – 30 days
• How to sign up – visit site and follow the directions

3. FreshBooks Pay Per Lead Affiliate Program

This next offer is also among the best pay per lead affiliate programs out there that you can join. It’s from FreshBooks, which is a software provider that focuses on supplying small businesses with comprehensive solutions for accounting and invoicing.

At first glance, this may not sound like the most exciting thing to promote to your visitors. But what it lacks in being interested, it makes up for in being essential. Eventually, any owner of a small business will need to invest in such a type of software.

Factoring in the fact that 99.9% of all businesses in the United States are small businesses, you’re looking at a market with a huge potential for profit as several hundreds of thousands of new businesses are created each year.

What’s even more impressive, the company is so confident in its products that they’re willing to give customers a free 30-day trial of the software so they can put it to the test. Now, let’s get to the good part — how much does FreshBooks pay per lead affiliate program pay?

For every visitor that you direct to the site via your unique affiliate link, you’ll earn $110 once they sign up for a paid account. This shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish with the right audience since free trials can effectively get people hooked up to a product long enough to want to buy it.

• Commission – $110 per sale
• Cookie duration – 120 days
• How to sign up – visit site and follow the directions

4. Kasamba Pay Per Lead Affiliate Program

When discussing affiliate marketing programs with potential prospects, most of them would never expect psychic readings to be a department that you can get into. Yet, nothing is impossible and we’re indeed talking about one right now.

Kasamba is a psychic readings platform that provides its visitors with every esoteric service in the book such as:

• Fortune telling
• Psychic guidance
• Spiritual guidance
• Dream analysis
• Astrology forecasts
• Career forecasts
• Tarot readings

So whatever sort of psychic-related advice your audience may be interested in, Kasamba can give it to them. Visitors can even test the waters of the website free of charge for 3 minutes with a psychic of their choice.

What’s in it for you? Well, to put it simply, a lot. You’re looking at a commission of as much as $150 per lead.

This number makes Kasamba’s affiliate program one of the best pay per lead programs you can join.

• Commission rate – $150 per lead
• Cookie duration – 60 days
• How to sign up – visit site and follow the directions

5. Paychex Pay Per Lead Affiliate Program

Established in 1971, Paychex dedicated its platform to providing payroll facilities in an outsourced format to cater to small and starting businesses that couldn’t afford to have a designated payroll person or team on board.

Since then, the company has expanded to offer a wide range of HR solutions for any size business up to an enterprise level. Their services also cover benefits for employees and insurance for businesses.

There’s certainly a high demand for the services of a platform like Paychex, especially when the number of new businesses started each year in the United States is closing in on 1,000,000. The market couldn’t be bigger and you shouldn’t have trouble promoting this platform to your audience.

Your motivation here is a nice commission of $75 for each new customer you bring in via your referral link. You can choose to get paid either by requesting a payroll quote from the company free of charge or by calling one of their sales associates for only a couple of minutes.

• Commission rate – $75 per lead
• Cookie Duration – 90 days
• How to sign up – visit site and follow the directions

6. Zenefits Pay Per Lead Affiliate Program

Within businesses that involve a fair number of employees, things can get pretty hectic and maybe even problematic in the HR department. For those who wish to minimize internal affairs errors and maintain a smooth operation in the office, we give you Zenefits.

Zenefits offers your clients a modern HR experience with its automated management platform. It provides small and medium-sized companies with the necessary software and mobile solutions for a wide array of services such as streamlined onboarding, performance reviews, PTO (paid time off), selecting insurance and additional benefits, as well as payroll management.

By spending less time and resources on HR, you’ll be free to take up more important tasks. You’ll also increase productivity in your business and boost employee experience.

So how much does Zenefits affiliate program pay? Well, for each new prospect you can earn a minimum of 10$ up to 25$. You also have the chance to make more money with better lead volume and quality.

• Commission rate – $25 per lead
• Cookie duration – 30 days
• How to sign up – visit site and follow the directions

7. BBVA Bank Pay Per Lead Affiliate Program

In the financial department of pay per lead affiliate programs, we’re looking at a great offer from BBVA Bank. If the name doesn’t sound familiar, we understand; not everyone keeps track of bank names outside their country.

Established in 1857, BBVA is one of the biggest Spanish banks. In 2020, Euromoney named this bank the best investment bank in Spain.

Aside from its impressive corporate history and achievements, this bank is known to provide a long list of financial products covering just about every financial requirement your visitors would need, from credit cards to mortgages, all of which you can promote.

However, according to the company’s affiliate agreement, you’re eligible for a commission for the following items only:

• Money market account
• Free checking account
• Online checking account

Be sure that these types of services are what your visitors need. Otherwise, you won’t benefit from the program.

This goes to show you the importance of reading the fine print whenever you’re signing up for any kind of deal.

Speaking of which, keep in mind that the cookie duration in this program is session-based. This means it ends when the session expires or the web browser is closed.

Despite all of those limitations, you earn a fixed commission rate of $85 per new customer with the BBVA Bank affiliate program. Do make sure you direct pre-qualified traffic to their website to guarantee your profit.

• Commission rate – $85 per lead
• Cookie duration – ends when the session expires or the web browser is closed
• How to sign up – visit site and follow the directions

8. Blueberry Pediatrics Pay Per Lead Affiliate Program

The most important thing in the life of any parent is their children’s health. The Blueberry Pediatrics app caters to this exact aspect by providing unlimited yet affordable pediatric care.

Available 24/7, this service delivers trusted medical diagnoses once gathered data are sent to an expert pediatrician. This way, concerned parents get all the perks of visiting a doctor but without the hassle of waiting, queues, or tantrums that little ones often throw when you have to drive them to a local clinic or hospital.

Blueberry Pediatrics can also save you the steep costs of an ER visit. Additionally, this platform can issue school notes remotely as well as medication prescriptions.

With this app, Pediatricians are available at any time for a consultation via phone, text, or video. At $144 per year or $18 per month, this budget-friendly service has no limit for the number of kids or the number of times you use it.

So, how much can you earn from Blueberry Pediatrics as a pay per lead affiliate? Well, you can earn $15 for every new prospect you send their way. For the right audience, this can be quite profitable since it’s essentially a no-brainer deal for most parents.

• Commission rate – $15 per lead
• Cookie duration – 30 day
• How to sign up – visit site and follow the directions

9. Born To Sell Pay Per Lead Affiliate Program

Back to the financial side of the spectrum, Born To Sell is one of the absolute best screeners for covered call investment with integrated software for easy portfolio management.

The covered call is a conservative, income-based investment strategy. It can consistently generate periodic monthly income with very simple execution.

If your visitors are interested in investing their money, you should have no issues promoting this service as facts indicate that people with stocks kept until expiration end up making no money out of these options.

Professional traders earn good cash from selling options to others. Born To Sell is here to make this accessible to average investors.

For additional income, stock owners can sell or trade covered calls against set shares. This strategy is proven to be superior to the common buy-and-hold method.

As an affiliate, you can earn commissions for new leads as well as commissions for sales. How much? Well, it’s $5 for each customer who signs up for Born To Sell’s free trial and an extra $40 for each lead that becomes a paid subscriber.

To help you reach as many prospects as possible, this service program lets you share a generated hyperlink on your social media (such as LinkedIn and Google+).

• Commission rate – $5 per lead
• Cookie duration – 90 days
• How to sign up – visit the site and follow the directions

10. LinkedIn Learning Pay Per Lead Affiliate Program

One of the fastest-growing niches online is education and e-learning. According to a recent estimate, the e-learning market in North America is projected to reach a value of $135 billion by 2026. So what time is better than now to get in on the action?

One of the best pay per lead affiliate programs you can join is LinkedIn Learning. This service provides high-quality courses delivered to you via industry experts to help you develop the necessary skill to excel in the most in-demand departments of technology, business, and creative jobs.

How does the LinkedIn Learning affiliate program compare? The company will pay you $5 for every new lead (up to $40) and 35% per each sale of individual courses.

• Commission rate – up to $40 per month and 35% per course
• Cookie duration – 30 days
• How to sign up – visit the site and follow the directions

11. 1Password Pay Per Lead Affiliate Program

Identity Thief may be a hilarious movie, but identity theft and fraud are no joke. Although they seem like things that wouldn’t happen to average people in real life, these crimes are surprisingly common in the US.

In 2020, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), there were 4.8 million reports of identity theft and fraud cases. This is 45% more than the 3.3 million in the year before, with 113% more identity theft reports compared to 2019.

Luckily, security and password protection services such as 1Password can save you from falling victim to such threats.

In addition to automatically storing, filling, and securing your personal data, passwords, and credit cards, this platform also blocks phishing attempts, alerts you to potential security breaches, removes vulnerable data from your clipboard, and hides your information from keyloggers.

1Password takes things to the next level — a corporate level. It locks away secrets in your company’s infrastructure (such as application keys, API tokens, and private certificates) and supplies them only at the exact time and place when they’re needed.

So how much will you make for each new lead you can generate? The answer is $2 per completed signup, which is free of charge. If you promote it well enough, you can also earn a 25% commission of the first month’s or year’s payment.

• Commission rate – $2 per lead
• Cookie duration – 30 days
• How to sign up – visit the site and follow the directions

12. National Debt Relief Pay Per Lead Affiliate Program

With recessions cycling to occur every 5 to 10 years on average, financing can be a nightmare for millions of people who are forced into acquiring debts that are poorly managed due to their lack of money skills.

As such, there’s pretty much a constant general need for debt consolidation, and this is where National Debt Relief comes in.

This service is one of the lowest-cost solutions to get rid of credit card debt, offering struggling consumers a way out instead of filing for bankruptcy. The company will negotiate with creditors on your behalf, aiming to bring down your total debt amount while allowing you to settle unsecured debts (such as credit cards and personal loans) with a lump-sum payment.

However, National Debt Relief can’t help you with debts from lawsuits, IRS debts, or mortgages.

So how much can you make as their affiliate? This pay per lead program is actually one of the highest-earning out there, where you get $27.50 for every qualified customer.

A qualified lead should have a minimum of $10,000 in unsecured debts and is just required to fill in a 6-field form that won’t take more than a minute to complete. Also, the company accepts leads from any state other than CT, ME, KS, WV, NH, SC, OR, and VT.

• Commission rate – $27.50 per qualified lead
• Cookie duration – 60 days
• How to sign up – visit site and follow dithe rections

13. 1st Class Medical Pay Per Lead Affiliate Program

Here’s another niche you probably didn’t know existed: portable oxygen concentrators. 1st Class Medical is a service that supplies these devices.

If you’re wondering who needs to use oxygen concentrators, the following list can help you get a better idea of the target audience:

• Individuals with COPD
• People suffering from cystic fibrosis
• People suffering from sleep apnea
• Individuals suffering from pneumonia
• People suffering from severe asthma
• A range of other respiratory diseases

1st Class Medical has been in the business of providing portable oxygen concentrators for almost more than 40 years. This company actually managed to solve the two biggest issues that surrounded oxygen concentrators, which are either being too heavy or draining the batteries too quickly.

As such, if you take a look at any of the oxygen concentrators they sell, you’ll find that their products aren’t only lightweight, but also equipped with batteries that are meant to run the device for a whole day.

What’s more, 1st Class Medical offers its customers life-long technical support free of charge. It also features a buy-back option that helps you save money whenever you’re looking to upgrade to a newer model.

We’re aware that this is one of the most niche-specific products, but then again, the demand is super-defined. You won’t really need to promote these products because anyone who uses them is already interested.

So how much money does this pay-per-lead affiliate program offer? Well, you stand to earn $20 for every new customer you refer to the service.

• Commission rate – $20 per lead
• Cookie duration – 30 days
• How to sign up – visit the site and follow the directions

14. Skillshare Pay Per Lead Affiliate Program

Skillshare is an online platform that supports e-learning with courses (free and paid) in just about every department you can think of including:

• Design
• Marketing
• Business
• Art
• Technology

For every new customer that joins their community via your referral link, the Skillshare affiliate program will pay you $7.

• Commission rate – $7 per lead
• Cookie duration – 30 days
• How to sign up – visit the site and follow the directions

15. 888 Casino Pay Per Lead Affiliate Program

If you thought we’d put together a list of the best pay per lead affiliate programs without including one from a casino website, then you’re greatly mistaken. The roundup just wouldn’t feel complete without it!

Today, our pick in the gambling department is the 888 Casino. We wouldn’t be surprised if the name sounds familiar to you, after all, these folks are one of the most well-known brands in the gambling world of online gaming

The main reason for their popularity is that they offer an extensive range of casino games and gambling-related entertainment. So whatever you go in hoping to find, 888 Casino has your back.

The website offers players slots as well as casino games including poker, blackjack, roulette, and Baccarat. They can go up against real players in live sessions or, instead, choose to play vs the computer.

It’s a no-brainer that casinos generate gigantic revenues for those running the platform. As such, the website will happily pay its affiliates £100 (since the operation is UK-based) for each new player you send their way.

Keep in mind that 888 Casino only considers a lead valid after they’ve been approved and deposited some cash for the first time. These conditions are pretty standard for casino-related pay per lead affiliate programs.

• Commission rate – £100 per lead
• Cookie duration – Permanent
• How to sign up – visit the site and follow the directions

16. Grammarly Pay Per Lead Affiliate Program

Grammarly is a tool designed by writers and linguists to provide real-time checking of the spelling, punctuation, grammar, and even phrasing of texts. It’ll help you correct mistakes and also suggest ways to improve your delivery.

It’s a high-converting pay per lead affiliate program that you can easily promote to students, scholars, writers, and just about any other person who’d like to improve their writing and composing skills.

As far as the money you can earn from Grammarly, you’re in for $0.20 per lead you send their way.

• Commission rate – $0.20 per lead
• Cookie duration – 90 days
• How to sign up – visit the site and follow the directions

17. CreativeLive Pay Per Lead Affiliate Program

Offering more than 1500 courses developed and taught by 700+ experts in their respective fields, CreativeLive is a platform that operates via creators for creators.

This platform presents a wide variety of courses in a bunch of different categories such as Music & Audio, Photo & Video, Craft & Maker, Art & Design, and Money & Life.

With such diversity, it’s easy to see how much marketing and profit potential we’re talking about. As an affiliate of CreativeLive, you can earn $1 through their pay per lead program for every prospect that signs up for their free trial.

Additionally, you have a chance to earn a 20% commission on purchases by new customers purchases and a 10% commission on purchases by returning customers.

• Commission rate – $1 per lead
• Cookie duration – 30 days
• How to sign up – visit the site and follow the directions

18. Sun Power Pay Per Lead Affiliate Program

Solar power has always been a thing long before now. But back then, the technologies of solar setups weren’t advanced enough to support a reliable and practical operation. Not to mention, they were very costly.

Luckily, time was kind to humans’ achievements in the solar power department. Solar panels nowadays have become a lot more efficient with much lower prices.

With Sun Power, your visitors can finally make use of solar power as the company offers products that suit the energy requirements of just about everything imaginable such as:

• Home generators
• Residential battery backups
• Solar panels for automobiles
• Solar panels for boats
• Portable solar-powered options for hikers and campers

Additionally, the company produces something called a “solar roof”. This is an option that allows you to replace your roof tiles with solar panels to generate clean energy and cut back on utility bills. The solar panels will blend in with the roof, so you don’t need to worry about them looking weird or out of place.

Whatever system you end up choosing, you’ll get a 25-year warranty with the purchase. This is a great selling point because it gives your audience total peace of mind to buy from the company.

So what can Solar Power pay per lead affiliate program do for you? For every new lead you bring in, you stand to earn a nice $75.

You’re looking at great potential for profit with this affiliate offer thanks to rising interest in alternative energy sources.

• Commission rate – $75 per lead
• Cookie duration – 45 days
• How to sign up – visit the site and follow the directions

19. Pluralsight Pay Per Lead Affiliate Program

This is another option for affiliate marketers interested in the e-learning and education niche. Pluralsight is a vastly resourceful online platform where your visitors can find a lot of courses designed by industry experts in IT, creative, and developer departments.

With more than 6,000 courses to choose from, both individuals and businesses can benefit from this site. The Pluralsight affiliate program pays $5 per new customer.

• Commission rate – $5 per lead
• Cookie duration – 45 days
• How to sign up – visit the site and follow the directions

20. American Express Canada Pay Per Lead Affiliate Program

If a good chunk of your audience is Canadian or lives in Canada, then you should consider signing up for the American Express Canada affiliate program.

Along with Mastercard and Visa, American Express (also known as Amex) is one of the giants in the credit card industry worldwide. If you’re from the US, you probably know this already, but if you’re from any other country, the introduction was due.

Now, if you think that the 2008 financial meltdown has gotten people to stop using credit cards, you couldn’t be more wrong. As such, promoting them to your visitors is a winning market, even more so with a company like Amex that offers plenty of perks and 18 different types of cards so your audience can choose whatever best matches their lifestyle.

A lot of people are interested in the facilitation that accompanies owning a credit card. Anyone familiar with this market knows how much money it can make you.

Via this program, your commission can be as high as CA$ 200 for each application upon approval. This is one of the best-paying lead-based affiliate programs on our list.

• Commission rate – a maximum of $200 per lead
• Cookie duration – 7 days
• How to sign up – visit the site and follow directions

How To Choose the Best Pay Per Lead Affiliate Programs

Choosing the best pay per lead affiliate programs to promote on your website will need you to do a bit of research on your part. However, there are two key qualities you should look for in any offer to make sure you get a winning deal:

• Interesting products — if you want your visitor to click and buy whatever product you’re promoting, it has to be interesting to them. Ideally, you want to promote products that belong to your niche.
• Commission — the program has to offer you fair pay in line with how much profit you end up generating for the company and the effort that goes into promoting their products.

How to Promote Pay Per Lead Affiliate Programs

Here are some ways to help you promote your pay per lead affiliate programs:

• Social media — platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram put your content out there for billions of people to view. Incorporating pay per lead affiliate offers in your content and then sharing it on social channels where relevant and trending conversations are taking place helps you make use of the generated following.
• SEO — applying search engine optimization to your content increases the chances of your web page being easily found by interested audiences.
• Blogging — creating a relevant blog is a highly effective method for promoting pay per lead affiliate programs because it establishes you as an expert in your respective field, which makes the offers that you mention more trustworthy. For example, The Inside Line is a blog that promotes GoPro affiliate offers by sharing the latest news of the GoPro world.
• Youtube — another way to promote pay per lead programs is by making videos and posting them on Youtube, where you review products and answer questions regarding offers you’re promoting. You can learn from Gear Patrol, which is an affiliate marketer that posts videos on its YouTube channel to closely review products from its affiliates.

Pay Per Lead Affiliate Programs FAQ

What does PPL – (pay per lead) mean in affiliate marketing?

Pay per lead (PPL) is a type of affiliate program where the merchant pays the affiliate a commission per every lead they receive. This can be an email, phone number, a sign-up for a free trial, an app download, etc.

This differentiates from traditional affiliate programs where affiliates only get paid when a sale is made through their links.

Is PPL (pay per lead) the same as CPA affiliate marketing?

These terms are often used interchangeably but CPA stands for “Cost per Action” which can be any action the merchant defines as a conversion, including both opt-ins and sign-ups, and purchases.

Pay Per Lead Affiliate Programs – Wrap Up

The beauty of Pay Per Lead affiliate programs is that they don’t just depend on generating sales, but also on customers simply signing up for a free account or subscribing to a free trial. We did our part and shared with you 20 of the best Pay Per Lead affiliate programs on the web. The rest is in your hands!

To learn more about making money with Affiliate Marketing, download my free step-by-step guide here

While some people “blog” simply as a hobby, most bloggers do it as a full-time career and their way to earn an income. When done correctly, blogging can be a profitable and rewarding pursuit that anyone can learn.

20 years ago blogging was way easier. One could simply write a few short blog posts and get a lot of visitors fast. But nowadays there are more than 600 million blogs and  7 million blog posts are published per day so the landscape is way more competitive and bloggers need to perform other tasks in order to keep up with it.

If you’re thinking about becoming a blogger or you’re just curious about what the job involves, then this article is for you. Below, we’ll be discussing the things a blogger does to keep a blog running and sharing some tips on how you can get started as a blogger, generate income and turn blogging into a full-time job! Keep reading to learn more.

What Does a Blogger Do?

Being a blogger can make for quite a busy work life, but it can also be very fun. The tasks a blogger needs to do every day are a lot -sure-, yet their versatility can take away from the hectic vibes and turn the job into something much more interesting.

As a blogger, you’ll have a hand in everything related to your blog including:

• Researching and coming up with ideas
• Writing and posting articles
• Optimizing content for SEO purposes
• Editing previous articles
• Promoting content and marketing the blog
• Seeking out partnerships
• Recommending products
• Managing accounts on social platforms

In this section, we’ll take a closer look at the most common tasks bloggers do daily to give a better idea of what it takes to operate a successful blog.

1. Choose their blogging niche

Any blogger starts their journey with an idea they want to share with the world. But there are several factors to keep in mind when choosing a blog topic or niche including your interests, knowledge, the demand in the marketing, and the monetization options.

Whichever topic you pick, always keep in mind that you will be reading and writing about it for years so make sure it is something you are truly interested in.

Research your blogging topic thoroughly to make sure it has evergreen potential and that people will still be interested in it for many years to come.

2. Keyword Research

Once bloggers choose the main topic of their blog is time to move on to the next stage: keyword research. This is one of the most important steps of blogging and it has the power to either make or break your blog’s results.

Since blogs get most of their traffic from search engines like Google, the process of keyword research refers to finding phrases or “keywords” that people are already searching for in order to create content around those topics.

Ideally, in this process, a blogger should also try to identify those keywords that don’t have as much competition so they have more possibilities of ranking for the top search results and people actually reading their blog posts.

Research also allows bloggers to deliver relevant and up-to-date information which helps build their authority and reputation in their niche which is key to their success.

Write Articles and Create SEO-Optimized Content

This is what most people consider to be the core of blogging — the writing aspect of the job. There’s no doubt that writing content is vital to the whole operation, after all, it’s in the very definition of what a  blog is; a written record of the author’s views regarding a certain topic.

Bloggers don’t need to be poetic or too fancy with words but they do need to be skilled writers in order to create content that is concise, easy to understand, and anticipates readers’ questions.

On top of all that, bloggers need to optimize their content for search engines like Google since they want their articles to appear on the top results of related searches.

This approach is referred to as search engine optimization or SEO, and it’s vital for generating traffic to your blog. Implementing SEO techniques into articles is a key skill for a blogger to learn since it has the potential to separate a successful blog from a failed one.

In the previous step, I mentioned keyword research as a part of SEO but once a blogger identifies the keyword they want to target, they need to make sure to optimize their content so it can actually rank for those keywords. This process involves including the keyword in the article, titles, and permalink as well as staying on topic and writing a better article than the competitors.

3. Planning and Maintaining a Publishing Schedule

Another task that a blogger needs to perform is to plan and maintain a publishing schedule. It is not enough with doing the research and knowing how to write the articles if you don’t create enough content for search engines to take your site seriously.

For most industries, it takes at least 100 articles for a blog to start getting significant visitors. This tends to be challenging for new bloggers since they need to create content for a long time without any feedback or results which is why it is important to stick to a schedule and trust the process.

Since posting content is one of the most basic ways to grow a blog, most bloggers aim to establish a daily publishing schedule or at least post every other day.

Pumping out new content at such frequency will surely give you a valuable edge over competitor blogs, but if you can’t, we recommend not going below a new post every week.

It also varies depending on the keyword you want to tackle and the length of the article. Naturally, a 5,000-word article will take more than a 500-word article so when it comes to choosing, always prioritize quality since longer (well-researched articles) tend to rank higher on average than short ones.

4. Design Visual Content

Designing visual content for the blog is yet another integral part of being a blogger. Even more so for some niches like travel, fashion, and beauty, among others.

Visual content helps to illustrate your points more clearly and bring your articles to life. It is also key to capturing and maintaining interest since people’s attention spans are shorter every day due to the exposure to social media and short format content.

Most people will skim through articles so they can find the bits that benefit them and then move on. If you design an attractive blog with original images that you created yourself, the chances of intriguing readers to stick around on your page for a longer time soar much higher than if you don’t use any images to support it.

Additionally, visual content can also help rank your content on search results and bring readers to your blog since some people search directly through the “Images” and “Videos” tabs of search engines like Google.

That being said, the importance of images and videos in a blog varies according to its niche.

For example, if your blog is in the food niche, you’ll need to include pictures of the ingredients, cooking steps, and what the final products look like, in order to make your article more appealing and easy to follow.

The same goes for blogs in the traveling and lifestyle niche. On the other hand, blogs in niches such as finance or marketing don’t have nearly as high of a demand for visual content or if they do, it is mostly in the form of screenshots or videos to support tutorials.

5. Engage with the Audience

An often underestimated task of running a blog is engaging with your audience inside and outside your website. This allows bloggers to foster a sense of community and build their authority. Readers rather to learn from other persons that share their interests versus reading a corporate or branded blog with no human presence.

Engaging with your audience involves several activities such as:

• Replying to each comment that a visitor posts on your blog, whether it’s positive or negative. Here, you need to put effort into reading the comments and replying accordingly instead of just typing a standard reply to all of them.
  
  This will show authenticity and encourages more of the audience to trust you and participate in discussions as well.

• Answering questions that readers send you or post under posts. Again, this is good for credibility and shows that you appreciate those who took the time to read your content and type an inquiry.
  
• Holding giveaways and contests that reward members of the audience who refer friends to your blog, share posts from your blog on their social media, subscribe to your social media platforms, sign up for your newsletter, and so on.
  
  This can be a very effective way to boost engagement on your blog with more visits, subscriptions, and conversions.

• Setting up an email newsletter. This approach allows you to engage readers when they’re away from the blog to drive them to revisit your website.
  
  The first step is to collect emails from your audience. The easiest way to do this is by incorporating pop-ups into your blog that ask readers to sign up for your newsletter. Be sure to include a brief idea of what your newsletter offers such as exclusive offers and tips.
  
  From there, you use the email addresses that you collect to keep your readers engaged via email. This is referred to as email marketing, and it helps you establish a more personal relationship as it enables direct communication with readers whenever necessary.
  
  An email newsletter is a great way for bloggers to notify their audiences of new posts or promote products that they may be interested in. As a result, it can boost your website’s traffic and generate more profit.

6. Post on Social Media

Long gone are the days with being a blogger was really just about writing blog posts. Nowadays, running successful a blog involves having a multi-platform presence and engaging with your audience inside and outside your website.

How well a blogger manages their blog’s presence on various social media platforms significantly contributes to how successful their blog becomes.

It’s no secret nowadays that social media can heavily impact a business to the point of making or breaking it. Almost every brand knows this, from the most established to the newest ones, and so they invest a better portion of their resources to promote their presence on social media.

Posting on social media is also one of the easiest ways to get early traffic to your blog since search engines can take up to 12 months to start showing your articles. It is also free and will help you attract loyal readers that will be happy to hear about your new blog posts.

The following are among the major social media platforms you should be active on as a blogger:

• Instagram: this is one of the go-to social media platforms for most bloggers in a wide variety of niches. The appeal comes from the access the platform provides for visitors to take in most of the information in visual form, which is -as we discussed earlier- necessary to capture the attention of people who are looking to keep scrolling as quickly as possible.
  
  As you increase the number of followers on your blog’s Instagram page you increase the chances of attracting traffic your the blog is higher. when you publish a new post.

• Twitter: this social media platform allows users to share text posts with a maximum of 280 characters which makes it perfect for bloggers who don’t create a lot of visual content and rather engage in conversation with their audience.
  
  This platform allows bloggers to share short snippets of their posts to spark people’s curiosity and make them want to read the rest of the article.

• Facebook: hundreds of millions of people around the globe don’t go a day without browsing through their Facebook feed. So it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’ll reach a lot of people by posting there.
  
  Bloggers have many options here. They can start a Facebook page for their blog where they post summaries of posts, extra tips, additional images, and so on. Not only can readers view your updates right on their feed if they chose to follow you, but they can also react to your posts and comment on them, giving you an opportunity to engage with them further.
  
  Bloggers can also join relevant Facebook groups where they participate in discussions to help others and share insights. They can then promote their blogs to other group members who had a positive experience interacting with the bloggers.
  
  While the organic reach of Facebook’s Pages is super limited, some bloggers have found a great alternative on Facebook groups which allows them to create an engaged community and have a secondary platform where they can share their updates and eventually, their offers and recommendations.
  

• TikTok: this platform took the online social world by storm using short shots of video content. This didn’t go unnoticed by brands that started creating challenges for the community to replicate just like normal users did. They even jump on trends and deal with popular influencers to incorporate their products in their TikToks.
  
  Compared to other platforms, Tiktok is fairly new since it was launched in 2016 but it is also the fastest growing social media app and has 131.0 million active users in the US alone. The basic function of TikTok is that users can post videos of themselves lip-syncing, dancing, or acting out short sketches.
  
  Since the app is still in its early stages, there are not as many creators (yet) as on other platforms so bloggers who adopt it will benefit from being able to grow their following faster than they would do maybe on Instagram.

• Pinterest: last but not least, the relationship between bloggers and Pinterest has been established a long time ago. So if you didn’t know about it, you need to seriously catch up! The platform works as a search engine but also has elements of a social media app like sharing, saving, liking, and commenting.
  
  Through Pinterest, bloggers can introduce their posts to millions of people in image form along with a short description that the reader can save to check out later. Giving the audience the option to pin something for viewing during their free time improves your blog’s chances of being revisited making it a great alternative to direct early traffic.
  

7. Manage Administrative Duties

In addition to all the creative processes that a blogger needs to go through every day, there’s also an administrative side to running a blog that they must tackle as well. It’s not the most fun task, but it’s essential to keep the blog running smoothly.

They’re more like technical tasks such as:

• Sending and replying to emails, whether from sponsors, partners, guest bloggers, and other business prospects.
• Responding to business inquiries via text or phone.
• Make sure the back-end is operating smoothly by servicing the platform, updating plugins, fixing bugs, and revising code.
• Use Google Analytics to keep track of statistics concerning the traffic to your blog and its ranking in the search results. This can help you get a better idea of what you’re doing right and what marketing areas need working on. Based on such stats, you can also start making smarter business decisions like collaborating or expanding.

8. Use Guest Posts

Guest posts can be quite beneficial for bloggers, especially those who are new to the field.

Inviting a known blogger to write and publish a post on your blog can help your blog reach a wider audience who will be more inclined to check out your content because you’re connected to said blogger.

It can also work the other way around. Bloggers can do guest posts on other bloggers’ posts as a form of trading readers, which helps both blogs address different demographics that may also be interested in what they have to offer.

By inviting other bloggers to write and publish their posts on your blog, you help them expand their network. This boosts your content, drives traffic, and increases shares for both blogs.

If done right, guest blogging is, by far, one of the easiest ways to build backlinks and expand readership. Accordingly, it can also help boost both bloggers’ SEO standing, making it a win-win!

9. Monetize their blog

The key to making money as a blogger is generating loyal traffic that’s willing to buy what you recommend, endorse, or make. Seeking profitable opportunities is a crucial task for a blogger looking to get paid off of their blog.

There are various ways to make that happen such as:

• Affiliate marketing: this is one of the most common ways for a blogger to make money through their blog. Affiliate marketing is where you strike a deal with a company to recommend its products or services to your reader in exchange for a percentage of each sale that happens via your referral link.
  
  What bloggers need to keep in mind here is that a lot of trust rides on the quality of the products or services they recommend. If your blog has a lot of readers who trust your recommendations, and you end up having them buy sub-par products, they won’t repeat the same mistake.
  
  This is why bloggers should really consider the sort of products and services they want to recommend via their blogs to maintain their relationship with the audience so that they continue trusting what they recommend.
  
  Some of the most common ways to promote affiliate products include:
  
  • Blog post promotion
  • Use banners on the blog’s sidebar
  • Write review posts
  • Use coupon codes

• Collaborations and sponsorships: collaborating with brands or other content creators can boost the status of your blog to the next level. The same goes for sponsorships where you get paid to have your blog endorse products from a certain company.
  
• Sell your own products or service: another way bloggers can profit is by selling their own products or services.
  
  These could be physical items, or digital products such as ebooks, video series, guides courses or membership. The latter option is easier to maintain because there’s no inventory management, packaging, or shipping involved.
  
  Many bloggers also end up offering coaching or mentorship services to share their knowledge in the niche and help others who might wanna follow their steps.

• Ad placement: This is one of the most common ways in which bloggers make money. It basically means that bloggers will display ads on their site in exchange for a fee depending on how many visitors they get.

Read Next: How To Make Money Blogging

10. Update Old Posts

Last but not least, bloggers need to revisit older posts and make sure the information included is still relevant. Updating your already published content about every month or so can help your blog maintain its rank in search results.

Search browsers, mainly Google, prefer showing fresh, new information so the newer content usually gets a nice boost in the ranking.

In other words, more recent blogs sit higher on the results page. Therefore, they get clicked on more.

How to Get Started as a Blogger?

If you’re thinking of starting your own blog, here’s what you need to know to get started:

• First of all, you need to pick a niche to write in and a name that expresses what you have to offer. When choosing a niche, it should be something that you’re interested in and have no issues understanding and researching its topics for a long time. As for the name, it’s best to be original and fun so it really sticks with the readers.

• Once you’ve figured out your blog’s niche and name, you should write a batch of posts to publish on your blog to get it up and running. Be sure to check out the articles on competitor blogs to get better insights on the best ways to address readers and how bloggers integrate SEO into their content.

• Establish a strong presence on social media platforms to help get your blog out there and reach a wider audience. Engaging with your followers and readers, replying to comments, as well as holding giveaways and contests are all great ways to build networks and gain traffic.

Wrap Up

There you have it, a detailed answer to the question “what does a blogger do?” to give you a closer look into what it takes to run a successful blog.

As you can tell by now, becoming a blogger requires a versatile set of skills, from being able to conduct thorough and continuous research to having technical knowledge of how to operate a smooth website.

A blogger also needs to be very creative when it comes to blog ideas and visual design. Not to mention, their minds should also be business-oriented to bring in sales, sponsorships, and partnerships that would eventually lead to profit.

Well, no!

Unless you’re only doing it for fun, blogging should also be a good source of money. In the end, you’re spending a lot of time and effort on your blog, so you should expect to make some money out of it.

Granted, making money out of blogs is now easier than ever, with all of the available hosting services that make your life much easier. Back in the day, ConvertKit was a mere idea, WordPress was in its infancy, and creating a website or a blog used to cost thousands of dollars. That’s not the case now, though.

The variety of blogging platforms available is a two-edged sword. You have multiple options to choose from, but you can easily fall into a trap and subscribe to mediocre service. So even if your blog looks elegant and trendy, you won’t be able to get cash out of it.

To be able to make a profit, you’ll need to explore the best blogging platforms to make money, and that’s what I’m here for. I’ll review the best platforms with their pros and cons, so you can make a decision quickly. But first, let’s see the aspects you need to consider before subscribing.

What to Look for in a Blogging Platform to Make Money?

Your blogging platform of choice should be affordable enough to enable you to make a profit, and it should be easy to use. But that’s not it. There are a lot of aspects to consider if you want to keep running your blog without much hassle.

Here’s a roundup of the essential things to look for in a blogging platform to make money.

1. Ease of Setup

If you don’t have a technical background, you’ll need a blogging platform that’s easy to set up. Some websites only require you to create an account, log in, and start posting immediately. Other services will need some technical skills, such as coding.

In addition, some hosting services require you to install the software on the hosted server. To be fair, that’s not a hard job, but some bloggers would rather do without it.

2. Simple Interface

You may accept a blogging platform with a challenging setup process because you’ll only have to do it once. After all, you won’t need to set it up again after you start posting. However, if you choose a blogging platform with an interface that’s hard to use, you’ll be stuck with it forever.

That’s why you’ll want to check the ease of everyday tasks, such as posting, adding images, changing visual elements, etc. If they’re hard to do or beyond your technical skills, it’ll be a huge hassle to deal with the platform.

Plus, you’ll want to make sure the interface is intuitive and easy enough to figure out. That’s especially essential for beginner bloggers.

3. Customization

The customization options of the blogging platform you choose can make or break the deal. You need to see if you’ll be able to easily change the theme, layout, colors, and fonts of your blog. Plus, if there are specific features you’d like to hide or add according to your preference, you’ll need to check if you can do that.

Each blogging platform offers different customization options. For example, some platforms allow the use of add-ons and plugins for various purposes, while some services don’t. That’s vital to take into consideration when choosing because it’ll affect your ability to make money out of the blog.

4. Control

With most blogging platforms, you’re giving up partial control over your content and posts. Meaning, if the platform changes any of its policies, you may not have control over who sees your posts and engages with them. Likewise, you’ll be giving up control over your content, which not all bloggers will be okay with.

So that’s one more thing to consider. On top of that, you’ll want to see if you have enough control to move all of your content to another blogging platform, granted you need to do so at some point.

5.Third-Party Applications

A lot of blogging platforms allow you to integrate your blog with third-party applications, which helps you make money easily and gather more subscribers. These third-party applications may include connections with video services or social media tools. Some services also include carts if you want to sell something from your blog.

On top of all that, an essential service you may need is an email marketing tool, such as ConvertKit, most famously. When you integrate such a service, you’ll be able to send newsletters to your subscribers and market for your blog via email.

That’s aside from the other integrations that’ll work in your favor for making money.

6. Monetization

If you’re reading this article, this means your goal is already to make money out of your blog. In that case, that’s the first thing you need to consider when choosing your blogging platform.

You’ll want to check if the blogging platform allows you to display affiliate links since that’s the most common way bloggers make money.

You can also check if the platform allows you to sell products—not all services allow you to do that, especially if they’re free. This way, you won’t be able to make money out of your blog.

If you want to make money out of ads, you’ll need to make sure your blogging platform allows that as well.

7. Theme

Although the theme of your blog won’t directly affect your ability to make money out of it, it’s still a vital aspect to consider. The theme needs to be versatile and flexible for changes. It also needs to fit your budget, or else you’ll be paying more than necessary for a relatively unnecessary feature.

8. Optimization Options

If your blog has a perfect theme, layout, and content, but it can’t be optimized for SEO or speed, you’ll be able to do little with it. You want people to visit your blog easily, and you want it to rank at the top of Google search results. For that to happen, you need optimization options for SEO, and your blogging platform of choice will determine that.

The Best Blogging Platforms to Make Money

Now that we covered the features you need to consider before choosing, we can move on to the reviews. Here’s a roundup of the best blogging platforms to make money. Some of them are paid, and some are free. You may choose according to your goals and budget.

1.   WordPress – For Everyone

If you’re a blogger and you haven’t heard of WordPress before, there’s a high chance you’ve been living under a rock for the last five or so years.

WordPress is now the leading hosting platform for blogs and websites, although there are many similarly good options. You can call it good marketing or good luck. In both cases, WordPress is probably the most used blogging platform on this list, powering nearly 35% of the internet’s websites. The fact that it’s free and open-source makes it the most sought-after content management platform on the internet.

WordPress.org allows you to host your own site, which is a huge bonus if you know your way around. Plus, it’s free, which allows you to save money for third-party tools or plugins you want to get.

To create a blog or a website on WordPress, you’ll have to integrate it with your hosting provider. Luckily for you, it’s a pretty easy step. One click, and you’re done. The platform will also change the DNS for you if you get your domain from the hosting provider.

Generally, WordPress is best known for its customization options. It allows you to use custom themes, install plugins, and do all you want on your blog. You’ll also be able to monetize your blog easily.

The platform is an ideal choice if you’re building your blog from the ground up. You’ll be able to completely control its functionality, so WordPress is your go-to if you want to be independent.

Pros

• Pretty easy to set up and use for beginners
• Thousands of free themes are available if you’re on a tight budget
• Ideal for independent users
• Free for tight budgets and easy monetization
• SEO options available

Cons

• Customer support isn’t available

2.   Ghost – For Tight Budgets

If you haven’t heard of it before, Ghost is a free, open-source platform that’s created explicitly for blogging. It works similarly to WordPress, providing you with a domain name and hosting. And, it offers you the option of using a ghost server to host your blog.

The significant difference between Ghost and WordPress is that Ghost is meant only for blogging, so you can’t create a website on it.

When it comes to ease of use, Ghost is one of the best options for beginners. Its setup may require mild technical skills, but other than that, it’s completely user-friendly.

Regarding pricing, Ghost offers plans starting from $29, which is ideal for beginner bloggers. If you’d like an advanced level, you can go for their expensive $100 monthly plan.

Moreover, Ghost allows you customization options like those of WordPress blogs. You’ll be able to upload themes and integrate plugins as much as you want. On top of that, you’ll be able to connect Google Adsense and similar services to your blog.

If you want to make money using affiliate links, Ghost allows you to do that as well.

But the best thing about Ghost is that it offers SEO options, along with built-in social media tools. Typically, those make your mission much easier when marketing for your blog.

Ghost also offers live post reviews, so you’re able to see how your post will turn out while you’re still writing it.

Generally, the open-source platform is an ideal choice for beginner bloggers and those on a tight budget. It may not be the best option for advanced bloggers, though.

Pros

• Easy to use and suitable for beginners
• SEO options available
• The software is entirely free

Cons

• Not the best option for professional bloggers

3.   Kajabi – For Coaches and Creators

Although Kajabi isn’t as commonly known as WordPress and Wix, it’s a pretty versatile blogging platform for making money. It enables you to post articles and sell courses, products, and even memberships. It also allows you to get blog analytics and have static web pages.

Kajabi has a feature called pipelines. When you build them, you’re able to lead the blog visitors to your sold items, whether they’re products or courses. Plus, the platform allows you to create community forums.

Not only that, but if you create your blog on Kajabi, you’ll be able to send out emails to your list of subscribers. And, you can tag your subscribers and enjoy features like those on Aweber and ConvertKit.

If you want to integrate third-party apps to your blog to add interactive buttons or advanced options for visitors, you’ll be easily able to do so through the platform.

Generally, Kajabi has more features than most similar blogging platforms, which is why it’s relatively more expensive than most of them. The plans start at $119 monthly if you pay annually, which is a high priced comparably. However, if you’re a professional who wants to make money out of their blog, the price will seem ideal. It’s just not targeted at beginners.

Kajabi is a powerful tool to start with.

Pros

• Third-party application integrations are available
• Highly versatile with a lot of advanced features
• It allows you to build pipelines

Cons

• The most affordable plan is relatively high-priced.

4.   Joomla – For Complex Blogs

Like Kajabi, Joomla isn’t as well-known as WordPress, but it’s a pretty solid option for bloggers wanting to make money. In fact, it was an equal fee to WordPress until 2010, when the latter started to shoot to the sky with its numbers.

Even now, it’s considered the second most successful CMS around the globe, being the hosting service for nearly 2.5 million websites across the world.

Joomla offers an advanced system for user management. In addition to that, its modules are highly flexible, fitting for all content types. This way, you don’t have to do a lot of research for a blogging platform that suits the topics of your blog.

The free plan also allows you access to different templates and layouts, so you’re not only limited to one theme that’s used by everyone.

If you want to offer multi-languages on your blog, you’ll be able to do it easily on Joomla. The platform provides built-in multilingual support, contrary to WordPress, that requires you to integrate a third-party application to get a translation.

Furthermore, Joomla allows you to run your own ads, so you’re able to make money and gather more people to view your content and subscribe.

All in all, if your goal is to make money out of your blog, Joomla is an easier option to use than WordPress. Its interface is simple enough for most users to understand.

It’s worth noting, though, that it’s more suitable for complex blogs. It requires some skills to add features and plugins, so it may not be ideal for beginners.

Pros

• Free to install and use
• Built-in multilingual support for translation services
• Simple interface with flexible customization options

Cons

• You may face compatibility issues with some plugins.

5.   Squarespace – For Trendy Designs

Squarespace established itself as a leading competitor in the hosting field a long time ago. Now, you constantly see comparisons between Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, and WordPress. Of course, there are multiple other options, but these platforms nearly present the same services, so readers are interested to know each one’s weak points.

Squarespace, in particular, is now powering millions of websites, quickly earning it a place in our top list.

Squarespace’s most significant selling point is its drag and drop system. It’s easy for virtually anyone to use, making it a suitable option for both beginners and professional bloggers. Not only that, but it also allows you to build your blog without any coding whatsoever. Of course, that’s a huge bonus because most bloggers don’t count coding as one of their skills.

Squarespace offers hundreds of customization options. This way, you can have your blog full of trendy designs and interactive buttons to pull users in. Although I can’t say that about most options on this list, it’s easy to make your blog look attractive on Squarespace.

If you want to integrate third-party plugins to make money, you’ll be able to do it easily. Squarespace allows you to add your plugins through Code Injection.

The platform’s cheapest plan costs about $12 monthly, which is ideal for users on a tight budget. The business plan also isn’t as expensive as other platforms, costing about $26 monthly.

All that said, there’s a huge downside in Squarespace, which is the inability to connect to Google AdSense. In other words, if you ever want to run ads, you’ll have to code your way through it. That may not be a problem if you make money through other methods, but it’s worth considering.

Pros

• Many trendy themes and designs are available
• Easy drag and drop system
• Moderately priced compared to competitors

Cons

• No free plan is available.

6.   Wix – For a lot of Free Options

The best thing about Wix is its variety of free options. If you want to create a blog and make money out of it with a tight budget, Wix is your way to go. It provides a huge collection of free themes and layouts, so you don’t need to pay $100+ for a theme. On top of that, it offers multiple free plugins for advanced features.

You can create a blog completely for free on Wix, as long as you have your own hosting and domain registration. I can’t say the same about almost all other options on this list.

With Wix, you also don’t have to worry about SEO. The website will take care of that for you. And, once you have your blog up and running, you’ll be able to write and publish from the frontend directly instead of logging into the admin dashboard. This may not be an essential factor to consider, but it makes your life a little bit easier.

Like Squarespace, Wix has a drag and drop system that’s intuitive and easy for any user to follow.

Luckily, Wix has leverage over Squarespace when it comes to ads. You can connect to Google AdSense easily, but you’ll need to subscribe for a paid plan. That said, you won’t have to pay for anything else.

Pros

• Suitable for free blogs
• It can connect to Google Adsense
• Compatible with a lot of third party applications

Cons

• You’ll have Wix ads on your blog if you choose the free plan.

7.   Blogger – For Beginner Bloggers

Blogger is powered and owned by Google, which is why it’s common and popular among bloggers, but that’s not the only reason. Blogger was the only platform available for blogging in the early 2000s. So, all bloggers in this time probably used it.

Blogger is one of the best options for beginner bloggers wanting to make money. For starters, it’s completely free to use. You’ll have access to hundreds of free templates and themes if you don’t want to pay for a premium service. All you have to do is have a Google account.

The platform allows you to use your own domain or use its subdomain.

Moreover, Blogger allows you to connect to Google AdSense and make money through ads, which is essential for any blogger wanting to make a profit. Not only that, but it also lets you add Google analytics to your blog to monitor your traffic.

If you prefer to make money by selling products or digital items, Blogger offers that service, as well.

Despite all the good things I just mentioned, the best thing about Blogger is that it allows you to convert to any other platform at any time. If you want to move your content across platforms, you’ll be able to do so easily without giving up control over part of it. This is an invaluable feature for some bloggers.

Blogger may start underperforming if your blog gets bigger. If you use a lot of advanced plugins, you may notice some setbacks. However, it’s the closest thing to perfection for beginners because its free plan includes almost everything.

Pros

• The free plan includes everything you’ll need
• Compatible with Google AdSense and Google analytics
• Migration to other platforms available

Cons

• Limited plugins and features

8.   Medium – For Writers With Premium Audiences

Medium isn’t very common among bloggers because it’s not available for everyone. If you want to read articles published on it, you’ll need to have a monthly subscription of $5–$50, depending on the number of articles you intend to read. Despite that, it’s an ideal platform to choose if you’re aiming at premium audiences.

Plus, the paid subscription for readers doesn’t come empty of benefits. The subscribers will receive daily emails with links to their articles of choice, along with monthly newsletters. They’ll also get audio versions of the articles they want to read, which is a huge bonus for a lot of people.

But let’s move on to Medium’s benefits for bloggers.

For one, it’s primarily designed for writing, so bloggers find it easy to use and enjoy its features. Additionally, it has multiple features explicitly for writers, which makes it easier for them to publish and post.

Although Medium requires visitors to pay, it’s free for bloggers, which is yet another reason to use it.

It’s worth noting, though, that the only way to make money through Medium is by writing high-quality content. The conventional ways to win money aren’t available on the platform. That includes Google AdSense, affiliate links, and selling digital products. If you want to win money through any of these, you’ll have to choose another service.

All in all, if writing is your only passion, and you want to make money out of it, it may be a good idea to use Medium. It’ll allow you to focus only on writing without bothering with the other details.

Pros

• No coding is required whatsoever
• Completely free for bloggers to use
• It provides a lot of partnering programs for winning money

Cons

• Limited to premium audiences

9.   Weebly – For Ease of Use

Weebly is a website builder like WordPress and Wix; however, it includes built-in features for creating blogs. Contrary to WordPress, which requires you to download the dedicated software and use other building tools to make a blog.

Weebly has SEO features and analytic tools already pre-installed, so you can use them without opting for third-party integration. In addition, it provides hundreds of themes and plugins for customizing your blog. If you don’t want to pay for a theme, you’ll surely find a suitable one for your blog in the extensive free list.

The only problem with Weebly is that its options get limited when your blog grows. If you want to take your business to the next level, you may find it challenging to do so. It’s still a pretty good option for hobbyists and regular bloggers, though.

The free plan of Weebly is pretty decent, and it’s empty of ads to avoid bothering the bloggers. Plus, it allows you to connect to Google AdSense. The paid plans aren’t too expensive, too—you can get a monthly subscription for as low as $5 if you want to monetize your blog.

Generally, Weebly is one of the easiest blogging platforms to deal with. It may be a suitable option if you don’t have a technical background or coding skills.

Pros

• Easy to use for everyone
• The free plan includes most features you need
• A list of free themes and plugins is available

Cons

• Limited options if you want to take your blog to the next level

5 Ways You Can Make Money From Your Blog

If you’ve already made a decision for the blogging platform you’ll use, it’s time to choose how you’ll make money. With blogs, the ways to make money are endless, depending on the type of your content.

Here’s a roundup of multiple ways you can use your blog to make money.

1. Promote Affiliate Products

Almost all famous bloggers make most of their money through affiliate products. Some people make tens of thousands each month out of affiliate marketing only. If that’s not enough to convince you, I’m not sure what is.

When looking for affiliate products to market for, try to pick products with high prices. A great place to start is web hosting companies—they pay an average of $100 for each signup, which is an impressive rate. But that’s if it goes with your niche, of course.

2. Sell Digital Products

If you don’t want to go into affiliate marketing, or the idea of marketing for other people’s products seems odd to you, you may sell digital products instead. Those products may be eBooks, applications, plugins, or even videos. You can also sell music to people to use in their videos.

If you have enough expertise to create online courses, it’ll be a great opportunity to make some money. You can create the course or the workshop once and keep selling it to gain money.

Of course, before choosing the digital product you’ll sell, you need to consider if it’s relevant to your readers.

Don’t fall into the trap many bloggers fell into before. They think their visitors need a certain product, and when they start selling it, they don’t achieve the desired success. Before doing something like that, make sure to listen to your readers first and know what they need.

3. Sell Memberships

A lot of bloggers opt for selling memberships to make some money out of their blogs. For example, if you have a blog for startup businesses, you can sell memberships through forums. The people who buy the memberships will be able to get custom advice about their businesses.

Likewise, if you have a blog for careers, you can sell your user’s memberships for the job board.

What’s important here is to make sure you’re selling membership for something useful. Plus, it needs to be special and exclusive, which means it can’t be available for people who don’t pay.

4. Use Google AdSense

Google Adsense is one of the easiest ways to make money out of your blog. You’ll only need to add a script to your website, which you obtain from Google. After that, you’ll be able to display ads on it.

Everything a user or a guest clicks on the ad, you’ll get paid. These are called cost-per-click ads, or CPC ads in short.

The cost you get is decided by the advertiser, so you need to choose well.

There’s a different kind of ad called cost-per-thousand-impressions, or CPM in short. If you create those ads, you’ll get paid when your users view the ad rather than click on it. However, you’ll only get paid when you reach a certain number of views.

5. Offer Coaching

Coaching is definitely not for everyone, but if it goes with your niche, why not?

A lot of bloggers have plenty of expertise in their fields. They can use that to their advantage and offer coaching advice for their followers. Even if they have a small audience, they’ll still be able to make some money out of it.

Some bloggers can even treat coaching as a full-time job and dedicate their time to it.

Some people charge $1000 an hour for coaching, so you can definitely make some money out of it. That’s if your audience needs it, of course.

6. Offer Sponsored Posts

If you’ve been blogging for quite some time and you have a strong audience on social media, you can definitely use that to win some money. One way to do this is to offer sponsored posts to brands.

The way it’s done, the brand publishes a post on your blog and pays you in return. To do that, you need to have a strong followers list, and you need to prove you can benefit the brand and get them leads.

If you manage to do so, you can win a lot of money out of sponsored posts.

The Final Verdict: Which Blogging Platform Is the Best to Make Money?

In my opinion, the best blogging platform to make money out of the ones I listed is WordPress, and for all the good reasons. For one, it’s free and open-source, making it a perfect option for tight budgets.

On top of that, it offers an extensive collection of third-party plugins for all needs. Whether you need some free plugins or some premium, paid ones, you’ll find what you’re looking for.

The only downside to WordPress is the lack of customer support. That said, most users know what they’re getting in beforehand. In the end, you’re using a free, open-source platform, so you don’t expect everything to be readily available.

If your goal is monetizing your blog and making money out of it, then using WordPress seems like your best option.

Read Next: Step-by-Step Guide To Starting A Money Making Blog

Luckily, ClickFunnels allows users to test the software without any financial commitments through their 14-day free trial. But what if two weeks isn’t enough? Is there any way to get a ClickFunnels 30-day trial subscription? More importantly, how much does the service cost after the trial?

We’ll answer all that and more in this article, so read on!

What Is ClickFunnels?

Before we delve into the nitty-gritty, let’s briefly discuss what ClickFunnels is.

In a nutshell, ClickFunnels is an all-in-one online software that helps business owners automate their selling process through sales funnels.

According to the website, it “converts visitors into leads and customers” without relying on an overly complicated marketing tool or tech team.

But although it’s known for its high-converting websites and reliable funnels, ClickFunnels is much more than that. This is where the “all-in-one” aspect of the tool comes in.  

One of the biggest reasons why ClickFunnels is so popular is because it gives you almost everything you need to advertise, sell, and deliver your products and services online. With it, you can create a brand, grow your email list, generate leads, set up special memberships, and much more.

Best of all, you don’t have to have any coding or design experience to use it. You don’t even have to worry about hosting; ClickFunnels takes care of that for you.

Alongside easy-to-implement sales funnels, ClickFunnels users will enjoy the following features:

• Drag-and-drop visual editor, with a wide array of themes and templates
• Analytics for sales data track record
• Email and Facebook marketing automation
• Email autoresponder
• Smart shopping cart with integrated upsells
• Highly-targeted messages through email, text, social media, and desktop notifications
• Split testing and conversion tracking

The above-mentioned features are organized in one simple dashboard, so you don’t have to click through multiple links to find one or the other.

Plus, ClickFunnels is quite forgiving with new users. The tool holds your hand through most of the available functions, showing you how and when to use them. Even if you’re a complete beginner with little to no tech know-how, you’ll still be able to navigate the interface without issues.

What Is the ClickFunnels 30-Day Trial?

ClickFunnels’s subscription packages can be quite heavy on the pockets, especially for beginner business owners with little to no clientele.

To remedy this, ClickFunnels urges users to use the tool free of charge for a span of 14 days to test-drive the product.

With ClickFunnels’s free trial, you get to experience almost everything it has to offer—for free—before committing to one of its subscription services.

We know what you’re thinking: only 14 days? What about Clickfunnels 30-day trial, then?

Unfortunately, ClickFunnels no longer offers a 30-day trial to test its services. The company used to have it in the past, but it’s been canceled and can’t be accessed any longer.

With ClickFunnels’s myriad of features, 14 days might not be enough to test the product in its entirety and make a decision. But although ClickFunnels reduced its 30-day trial to 14, you can still use the service for an additional 30-days with the company’s 30-day money-back guarantee.

This essentially “extends” your free trial for another 30 days as long as you cancel the service before the grace period ends. 

Keep in mind that if you don’t cancel the service before the 30-day money-back guarantee period, you’ll be billed for the plan you chose during registration.

The same is said if you don’t cancel your 14-day trial before the 14-days is up. ClickFunnels asks for your card details even when you’re signing up for the 14-day trial.

Is the Clickfunnels 30-Day Trial Still Available?

Unfortunately, ClickFunnels 30-day trial is no longer available.

Due to ClickFunnels’s popularity, there are several dozen websites that promise 30-day or even 60-day trials of ClickFunnels. Don’t be fooled; these websites are merely hoaxes!

Officially, the company offers a 2-week trial to test its services. This may not seem much, but for most people, 14 days is more than enough for them to decide whether their business will benefit from the program or not.

During the 14-day trial, you can get access to every feature ClickFunnels has in its Platinum plan. After the 14-day trial is up, you’ll automatically be charged $297 for the premium plan.

If you’re not too keen on paying this amount, you can instead opt for the company’s basic plan for just $97 per month after the 14-day trial. But remember, the basic plan only gives you limited access to ClickFunnels’s features.

Can You Use the 14-Day Trial Alongside the 30-Day Guarantee?

Yes. ClickFunnels’s terms and conditions don’t require you to use one or the other. Therefore, you have almost 45 days to experiment with the platform’s features, from their webpage editor to their Follow-Up funnels.

If you’re not planning to use the extra 30 days, though, it’s good to cancel your subscription two days before the end of the 2-week trial period.

ClickFunnels automatically charges its users full price after the trial period has ended.

How Much Does ClickFunnels Cost After the Trial?

ClickFunnels offers three different subscription packages: the Basic Package, the Platinum package, and the Two Comma Club package.

The 14-day trial allows you to test the Basic and the Platinum package for free before committing to either plan.

The Two Comma Club package is only available to companies with million-dollar businesses—hence the name, “Two Comma Club,” alluding to their seven-figure profit margin.

Unsurprisingly, the Two Comma Club gives users access to anything and everything ClickFunnels has to offer. However, ClickFunnels mainly created this package as a way to honor and recognize entrepreneurs who’ve reached extraordinary heights with their businesses.

Currently, the club has over 10,000 exclusive members, including Justin Cener, Nico Moreno, and Carolina Millan.

If you already qualify for the Two Comma Club, you’re probably not interested in ClickFunnels’s 14-day trial. But truth be told, the Two Comma Club won’t benefit small businesses because of its frankly outrageous package cost.

Entrepreneurs with seven-figure businesses won’t blink twice at the fee, but beginners will most certainly think twice before joining the club.

So, how much does ClickFunnels cost after the trial? More importantly, what are the features each package has to offer?

Basic Package

If you’re just starting out with online sales funnels, ClickFunnels’s Basic package is a fantastic choice. It isn’t as feature-heavy as the Platinum package, but it has enough to kickstart your business.

The Basic package gives you access to the following:

• 20 sales funnels
• 100 individual pages
• One sub-user
• Up to three Different Domains
• Up to three payment gateways
• Unlimited membership members
• Live video support
• Complimentary onboarding call
• Over 10 training courses with FunnelFlix
• Over 110 share funnel templates to choose from

With that said, the Basic plan doesn’t feature autoresponders and email automation, lead scoring, segmentation, and branded affiliate features. It also doesn’t come with Follow-Up Funnels.

For most businesses, the missing features are quite valuable. Necessary, even. But if you’re a beginner, you might not need the extra features.

Also, you’re better off with the Basic plan if you’re already subscribed to an email marketing tool like MailChimp or Constant Contract.

The base subscription plan costs $97 per month after the 14-day trial.

Platinum Package

The Platinum package is ideal for established businesses, marketing agencies, and influencers. It’s also suitable for individuals who own multiple businesses, websites, and brand names.

This subscription package allows you to connect as many as nine domain names, giving you the chance to control most, if not all, of your businesses in one account. It also lets you connect up to nine different payment gateways.

Furthermore, the Premium package lets you automate email marketing through Follow-Up Funnels. Follow-Up Funnels are proven to increase business revenues and convert leads to customers. They allow you to easily reach out to customers without having to pay for ads or subscribe to a separate service like ConstantContract or MailChimp. 

The Platinum package is also suitable for businesses that need more than 20 funnels. Compared to the Basic Package, the Platinum package offers unlimited funnels. Yes, you heard that right—unlimited! It also gives users unlimited landing pages instead of only 100.

In a nutshell, here are the features that come with the Platinum package:

• Unlimited sales funnels
• Unlimited membership funnels
• Unlimited lead generation and high-ticket funnels
• Unlimited contacts
• Up to three sub-users
• Connect to up to nine different domains
• Up to nine payment gateways
• Over 30 training courses with FunnelFlix
• Over 200 funnel templates to choose from
• In-depth training with expert coaches in real-time

The Platinum subscription plan costs $297 per month after the 14-day trial.

Two Comma Club

The Two Comma Club plan benefits individuals with lots of businesses and brands. It lets you manage up to 27 different domains and payment gateways from a single account. It also offers unlimited funnels, landing pages, and Follow-Up funnels, as well as VIP priority support.

Further, the Two Comma Club lets up to 10 different users control the account, as opposed to the Basic’s one and the Platinum’s three.

The Two Comma Club costs a jaw-dropping $2,497 per month. For how much it costs, the features it offers are underwhelming.

But the Two Comma Club is more about prestige than functionality. As they say, exclusivity sells. When you join the club, you’re entering an upper-class community of top entrepreneurs.

If you want to become a part of the Two Comma Club, head over to ClickFunnels’s Two Comma Club Award application.

From there, you need to send a screenshot that proves you’ve made over $1,000,000 with ClickFunnels. You’ll also need to pay an extra $250 to be considered.

ClickFunnels awards its members with plaques depending on the milestone they’ve reached. You get the 2CC Award if you’ve earned $1 million, the 2CC-X Award if you’ve earned $10 million, and the 2CCC Award if you’ve earned over $25 million.

How Do You Subscribe to ClickFunnels’s Free Trial?

Subscribing to ClickFunnels’s 14-day free trial is fairly straightforward. Simply visit the website and click on the icon that says “Start Free 14-Day Trial Now.” You won’t miss it; it’s one of the first things you’ll see on the front page.

Upon clicking the 14-day trial option, you’ll be redirected to a registration form. From there, you’re asked to fill in your name, email, address, and credit card number.

By default, ClickFunnels puts you on a Platinum 14-day trial. If you’re not interested in the Platinum trial, you’ll have to manually select the Basic plan.

After filling in the form, click on the option that says “Process my Payment and Information.” Once you submit the form, you’re free to use ClickFunnels’s software for 14 days. That’s it! 

Although you can immediately start using the tool after you subscribe to the 14-day trial, the sign-up process doesn’t end there. You can actually get free bonuses and discounts during the trial when you join ClickFunnels’s One Funnel Away Challenge. This just goes to show how much ClickFunnels love spoiling their new customers!

What Is the One Funnel Away Challenge? 

Once you submit your payment details on the free trial page, you’re prompted to join the One Funnel Away challenge at a cost of $100.

Joining isn’t mandatory, so you can skip it if you wish. But if you’re a budding business owner, we highly recommend you to partake in the challenge.

The One Funnel Away Challenge is a 30-day challenge that helps entrepreneurs grow their businesses. Should you accept the challenge, you’ll have to complete the tasks given to you by ClickFunnels’ coaches for 30 days.

Throughout this period, you’ll be coached by Russell Brunson himself, the founder and CEO of ClickFunnels, and several of ClickFunnels’s implementation coaches.

You’ll also receive various materials that’ll give you an idea of how to improve and grow your business. This includes the “30 Days” 550-page digital eBook and 20 digital workbooks, both of which are valued at around $100 if you want to buy them individually.

If you opt to the 30-day One Funnel Away Challenge, you get:

• 30 days of video coaching from Russel Brunson
• 30 days of live coaching with ClickFunnels’s implementation coaches
• 30-day access to the exclusive OFA Facebook group
• Digital workbooks for each mission
• Private “Big Breakthrough” training
• 550-page eBook written by reputable Two Comma Club members
• Unlimited access to 30-day interviews

According to the company, the total value of the above-mentioned training materials costs around $3,000. To get all of that for only $100 seems almost too good to be true, but it’s actually 100% legit.

Joining this challenge might just give you the push you need to build a successful business. For just $100, it’s absolutely worth a try.

Is ClickFunnels Worth the Cost After the Trial?

In today’s ever-changing world of technology, online businesses benefit from strong, lead-generating websites the most. This is why ClickFunnels is so popular; it’s not only a funnel builder, it also gives you the tools required to improve your SEO rating and online visibility.

With that said, ClickFunnels can be quite expensive for small businesses that are just starting out. For $97 per month—and $297 for the Platinum subscription—it’s understandable to be a bit wary. After all, ClickFunnels isn’t the only sales funnel creator that can haul your business off the ground.

This makes users wonder whether ClickFunnels really worth the cost after the 14-day trial period.

Although there are a ton of cheaper alternatives out there, ClickFunnels isn’t “the best” for no reason. Unlike most funnel creators, ClickFunnels features an easy-to-use UX, an effective funnel creator, an impressive gallery of templates, and incredibly fast web hosting. It also offers top-tier training guides and customer support.

So, if you’re confident in your business and have the capital for it, ClickFunnels will not only save you tons of effort but also time and money. It gives you all the resources you need to build and improve your business, which is an invaluable aspect of the support spectrum.

Can You Make Money During ClickFunnels’s Free Trial?

Yes, but it mainly depends on how you use the service. You can certainly make a few dollars during the free trial, but unless you’re an already established firm, you probably won’t earn all too much during this period.

Even with ClickFunnels, most businesses take months and even years to establish a strong online presence. The success of your business depends entirely on how many people visit your website and how professional your content, branding, and customer management are. So, don’t expect your website stats to skyrocket as soon as you sign up for a ClickFunnels plan.

With that said, here are some ways to make money with ClickFunnels during the trial period:

Digital Products

If your business is purely digital, then making money through ClickFunnels can be a lot easier than you could possibly imagine. This is because the sales funnels it creates can be almost entirely automated.

A consumer who visits your website can get a selection of targeted follow-up emails, get discount codes, see an order form, place an order and receive it, and then get a post-sale email, all through ClickFunnels.

That means that you’ll have practically automated your entire cycle. That way, you can just concentrate on getting more and more people to visit your website. This is, in short, a surefire recipe for success. You can focus your resources on doing what you do best—running the business—while ClickFunnels does all the ‘boring work’ in the background.

Physical Products

ClickFunnels has a whole range of templates built for physical products, from weight loss products to books and phone accessories. Add to that the numerous integrations they support for shipping services and even calculating shipping fees, and you get a headache-free selling cycle.

There are also some super useful features and integrations that help you manage the products you sell, such as tracking shipments, setting inventory limits, adding products with variations like size or color, and many more.

Affiliate Marketing

As we mentioned earlier, one of the biggest advantages of ClickFunnels is its affiliate marketing system. Using ClickFunnels to recruit promoters for your products can multiply your sales and increase your profit with a fraction of the resources you’d normally use.

Promoting your affiliate program can be easy if it runs smoothly and rewards better performance. There is even a Facebook group for ClickFunnels affiliates that connects affiliates and entrepreneurs to share tips, ideas, and best practices.

Exclusive Content

One of the great features of ClickFunnels is the ability to create a members-only section. This section allows consumers to pay a monthly subscription to access exclusive content.

The perks that you can offer your members are quite flexible. From exclusive content, eBooks, PDFs, and videos to gift cards, lessons, or whatever your members request.

Having a monthly subscription can bring you great profit, especially if you don’t have to constantly pay to create new content for this section. For this, ClickFunnels has a feature to “drip content,” or send out content for each new member at a schedule.

Freelancing and/or Consulting  

One of the main selling points for ClickFunnels is its ease of use. As a freelancer, you probably don’t have time to learn to code. You may not even have the time to learn SEO optimization and how Google algorithms work. 

In this case, Clickfunnels is perfect for you. You get access to pre-generated templates to use for your website to drive traffic and convert clicks into sales.

There’s a range of templates to choose from, each tailored to different aspects of the business. You can select the best combination of platforms to suit your specific business model.

With the guaranteed conversion rates offered by ClickFunnels, it’s a great way to outsource all the time-consuming tasks of your business and concentrate on what you’re good at providing your service to your users.

Online Events

ClickFunnels also has templates that are made specifically for selling webinars, online events, and other virtual events. These can be anything from one-on-one coaching sessions to full-on video conferences.

An incredibly useful tool is the ability to automate webinars. You can schedule a video webinar that starts every hour, day, or week. It will start with the users that signed up for the webinar and repeat at the frequency of your choosing.

This means that you can be constantly making money without spending an extra dime on new content. As long as your webinars sell and provide value for your users, all you’ll need to do is answer your customers’ questions and update some content.

How to Get the Most Out of ClickFunnels’s Free Trial

There’s a whole lot you can do while on ClickFunnels’s free trial. 14 days might not be enough to build a million-dollar empire, but it’ll give you the basic knowledge to jump-start your business.

If you didn’t get your fill within the 14 days, you get another 30 days for “free” through ClickFunnels’s 30-day money-back guarantee. Just make sure to cancel the service before 30 days are up if you aren’t planning to use the tool any further than that. 

Create an Affiliate Program

One of ClickFunnels’s most notable features is their affiliate system, Backpack. Among many other features, you can set up an extensive affiliate program with different affiliate types like “friends and family” or “super affiliate,” and pay pre-calculated commissions through PayPal.

Affiliate programs are great for an established business that wants to grow its reach. However, keep in mind that you need to find promoters to sign up for the affiliate program. If your business doesn’t have an audience already, it might be more of a burden than an advantage.

Utilize the Follow-Up Funnel Feature

Whether you want to reach visitors that opted in for your mailing list or check in with a customer who just bought your product, the Follow-Up Funnel is the tool for you.

Just like the affiliate program, it can take some time and tinkering to set up. But once it’s up and running, it can fully automate and transform your business.

According to IRC Sales Solutions, only about 2% of sales are finalized during the first point of contact. Trust, brand reputation, and business relations are big factors of these sales.

This is why Follow-Up is so valuable, as it can be used to contact customers who didn’t stay on your website for long, customers who almost made a purchase but stopped somewhere in the process and customers who already made a payment.

Unfortunately, Funnel-Up is only available in the Platinum package. If you’re planning to use ClickFunnels long-term, the Platinum package is worth the investment if only for its Follow-Up funnel.

Experiment With ClickFunnels’s Actionetics

ClickFunnels’s automation platform is called Actionetics. This fantastic tool takes website automation to a whole new level. It allows you to import your contacts into the website, create new tags to hyper-segment your email list, and, most importantly, set up your first action funnel.

ClickFunnels’s Actionetics gives you the chance to be as technical as you’d like with your email list. With this feature, you can create custom groups and program them with individual action triggers.

Furthermore, you can build your first autoresponder with the tool. Autoresponders are a brilliant way for business owners to connect to their clients when they perform certain actions on your site. It can be as simple or as complex as you want, from a simple order confirmation to a more thorough security check.

Actionetics might seem a bit complicated for a beginner, but ClickFunnels actually makes it extremely easy to use and manage. You can build a fully functioning system in less than a day, making it one of the more important “test runs” with the free trial.

Join the FunnelFlix Program

The FunnelFlix Program is a bit of a doozy. By itself, it costs thousands of dollars. The basic package costs around $2,000, the premium package costs $3,000, and the ultra-platinum package costs $6,000.

But if you get the 14-day trial, you get access to the FunnelFlix Program for free. That’s an insane value!

If you subscribe to the Basic 14-day trial, you get over 13 training courses with FunnelFlix to help you with funnel building, personal development, copywriting, sales, traffic, and so much more. You also get to partake in the 5-day lead challenge.

Conversely, the Platinum 14-day trial gives you access to over 33 training courses with FunnelFlix. It’ll also give you a chance to participate in its 21-day challenges and virtual hackathons to further improve your business know-how.

The hackathons are especially vital for beginners, as expert coaches will show you how to build funnels in real-time, from start to finish.

The FunnelFlix package comes with over 10 well-known titles, including Funnel Builder Secrets, High Ticket Secrets, Funnel U, and the Tony Robbins Private Collection. You also get the following perks:

• 6 months enterprise account to ClickFunnels
• Funnel Hacks Masterclass
• Unlimited funnels bonus
• 12 months access to funnel scripts
• Funnel Builder Secrets training
• Traffic Secrets membership

It’s worth noting that these perks are available in the Basic package (worth $2,000). You can access all that and more through the 14-day free trial.

Once your trial ends, you can get an additional 30-day trial (through the 30-day money-back guarantee) by subscribing through the FunnelFlix Program directly. It’s completely risk-free, so why not take advantage?

Conclusion

For serious entrepreneurs, ClickFunnels can be a mind-blowingly useful tool. It does a great job of easing the stress of dealing with multiple tools, platforms, and employees to achieve the same results.

Take your time when assessing how useful ClickFunnels can be for your business, and how feasible it is to pay the monthly costs to create your sales funnels. After all, you have a 14-day free trial and 30-day money-back guarantee to take advantage of. Good luck!

While many newbies get overwhelmed at the mention of the words “sales funnel”, the truth is that using an Affiliate Marketing funnel is essential to qualify your potential customers, increase your conversions and build a successful long term business.

After reading this article, you will know exactly how to create your own high converting affiliate funnel, why all successful affiliate use one and how to optimize it and apply it to your business.

Let’s get started!

What is an affiliate marketing funnel and why you need one?

When I was first learning about affiliate marketing, the most common explanation I’d hear was that affiliate marketers promoted products online and made commissions when people clicked their links and bought the products.

And while that is correct, it doesn’t quite explain why you need a sales funnels and where exactly does it fit inside this model.

So let’s take a closer look at the affiliate marketing process to understand why a funnel is necessary.

Direct Linking vs. Using a Sales Funnel

When you join an affiliate program in order to promote their products, you receive your own affiliate link. This link contains your affiliate ID so when you use it to direct people to the affiliate offer, they know which commission should be attributed to you.

Technically, you could place this link anywhere (as long as it is allowed by the affiliate program) so when people click on it, they go to the merchant’s site and if they buy something, you get a commission.

Simple right? Why would you want to complicate things…

Well, the reality is that the majority of people won’t buy the product after clicking your link. Actually, it takes an average of 8 touches to get a conversion with a new customer.

This is why using a sales funnel for affiliate marketing is essential.

When you use a simple sales funnel, you collect your potential client’s email before directing them to the affiliate offer. Some of them might buy the first time and some of them won’t. But now you have a way to follow up with them via email and get another percentage of them to buy.

Not to mention that you are building your email list at the same time and can now email them about other related offers in your niche for free and forever.

Benefits of Using A Sales Funnel For Affiliate Marketing

1. More conversions = More money

The main benefit of using a an affiliate marketing funnel to promote your offers is to increase conversions.

As I mentioned before, most people won’t buy the products you are promoting the first time they click on your link so if you are not following up with them you are missing conversions that are low-hanging fruit and basically leaving money on the table.

Now, most affiliate programs have a cookie duration time of around 30 days, which means that you would still get attributed a commission for a sale that was made in that time frame.

However, if the client decides to come back to the product after a few days, they will probably do a quick search on Google and end up clicking on someone else’s affiliate link so you lose the commission.

On the other side, if you use a sales funnel, they will receive your follow-up emails so they are a. more likely to make a purchase, and b. when they do, they will probably go through the link on your email campaign so you will still get that commission.

2. Build a lifetime money-making asset

The phrase “the money is on the list” might be a bit of a marketing cliché but not gratuitously. Any business owner or marketer knows that an email list is one of the most important assets to long-term success.

As an affiliate, you might choose to promote your offers via social media, a blog, or using paid ads but most of those platforms can distemper or shut down your account overnight making you lose your audience and income source which is why you don’t want to rely solely on them.

On the other hand, your email list is 100% yours and no one can take it away from you. Even in the weird case that an email company closes your account, you can always move your subscriber to another one and continue with your business.

And is that is not incentive enough, a popular study by DMA found that for every dollar you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42 which is more than you will get on any other platform.

3. You can promote other offers for free

While the short-term goal of using an affiliate marketing funnel is being able to follow up with potential clients and increase your conversions, it also allows you to promote other related to the people who opted into your email list.

This means that you can create a months-long or even years-long email sequence and promote other affiliate offers to your list on autopilot.

Of course, you want to make sure to also provide value to your subscribers and build a relationship with them so they don’t end up leaving your list. But, as long as you keep your email list happy, they will continue to buy the products you recommend.

Plus, the success rate of selling to a previous customer is 60-70%, versus that of selling to a new customer which is 5-20%. Basically, it’ll be easier and more profitable to promote other affiliate offers to your email list than it’ll be to promote them to a new audience.

4. You Build Your Personal Brand

Using a sales funnel to promote your affiliate marketing offers, is a great opportunity to build your personal brand and grow your authority in your niche.

Nowadays. people prefer following the recommendations of someone they know and trust so it is key to grow a relationship with your audience.

When you use a sales funnel, you use what is known as a “bridge page” (more on this later) which is where you have the opportunity to quickly present yourself and endorse the affiliate offer you are promoting. This way, when you email those who opted into your list, they will know who you are.

“But what if I don’t want to build a personal brand?”

If you were thinking that, do not worry, not everyone wants to build a personal brand and you don’t need to show yourself or do in order to use a sales or be successful but depending on your niche it can very beneficial to your business.

You can use paid ads with no issues

One of the methods affiliates use to bring traffic to their offers is paid advertisiment on platforms like Google, Facebook. Tiktok, etc. But most of these platforms are not very fond of affiliate marketers so they will often ban accounts that use affiliate links as the destination URL for their ads.

But when you use an affiliate marketing funnel, you don’t need to worry about this happening to your ad account since you will be sending all your traffic to your opt-in page instead of your affiliate link.

As an affiliate, your traffic source is the core of your busines and this allows you to diversify and scale your earnings with a lot more ease.

How does an affiliate marketing funnel look like?

Know that you are aware of some of the main benefits of using a sales funnel for affiliate marketing, let’s take a look at what does it actually means.

In the image above you can see an example of how an affiliate marketing funnel works and what parts it is composed of. (I will explain how to create one with more detail in the next section)

At the beginning, we have the traffic source that can be anything and as many, as you choose (eg. social media, a blog, Youtube, ads, etc.) and next we have the first step of the sales funnel which is an opti-n page that has the goal of capturing people’s email addresses and add them to your email automation.

Following, we have what’s known as a bridge page which has the goal of both pre-selling the offer to the visitor, introducing yourself and start building a relationship with your subscribers. Some affiliates skip this bridge page and simply go from the opt-in page to the merchant’s website but it helps conversions and improves your business long term.

From there, we direct visitors to the merchant’s website through the affiliate link where they might or not buy the product.

And finally, we have a 5-day email campaign that is sent automatically to those who opted-in and has the goal to convert more of them into buyers and, of course, make you more commissions.

How To Create An Affiliate Marketing Funnel

Now that you understand how an affiliate marketing funnel works, it’s time to learn how to create your first high-converting sales funnels for your affiliate offers.

Let’s get started!

1. Choose your affiliate offers

Before you start building your sales funnel, you want to make sure that you have chosen the right affiliate offer to promote. No matter how amazing your funnels are, if you have a bad product, it won’t perform well and it won’t be worthy of your time and effort.

If you have already decided on your affiliate offer, feel free to skip to the next point. Otherwise, here are some key factors to consider:

Commissions

Affiliate commissions vary a lot from program to program and can be anything from 3% to 50%+. There are also programs that pay recurring commissions every month or those that pay you based on leads instead of sales —known as CPA (cost peraction) programs.

Naturally, you are doing this to make money so you want to choose an affiliate program that offers a good commission rate. Recurring commission are also a great alternative to high ticket programs since your lifetime average value of your customers can be similar or higher.

I would suggest staying away from programs like Amazon, Target, and other retailers which pay around 3%-8% so you need a lot of sales to make a significant income.

Instead, go for high-ticket or recurring affiliate products that pay at least a 20% commission rate or have an EPC of $50 minimum. Typically digital products like software, apps, memberships, courses, etc. tend to pay higher commissions since they only invest in their product once and they can then sell it forever.

Reputation

When you promote or recommend an affiliate offer, you are putting your name and reputation behind it so you want to make sure it is a product you can trust and that you are happy to associate yourself with.

If the brand is super popular (e.g. Apple, Nike, Chase), this is obviously not an issue and you can promote it with no concerns. Otherwise, make sure to do some research about it, and read the reviews and if possible, buy the product and try it out yourself.

Ultimately, you don’t want to promote anything you would not buy and use so keep that as the bar for the affiliate products you promote.

Merchant’s Website

The sales page or website of your affiliate offer is as important as the product itself. While you are going to take people through your sales funnel, the merchant’s page is the last step so you want to make sure that it is well designed and optimized for conversions.

Most companies have entire teams taking care of this but it is always worth it to check that the page looks professional, loads fast, has clear buttons to shop above the fold, and takes both credit card and Paypal.

1. Create your Opt-in Page

Your Opt-In Page is the first step of your affiliate marketing funnel and where you will direct all your traffic towards.

The main goal of an opt-in page is to capture visitors’ emails by offering something free in return (also known as a lead magnet).

Naturally, the lead magnet or freebie must be related to the offer so it makes sense to present the affiliate product to those who opted-in to receive it.

Here is what you need to consider when creating your opt-in page:

a. Choose your lead magnet

As I mentioned before, your lead magnet is a free item that you will offer to your visitors in order to capture their emails. And it will also help you to reach the right audience.

For example, if you are promoting a weight loss supplement, you could offer a 7-day weight loss plan as a lead magnet since those who are interested in that freebie are also very likely to be interested in the weight loss supplement.

A freebie doesn’t need to be anything too complicated or that takes you weeks to create but it does need to have a high perceived value and solve a problem for your target audience.

In the example for the weight loss supplement, you can imagine that people who are trying to lose weight are also wondering what they should eat to get results. That’s why something like a meal plan, recipes, or weight loss hacks are freebies that they would be interested in.

Some other popular lead magnets you can consider are templates, worksheets, discounts, free consultations, pdf guides, ebooks, video series, etc.

While your lead magnet is important, you won’t know how well it works until you test it so try to not overthink it. You can always optimize it later once you get some data so it is best to put your funnel into action and see how it performs, especially if this is your first time promoting a certain product and still don’t know if it will convert well.

b. Use an attractive headline and Call To Action (CTA)

Once you have chosen your lead magnet, the next important step is to communicate it in an attractive way so your visitors understand the benefit they can get from it.

When visitors come to your opt-in page, you only have a few seconds before they decide if they stay or if they simply close the page so it is key to use a clear and concise headline that captures their attention and motivates them to give you their email.

Below are some proven formulas to create high converting headlines are:

• How to Achieve [Result] in [Timeframe] Without [Thing You Hate Doing]
• [Number] Quick Tips to Getting Easy [Result]
• Discover How You To [Desired Outcome] in [Timeframe]
• [Number] Beginner Strategies to [Desired Outcome]

You can also check out this article for 100+ headline templates you can use on your opt-in page.

c. Be consistent with the merchant’s website

Something key to consider when creating your opt-in page (and the rest of your affiliate marketing funnel) is to be consistent with the design and message of the affiliate company you are promoting.

Your visitors should feel like all the pages are related and be able to navigate seamlessly throughout all the sales funnel without any noticeable differences.

Using a message or design that is not consistent with the merchant’s website might make them think there is something sketchy about the offer or that they have landed on the wrong page.

In the image below you can see an example I created for an affiliate offer. The last one is the merchant’s landing page so I used the same colors and types of images to create the opt-in and bridge page and achieve consistency across the whole funnel.

d. Use a sales funnel builder

If you are wondering how would you even go about building all of this without any coding or design experience, do not worry.

Nowadays there are dozens of drag-and-drop funnel builders that make the whole process completely easy and intuitive.

Here is a list of my top best alternatives for beginners if you want to check it out. I personally use and recommend Clickfunnels to my readers since I have found it to be the easiest one to use.

It has premade funnel templates that you can simply import and customize to match the colors and branding of your affiliate offer.

It also offers an email autoresponder so you don’t need to go through the trouble of integrating a separate software. Click here to get a free trial.

2. Create your bridge page

The next step in your affiliate marketing funnel is the bridge page, which has the purpose of connecting your opt-in page with the merchant’s website.

The main goals of your bridge page are to introduce the affiliate product to your visitors and “pre-sell” it with the hopes of increasing the conversions.

But it is also an opportunity to briefly introduce build yourself to your audience and start building your own personal brand and authority. This way, you can start creating trust with your subscribers and they are more likely to remember you and read your emails.

So, what should you include on your affiliate bridge page?

• Thank you message: Thank people for opting-in and let them know that the free item that you promised is on the way to their inbox. You can also ask them to check their spam folder and whitelist your email address so they have more chances of noticing your next emails.

• Headline: Use an attention-grabbing title that highlights the benefits you are about to present and increase the chances of them not closinf the tab.

• Introduce yourself and the offer: This is the main element of the bridge page where you will introduce yourself and your credentials to start building your authority and give more weight to your recommendations.
  
  Then introduce the affiliate product and recommend it from your own personal experience to increase its social proof. This is best done through a short video but some affiliates use just text and pictures, below you can find some examples.

• Call to Action Button: Finally, include a clear and direct CTA button and direct it to your affiliate link. This way when people click on it, they will go to the merchant’s website and you will be credited for their purchases.

Tip: Make sure to keep the message and branding consistent throughout all your funnel so visitors never feel confused or wonder if they have landed on the wrong page.

3. Merchant’s website (Affiliate Offer)

The next step in your affiliate marketing funnel is the merchant’s website, which is where your audience will go if they click the link on the previous bridge page.

It is estimated that around 1%-2% of visitors make a purchase when visiting a website for the first time so you can expect to get 1-2 sales for every 100 clicks.

But don’t worry, for the majority of them who didn’t buy the affiliate product, you have a chance to follow up via email which is where the next step comes…

4. Create your email campaign

Since only a small percentage of visitors will buy the product when first visiting the page, the goal of your email campaign is to convert more of them into buyers.

One of the most effective email campaigns is the SOAP Opera sequence, create by Russel Brunson. This series of five emails that you can send five days in a row that focus on building a relationship with your new prospect, creating trust as well as an interest in your brand and/or product

As the name suggests, the “soap opera sequence” involves creating a story that relies on open-ended, high drama “episodes” that catch your readers’ attention and make them want to find out more (aka, open your next emails). 

Here is a breakdown of the five emails in the sequence:

Email 0: Lead Magnet

Before starting with your SOAP Opera sequence, your first email should be to send the lead magnet or freebie that you offered on your opt-in page. You can also let your subscribers know that you will be sending them some important information in the coming days so they know what to expect.

Email 1: Set the Stage

The first email in the sequence is the welcome email. This is your first opportunity to introduce yourself and create a connection with your subscribers. You want to create some mystery so they feel compelled to learn more. Here is an example of how to do it:

“I’ve been in the fitness industry for nearly a decade but only two years ago I discovered a little-known scientific fact that change it all for me. I’m getting results I never thought possible and doing it almost effortlessly. Do you want to know what this fact is? Watch out for my next email and I’ll share my secret with you.”

Email 2: High Drama

At this point, your subscribers are wondering what is the fact that has given you so great results. They are already interested so you can share more information to keep them hooked and start the selling process.

You can increase the drama by sharing a low point in the story. In the case of the fitness example, it could be an injury that leads to getting out of shape and needing a highly efficient training method.

As you promised, share the “secret” and present the affiliate offer:

“Before I go, it’s time to share the fact I discovered with you. Take a look at this website and see the results people are getting with it”

Email 3: The Epiphany

By now, your readers are invested in the story, have been introduced to the offer. But most importantly, they feel a connection with you and want to find out how you overcame the difficulties.

So now is where you use the Epiphany email to tell them:

“What I discovered was that I need a training method that I could do anywhere…”

Naturally, this epiphany needs to be related to a benefit of the product you are promoting so they can begin seeing the value they can get from it.

Email 4: The Hidden Benefits

At this point, your subscribers already know the product you are promoting and its potential value but this is where you help them understand and imagine how it can actually work from them and improve their lives.

Imagine yourself using the product and share all the ways it can benefit them. Make them realize how much they actually need it.

Make sure to add your affiliate link and a call to action inviting them to purchase.

Email 5: The Call to Action

This is the last email of your SOAP opera sequence. Your subcirbers are already familiar with you and the affiliate offer.

Here you can add some sense of urgency to invite them to make a purchase soo. See this example:

“I don’t know how long this offer will be available but if you don’t want to miss out on this opportunity click here now”

Note: After this email sequence, you can (and should) continue to email your list to continue to build trust with them and promote other related offers.

4.1 Sell 24/7 on autopilot with email automation

The best part of using a sales funnels for your affiliate offers is that you can create email sequence that does the selling for you on autopilot while you focus on other tasks, sleep or go on vacation.

You can do this with an email autoresponder like to use ActiveCampaign which connects to your opt-in page so your subscribers are automatically added to your list. This way, every time a person that opts-in to receive your freebie, they will receive all the emails in that automation.

5. Send traffic to your affiliate marketing funnel

Once your affiliate marketing funnel is set up, it is time to “feed” it with some traffic so it can start converting visitors into buyers.

The main benefit of using a sales funnel for your affiliate marketing offers is that the sales process is automated and you can focus 100% on getting visitors and let the funnel do its job.

There are many platforms and methods that you can use to attract visitors but overall, they can be split in two main categories: organic and paid traffic. Let’s explore them a

a. Organic traffic

Also known as free traffic, the term “organic traffic” refers to the visitors that land on your website (in this case, your opt-in page) as a result of unpaid (“organic”) strategies. In other words, organic traffic is the opposite of paid traffic, which happens when you use paid ads.

Here are some of the platforms you can use to drive organic traffic to your affiliate marketing funnel:

• Social Media: you can use platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, Snapchat, etc. to create content that attracts your potential audience and direct them to visit your opt-in page.
  
  This is also known as content marketing and nowadays it is one of the fastest ways to get some significant free traffic.
  
  On the other hand, content on social media platforms has a short lifespan so you need to post continuosly to keep sending traffic to your funnel.

• Search Engine Optimization: Also known as SEO, this method involves creating quality and relevant content on blogs, websites and Youtbe and optimize it with relevant keywords so it can appear on search results.
  
  Search engines like Google, Youtbe and Pinterest have a high buying intent since people are actively looking for an answer or solution so if you manage to rank your content on top results, it can give you passive commissions for years.
  
  While SEO takes some time until you start getting traction, once you do, it becomes more passive than social media.

b. Paid Traffic

The other alternative for bringing visitors to your affiliate marketing funnel is using paid traffic. This means traffic that results from visitors clicking on a link in an ad that you paid for.

Almost any online platform offers the possibility of buying paid ads so you have lots of opportunities to reach your target audience. Here are some of the most popular:

• Search Engines: Youtube, Pinterest, Google
• Social Media: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapachat
• Native Ads: Apps, Mobile, News Publishers

Like with organic traffic, each one of these platforms has its own learning curve and it is best to focus on one at the time until you have mastered it before moving to the next one.

Additionally, if you are a beginner, I recommend starting with organic traffic so you can get some visitors into your funnel and get an idea of your conversion rate and how much you can pay per click to stay profitable before spending money on ads.

6. Optimize and scale

Another advantage of using an affiliate marketing funnel is that once you start sending some traffic and getting some data, you can see inside your stats exactly how each one of the steps is performing.

This will allow you to identify where you can make improvements and easily increase your conversions and profits.

Using a software like Clickfunnels, allows you to create A/B tests with one click and test different variations of your pages to see which ones give you a better conversion rate.

Some elements you can split test are:

• Copy (text) starting with your headlines, buttons, calls to action, etc.
• Colors of your text, buttons, background, etc.
• Placement of your images.
• DIfferent images
• Using / not using a video sales letter.
• Adding a social proof plug in.
• Adding a live chat option
• Adding / switching the testiomanials,
• etc.

By optimizing your sales funnel, you will be able to continuously make more money with the same amount of visitors.

In a similar way, you can analyze the optimize the different elements of your email sequence to improve its conversion. In this case, you can split test out different subject lines, images, calls to action in order to improve open rates and click through rates.

This might seem like a tedious step but these tweaks have the power to duplicate or triplicate your income without much effort so you don’t want to skip it.

Affiliate Marketing Funnel FAQ

How do I create a funnel for affiliate marketing?

Summing up what I have detailed in the article above here are the steps you need to follow to create your own affiliate marketing sales funnel:

1. Choose your affiliate offers making sure they are high quality products that pay good commissions.
2. Create a “freebie” or lead magnet related to your affiliate so you can attract potential buyers and build trust with them by giving them something valuable that helps their problems.
3. Create an opt-in page where you offer your lead madnet and capture people’s emails. This way you can then follow up with them and build a long term profitable email list.
4. Create a bridge page where you introduce yourself and present the affiliate offer. Add a button with an attractive Call To Action and direct people to the merchant’s website through your affiliate link.
5. Create an 5-day email sequence to follow up with your now subscribers and turn more of them into buyers.
6. Analyze your funnel data and do A/B testing to optimize opt-in rates, purchase rates and email rates.
7. Boom you now have a high converting affiliate funnel!

If you rather have someone guide you step by step while you build your affiliate funnel and learn other high-income skills, make sure to check out this beginners 15-day challenge

What is the best funnel for affiliate marketing?

My favorite funnel builder and the one I recommend to my students is Clickfunnels. It is really intuitive and beginner-friendly so anyone can create funnels from scratch without any design or coding experience.

Also, Russell Brunson, the founder of ClickFunnels, was one of the first people to create a sales funnel builder for online businesses and you get access to tons of education, tutorials, and templates. Not to mention you can win a 2 comma club award and be a part of a great community.

Can you use ClickFunnels for affiliate marketing?

Yes, ClickFunnels is one of the most popular funnel builders used by affiliates to make money online. The platform offers high-converting templates and features that make it easier to track and optimize your conversions like detailed stats and one-click-split-testing. It also offers email automation so you don’t have to go through the trouble of integrating a separate software.

Additionally, Clickfunnels also has a great affiliate program that you can promote to anyone with a business or wanting to generate an online income. One of the best parts of their affiliate program is that they pay up to 40% monthly recurring commissions for life to their affiliates. You can learn more about making money as an affiliate in my Clickfunnels Affiliate Program Review.

Takeaway

Using a sales funnels for affiliate marketing will not only allow you to build a successful and profitable long term business but you will also help you build your authority and create a connection with your subscribers that will protect your business against any setback.

While the idea of creating a sales funnels can sound intimidating for beginners, there are now tools and software that do most of the work for you and that anyone can use without any design or coding experience.

So, if you are serious about your affiliate marketing business, setting up your sales funnel is one step you can’t skip!

That’s why I’ve decided to do a thorough comparison of Thinkific vs Kajabi, two of the more popular online course platforms so you can have an in-depth look into the differences between these two platforms, their pros and cons, their plans, pricing, and so on.

Both of these platforms are great in their own way, and will allow you to create, market, and sell online courses and digital products to your audiences. However, while they are used for similar purposes, they do differ from one another in a few major ways.

Therefore, in order to make the right decision for your online business, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with all of the features, tools, and benefits that they offer and that’s what we’re here to help you with!

Before we begin, if you’re not quite familiar with these two platforms, here’s a quick overview of each of them.

Thinkific Vs Kajabi: What do they do?

Thinkific and Kajabi are both cloud-based platforms where you can create, market, and sell courses and membership sites.

Both platforms are designed to help you deliver online courses and digital products to your students, build your brand, build your website, grow your business, and everything else in between, without having to rely on any tech knowledge.

In comparison to other popular online course platforms like Udemy and Skillshare, Thinkific and Kajabi let you retain complete control over your courses. You can set your own course policies surrounding refunds, pricing, managing student data, and everything else.

Although there are a lot of similarities between these two platforms, there are some major differences that we’ll discuss in depth below, so you can figure out which platform works best for your needs.

While there are many differences between these two platforms, some matter more than others, so we’ll start with those ones and finish off with some of the ones that you may have a preference for, but won’t be a deal-breaker in deciding which platform to go with.

Pro and Cons of Thinkific and Kajabi

To help you make the right choice for your business, let’s take a look at the main benefits and features of these platforms, category by category, starting with their plans and pricing.

But first, a quick overview of their main pros and cons.

Thinkific Pros and Cons

Pros

• Free plan available
• Less expensive (paid plans start at $39/month)
• Easy to use builder, very intuitive
• Unlimited courses on all paid plans
• Better quiz answering options
• Live or interactive classroom experience
• Comprehensive training tools and guides
• The ability to sell courses in bulk
• Course-completion certificates
• Can sell your courses on Shopify

Cons

• Limited marketing options
• No live chat support for their free plan – only email support
• No 24/7 support
• Need integrations to automate your email marketing
• No mobile app

Kajabi Pros and Cons

Pros

• All-in-one business platform with an array of marketing and selling tools
• Advanced email marketing and automation features
• 24/7 customer support
• Live chat support
• An Android/iOS app available
• Kajabi University with resources on everything you need for your digital business

Cons

• No free plan available, 14-day free trial only
• A bit on the expensive side
• On Kajabi’s cheapest plan ($119/month) you can only sell 3 courses/digital products
• Third-party payment gateway integration required to sell in Shopify stores

Now that we’ve covered the main pros and cons of both platforms, let’s get into a more detailed comparison of their plans, features, and everything else.

Thinkific vs Kajabi: Main Features

Let’s take a look at the main features offered by these platforms and how they compare.

Course Creation

Both platforms offer all the standard course creation features including:

• Built-in Content Creation Tools
• Full Video & Content Hosting
• Coupons
• Course Bundles
• Affiliate Management Tools
• Downloadable Content
• Retain Ownership Over Your Content
• Import Existing Content
• Launch Membership Sites and more

Both Thinkific and Kajabi have intuitive course builders, that are easy to use and don’t require any technical knowledge. Thinkific offers a range of course template options you can use, and you also have the option of customizing your courses even further using HTML and CSS if you’re up for it.

With Kajabi, the whole process of creating courses is as fun and as enjoyable as Thinkific, although the main drawback users sometimes comment on is the fact that things are organized and labeled a little bit differently in Kajabi, making the platform a bit less intuitive than Thinkific.

So, while these features in Kajabi are more customizable, they also come with a steeper learning curve, which is why those who are looking for an easier and faster way to create their online courses might prefer going with Thinkific.

However, if you value personalizing your courses and don’t mind the fact that their course-building process isn’t as user-friendly as Thinkific’s is, then Kajabi will be a good choice for you.

Thinkific’s course builder is a bit limited in terms of visual design especially in comparison with Kajabi’s course builder which allows you to easily choose themes that differentiate how elements are visually organized on the screen, you can easily control the placement of images, text, and other elements, edit image-sizes and more.

While it doesn’t offer as much versatility in course creation as Kajabi does, with Thinkific you have more features that can be used for creating lessons, such as presentations and student feedback.

Building and Designing Your Website

To make sure your courses sell, you’ll need to create a website where people can find everything there is to know about you, your content, and the digital/physical products you’re selling. Your website needs to be easy to navigate and visually appealing so you can attract more potential customers and grow your business.

Both Thinkific and Kajabi offer users a chance to create beautiful websites, using their easy-to-use builder that allows you to build out a website around your courses or other digital product. Using their drag-and-drop builder, you can completely customize your pages and create a unique look for your website, without doing any coding or having to hire a web designer.

You can simply use their website builders to design and create your website from scratch, offering a lot of design flexibility so you can create the website you’ve envisioned for your business.

While their website builders function similarly, Kajabi’s builder offers more advanced options and customizations so it might be a better option for those of you who are looking to create a professional-looking site. If your priority is to have the best design for your website and courses, Kajabi might be the better option for you.

Themes and Templates

Using pre-designed themes and templates, you can easily build the courses you’ve envisioned, along with your website, membership site, and more. When you have access to different templates that are ready to go, building your online courses is easier than you’ve envisioned.

With Thinkific, you have three different themes to choose from that are available in your theme library. You can change the style of your theme in the settings, along with the colors, images, fonts, and so on.

With Kajabi, you have a larger selection of available themes, 12 to be exact. They are suitable for different types of products, online courses, webinars, membership sites, and more.

Same as with Thinkific, Kajabi allows you to customize the available themes, by changing the style to fit what you’ve envisioned for your business to look like.

Reporting and Analytics

To be able to understand your customers and their needs better you need to know what they like and don’t like about your content, as well as how they interact and engage with it. This will let you know what aspects of your online course business need improvement and help you identify your customers’ preferences.

Reporting and analytics are therefore essential to your business.

With Thinkific, you can get advanced reporting options so you can track your revenue, orders, student engagement, and so on. Using the tools offered by Thinkific, you can get better insight into your customers’ activity and get to know your audience better. This will help improve your marketing strategy so you can boost your sales.

In addition to Google Analytics, Thinkific provides a few other useful integrations that can be used for tracking and analytics, including Facebook Pixel, Mixpanel, Segment, Sumo, and Wizebank Analytics.

With Kajabi, you get three built-in analytics tools you can use, including Google Analytics, Segment and Facebook Pixel.

Kajabi allows you to monitor your subscription rate, your revenue, page views, opt-ins, and provides useful and detailed reports on profitable areas, areas where you can improve and more.

Thinkific vs Kajabi: Available Plans and Pricing

When it comes to pricing, Thinkific’s plans are more affordable than Kajabi’s.

Here’s a quick overview of their plans, starting with Thinkific:

Here are the packages that are available through Kajabi, and their prices:

The main difference between these two platforms when it comes to the plans they offer is that with Thinkific you can get a free plan, whereas Kajabi just offers a 14-day trial. You can use their trial to test out the platform and see if it’s a fit for you and then make your decision about purchasing, whereas, with Thinkific, you can stay on their free plan for as long as you want, or until you feel the need to upgrade to a more comprehensive plan.

Even when you decide it’s time to upgrade, Thinkific’s basic plan is still a lot cheaper than Kajabi’s. Their basic package is priced at $39 per month (paid annually) or $49 per month (paid monthly), while Kajabi’s is priced at $119 per month (paid annually) or $149 per month (paid monthly).

Kajabi’s growth package is priced at $159 per month (paid annually) or $199 per month (paid monthly), while their Pro package is priced at $319 per month (annually) or $399 per month (monthly).

However, as you will see below when we compare their features and the tools they offer, you’ll notice that Kajabi is more advanced in that matter and offers some features that are not available through Thinkific. That’s because Kajabi is an all-in-one business platform, while Thinkific is designed primarily as a course creation platform. This helps justify their differences in pricing.

While Thinkific is more budget-friendly, considering everything that the platform offers, in the end, it will depend mainly on your needs and the needs of your online business when determining which platform suits you best.

Visual Appearance

Both Kajabi and Thinkific look great out of the box and provide themes that are modern, professional, attractive, and functional. You can use their templates to build professional landing pages, sales pages and you can even go with custom themes and templates when you want to achieve something unique.

With Thinkific, on the other hand, there isn’t a market for custom, premium themes, so if you want to build something that differentiates you and makes you unique, you will need to do custom coding on the theme you select.

Ease of Use

With Thinkific’s visual editor, you can easily build your courses from scratch using pre-made templates. Thinkific makes it easy to add all types of different content, including text, PDFs, audio, videos, surveys, assignments, quizzes, and more. Just use their drag-and-drop editor to upload all content, add your descriptions, choose different color themes, fonts, and more.

Thinkific is designed to be easy to use and quite intuitive, meaning you don’t need to be tech-savvy to be able to create great-looking courses and content.

While Kajabi also comes with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor that allows you to easily build everything including courses, membership sites, landing pages, sales pipelines and customize pre-designed templates to make your courses stand out without having to do any coding, Kajabi isn’t as intuitive as Thinkific, and many find that to be one of its flaws.

With Kajabi, editing your site can sometimes be a bit confusing as the platform isn’t as flexible and as easy to use as Thinkific is. The main criticism users have about Kajabi on this subject is the way some things are named, and where they are located.

That’s why once you figure all of that out it will be much easier to go on from there. Expect to spend some time figuring out where everything is located and how things work before you start creating your courses and other aspects of your business. And if you get stuck at any step of the way, you can always contact Kajabi’s chat support or check out the guides and tutorials available on their website and through their Hero University.

We won’t discourage you from using the platform just because it is not as intuitive as Thinkific is and will require a bit more time until you figure out how everything works, we would just advise you to not be afraid to ask for assistance from their support team or freelancers who offer Kajabi services so you can get the most out of the platform.

Student Experience

The experience students have when taking your courses plays an important role in the success of your online course business. Not only is it directly connected to the success of your courses by helping generate more sales, referrals, and upsells, but it also makes your courses look and feel premium and professional.

Here’s how Thinkific vs Kajabi compare when it comes to student experience.

Thinkific’s dashboard is visually appealing, clear, and easy to follow. Students can easily track their progress, keep up to date on what’s next in their course, and more. The whole learning process is improved by the option to add many content formats for students to interact and engage with, including text, images, videos, multimedia, downloadable files, quizzes, surveys, presentations, webinars, and more.

Other aspects of Thinkific that help improve the student experience include:

• Built-in certificates available through Accredible
• Reminder emails
• Free Wistia video hosting

When it comes to Kajabi, you also have the option of adding text, images, videos, quizzes, and other similar content to make your courses more engaging to your students.

The platform also offers more available themes and templates than Thinkific so you can create a better learning experience for your students by customizing and tailoring it to fit their needs best.

What’s great about Kajabi is that they have a mobile app that allows students to follow your courses on the go and track their progress through their phones. The app saves their progress and allows them to pick up from where they left off and it also comes with a “magic link” that students can use to access content without a password.

While both platforms are designed to provide a great learning experience for your students, since Thinkific is specifically designed with that aspect in mind, it does have an advantage over Kajabi in that regard.

Thinkific vs Kajabi: Student Accommodation Limit

Another important aspect that course creators should consider when choosing an online course platform is the number of students they can accommodate.

When it comes to Thinkific, it doesn’t matter which plan you choose to go with, since all 4 available plans, including the free plan, allow for an unlimited amount of students.

With Kajabi, however, that is not the case. If you go with Kajabi, the number of students you’ll be able to accommodate will depend on the type of plan you choose to go with. Their Basic plan allows for 1000 active members (students), their Growth plan can accommodate up to 10,000 and their Pro plan can accommodate 20,000.

Thinkific vs Kajabi: Other Limits

The number of students you can accommodate isn’t the only limit you’ll need to take into consideration when making the choice of Thinkific vs Kajabi.

Other aspects you should consider include:

Course Limits

When it comes to Thinkific, if you decide to go with their free package you will be limited to three courses. However, if you choose to go with one of their paid plans, you can have an unlimited number of courses, no matter which of the paid plans you choose.

With Kajabi, their Basic plan allows you to create 3 products (courses) and 3 pipelines, their Growth plan allows for 15 products and 15 pipelines and with their Pro plan you can create up to 100 products and 100 pipelines.

Website Limits

With Thinkific, you are allowed to set up as many websites as you’d like, but you’ll have to purchase a separate plan for each of them, as they do not have a master admin area where you can have access to multiple Thinkific schools in one dashboard.

With Kajabi, on the other hand, you can create multiple websites (3 to be exact) under their Pro plan only, but their other plans are limited to one website.

Admin Users Limits

On Thinkific, site admins have full admin privileges that are similar to those of the site owner. They are allowed to manage students and courses, and have all the permissions as the site owner, aside from being able to transfer account ownership and set up payment integration.

On Thinkific, you can assign 2 site admins if you’re on their Pro plan and 5 site admins if you’re using their Premier plan. Simply assign them their role in the user roles section by checking off-site admin and you can allow them to have all the site admin privileges over your courses, sites, and content.

When it comes to course admins, the Pro plan allows for 5 course admins/authors, whereas the Premier plan allows for 50.

With Kajabi, you can have only one admin user on their Basic plan, 10 admin users on their Growth plan, and 25 on their Pro plan.

Marketing and Selling

Both Thinkific and Kajabi are specifically designed for marketing and selling purposes. Therefore, both platforms offer a range of tools and features that you can implement to achieve your marketing goals.

When it comes to Thinkific, most of these marketing features can be found under the market and sell section, although they are dispersed throughout other sections as well.

Here’s what Thinkific offers when it comes to marketing and selling:

• Coupons. With Thinkific’s paid plans, you have the option of offering coupons to your students that they can use when purchasing your courses.
• Affiliates. Use this feature to incentivize your students or fellow marketers to sell your courses, bundles and membership programs to prospective learners by paying them commission for every course or digital product sold.
• Sales Widget. Use this feature to direct your users straight to a landing or checkout page by placing a sales widget onto your website.
• Customize your website. In the design your site section, you can find all the tools you need to customize your sign up and checkout page so you can have a more visually appealing site and boost your conversion rates.
• Offer a free trial. Thinkific allows you to offer your students a free trial as part of your courses, which your learners can use to get more familiar with what you offer and then be able to purchase your course if they like your content.
• Create bundles. You can create bundles of related courses and sell them as one single product for a single price. This way you can offer some discount for your content and sell more courses.

While Thinkific offers a wide range or tools and features specifically designed for marketing purposes, Kajabi’s features when it comes to marketing and selling are more advanced and the tools they offer are designed to help you market your courses better.

The platform offers tools that can help you maximize your ability to market your courses.

Those include:

• Automations. Streamline and simplify the whole process on the platform by creating automations which are available in almost every part of the service. Depending on your subscription plan, you can have access to basic and advanced automations. You can use these processes to automate all of your basic admin actions, so you can focus more on the creative part of your process as an edupreneur. Automations can be found in pipelines, email campaigns, events, forms, offers, posts and so on.
• Pipelines. As part of Kajabi’s available automations, pipelines are automated marketing and sales funnels used to take your potential customer through the journey of getting to know your product and becoming a paying customer. Pipelines help you automate that whole process by creating landing pages, email campaigns and offers which are completely automated and free up your time so you can focus on creating exceptional content for your students.
• Email campaigns. With Kajabi, you can easily learn how to create and send email campaigns to your list of subscribers in the form of email broadcasts or email sequences.
• Email sequences. Automate the process of sending one or more emails to your visitors and students after they’ve completed a certain action like completing a form, making a purchase and so on.
• Email broadcasts. You can use email broadcasts to send announcements and newsletters to a specified audience in your contact list by creating email campaigns.

If you place priority on marketing your courses and have the budget to go with one of Kajabi’s plans, then we recommend this option. While Thinkific offers all the standard marketing features, such as bundles, coupons, affiliate marketing and integrations with email service providers, the tools offered by Kajabi in terms of marketing and selling are not found in alternative platforms, so if this is something you value highly and wouldn’t mind paying a bit extra to get it, Kajabi is the way to go.

Sales Tracker

Both Kajabi and Thinkific allow you to track your revenue and sales through their sales tracker.

Kajabi’s sales tracker offers more advanced options and more data points that you can analyze. One advantage of Kajabi’s sales tracker over that of Thinkific is that it displays your revenue and sales data graphically and it also has a separate affiliate marketing report. While Thinkific’s sales tracker may not be as advanced and robust as Kajabi’s, it still offers complete and informative reports that you can use to track your sales and make improvements so you can boost your performance.

Affiliate Program

Both platforms offer affiliate programs that you can use to reach more learners and scale your business.

The only downside when it comes to Kajabi’s affiliate program is that it is available on the higher-paying levels only and is not a part of the basic package.

With Thinkific, on the other hand, the affiliate program is available for all tiers.

Customer Service

Both Kajabi and Thinkific offer reliable and professional customer support to help users navigate their platforms better and improve their experience.

Thinkific offers customer support via:

• Email
• Live chat support on paid plans
• Phone (Monday to Friday, from 9 am to 5 pm PST).
• Facebook community
• Tutorials designed to make the onboarding process easier
• Hour-long onboarding call to help you get started (Pro and Premier plans only)

Kajabi, on the other hand takes the lead in this category, by offering customer support via:

• Email
• 24/7 live chat for those using the Growth and the Pro plan
• Onboarding call to help you get started
• Training webinars through Kajabi University
• A community of experts on their social media platforms
• Live training to help users solve issues in real-time

FAQs

Let’s take a look at some of the most frequently asked questions about Thinkific vs Kajabi that people usually have before they decide which platform to go with.

Do Kajabi and Thinkific Offer Free Plans?

With Thinkific, you have the option of selecting their free plan from the 4 available plans that they offer. Their free plan is not limited to a period of time but is limited in the features and tools that it offers as well as the number of courses you can create. You can stay on their free plan as long as you want, and upgrade to one of their paid plans when you’re ready to scale up.

With Kajabi, you can only get a 14-day free trial, available for all three packages that they offer. This allows you to test out the platform’s features for free, but if you decide to continue using the platform you will need to subscribe to one of their paid plans.

Are Kajabi and Thinkific Expensive?

Thinkific’s lowest-priced package starts at $39 per month (paid annually) or $49 per month (paid monthly), and they also offer a free plan. In comparison, Kajabi’s cheapest plan is priced at $119 per month (paid annually) or $149 per month (paid monthly), and they do not offer a free plan. Although their basic plan is around $100 more than Thinkific’s basic plan, the fact that Kajabi is an all-in-one platform and provides more tools and features that are designed for marketing and selling purposes than Thinkific does justify its price.

Do Kajabi and Thinkific Charge Transaction Fees?

No, neither of these platforms charge transaction fees when someone purchases your course or digital product. You keep all of the money you charge for your products, aside from the processing fee of 2.9% + 30 cents collected by Stripe for each transaction.

Can I Move My Courses from Another Platform to Thinkific or Kajabi?

Whichever course creation and hosting platform you’re using now, both Thinkific and Kajabi can ensure a seamless and quick transition and migration for your courses and your students. Their support team is here to make sure all aspects are covered and everything from logins, to student progress, enrollment dates, and so on are transitioned properly onto your new online course platform.

If after reading this review, you’re still left with unanswered questions about the way Kajabi and Thinkific work, check out their FAQ sections on Kajabi and Thinkific to find out what it is you’re looking for.

Thinkific vs Kajabi – Which One is Best?

All in all, we can conclude that Kajabi is a great all-in-one platform that’s suitable for experienced course creators who are looking to create and scale their knowledge business and have all parts of their online business under one roof, while Thinkific is suitable for those who are looking for a course creation platform only, and don’t necessarily need to have their website, email automation, sales funnels and everything in one place. If you already have your business up and running, have your own website set up, and you already do email marketing, Thinkific would be the way to go.

If, however, you want to take advantage of all the extra marketing and sales tools Kajabi has to offer and would benefit from using an all-in-one platform that has all of the necessary tools and features under one roof, then you should consider paying extra and going with Kajabi. In the end, it’s up to you, your needs, and your budget when it comes to determining which platform suits you best.

You can learn more about each one and make sure you are choosing the right one in this Thinkific Review and Kajabi Review

What is Kajabi?

Kajabi is an all-in-one business platform that allows users to build and grow a successful business online. Their mission is to empower knowledge entrepreneurs to achieve their passion and sell their content online.

The platform is designed to help users easily create premium digital products such as online courses, coaching programs, membership sites, and more. Using Kajabi’s main features and capabilities, you can then create multiple options for monetization and automate your marketing and sales process.

We’ll get more into the details of what Kajabi offers below.

What’s Kajabi Used For?

Basically, Kajabi is used for creating, hosting, marketing, and selling digital products. It provides all the necessary features needed to create a professional website, a range of digital products, sales pages, sales funnels, email campaigns, and much more.

You can even sell physical products through the platform if you want, although that’s not its main purpose.

Who Uses Kajabi?

Kajabi is used by over 40,000 course creators, entrepreneurs, and influencers worldwide. It is a platform that’s primarily used by individuals and businesses who have valuable educational content they want to create, package and sell online to students across the world.

The platform is designed with edupreneurs in mind, including speakers, authors, creatives, consultants, writers, coaches, and others who make a living by creating and selling educational content or those who have valuable information and/or educational content that they want to share with their students and monetize it.

Kajabi Review: Main Features

If you’re looking to create your first course, or if you already have courses that you want to move to a better platform and you’re considering switching to Kajabi, here’s what you need to know so you can make an informed decision and see if this platform works for you.

1.    Kajabi Course Builder

Course and Website Building

If you’re just starting out, building your website will be one of the crucial things you’ll need to do so you can promote your content and present yourself and your business to the world.

If your intent is to become an edupreneur and create courses and digital products for your students, then choosing a platform that offers those options and allows you to create a website as well will be very useful to you and will save you a lot of time and money in the process.

What’s great about Kajabi is that you can create an engaging and professional-looking website easily, without having any knowledge in web design. Creating a website with Kajabi is easy since you can use their drag-and-drop builder to integrate all of your ideas and create the website you’ve envisioned.

In addition to making the website creation process easy and intuitive, their online course creation tool is also really easy to use so you can build your courses from the ground up. Kajabi makes the whole process of creating courses easy and enjoyable. You don’t have to be tech-savvy to create amazing courses on the platform.

Simply write your scripts and lessons, record any audio or video you need for the course, create your graphics, and once all that content is created and edited, you can start uploading it onto the platform.

Choose among the different product templates available. Within the template, you’ll have the option of creating categories, sub-categories, and posts (lessons). Within each lesson, you can add all kinds of content, including:

• Text
• Images
• Videos
• Assessments
• Downloads
• Comments
• And Kajabi Automations

The platform makes it easy to upload your content and create your courses according to your preferences so you can create the course you’ve envisioned and start marketing and selling it right away.

Website Themes

Kajabi has an extensive library of available themes that are ready to go. You can simply select the one that fits best and modify it as much as you’d like so it can look the way you imagined it.

Each theme has a particular aesthetic using a collection of layouts and elements. Aside from using a predefined theme, you can also import your own custom theme.

Additionally, you have the option of using different themes on different products, so each product can have a unique aesthetic and be easy to distinguish from the others.

Product Creation

Kajabi offers a ton of great templates that you can use to create mini-courses, full courses, drip courses, and more. Apart from course creation, you can use Kajabi to create communities, memberships, and coaching programs using their templates with pre-loaded content which you can easily modify, move around, structure, and so on, so you can get everything set up right away.

Kajabi provides easy-to-use templates for creating live events as well. Just set up your Zoom webinar through the platform and build a pipeline with a registration page, a post-event offer, and a checkout page to make the most use out of your webinar and convert more leads.

Consistent Branding

By having both your courses and your website in one place, you can easily incorporate the same colors, styling, and elements across all pages so you can remain consistent with your branding. Since Kajabi has the same page builder for building course products, websites, landing pages, checkout pages, funnels, email, and all other forms, it’s super easy to keep your branding consistent.

Design and Customizations

You don’t have to be tech-savvy to be able to create appealing and well-structured courses. Kajabi offers a ton of templates that you can choose from. Using a template will make the process a lot easier for you since they offer pre-selected layouts and elements which you can then tweak and make changes to until you’re satisfied with the way your course looks.

Once you select a template, you can go through each element and customize it further. You can make your site and courses as unique as you want, particularly if you have access to the code editor available in the higher-paid plans. Then, you can use CSS and HTML to make certain edits outside the available customizations.

To remove the “Kajabi” brand from your site and domain URL, you will have to purchase the growth or pro package.

Good Video Streaming Capabilities

Kajabi offers integration with Wistia, a video hosting platform that allows you to take full control of your video content, which you can integrate with your tech stack so you can send engagement data to your CRM and use that to grow your business.

You can use Wistia to upload and stream your videos and you can rest assured that they will be secure on their platform. The fact that you have Wistia integrated with your Kajabi account means that you’ll save money by not having to buy a separate license for Wistia, which costs $99 per month.

Unlimited Hosting

As an all-in-one platform, all Kajabi plans offer web hosting with an unlimited amount of storage and bandwidth. They also have an auto-scaling feature to optimize performance depending on how much web traffic you’re getting. With Kajabi’s unlimited hosting you can have as many visitors on your site, create as many pages, and have unlimited storage space. You won’t have to worry about website speed regardless of how many visitors you’re getting.

User Experience

Kajabi is designed to be user-friendly and easy to use. On the dashboard, you can see everything laid out clearly and from there you can easily access different modules by navigating through the tabs.

Along with intuitive navigation, you also have the help of the Kajabi Assistant so you can look up certain tools and features by keywords. If you still can’t find what you are looking for on the platform, there are a ton of helpful guides and videos on Kajabi that are designed to help you navigate the platform better.

One instance where you may struggle a bit at first are the automation tools, at least some of them, which are harder to figure out, especially for someone who hasn’t worked with automations before. If you need help setting up automations talk to their customer support team or check out their useful guides on the subject.

2.    Kajabi Support

Kajabi Community

The great thing about Kajabi is that it has a strong community of people who use the platform and are super enthusiastic about getting the most out of it, as well as helping others like them succeed by offering advice and solutions through meet-ups, their Facebook group, forums and more.

This dedicated community is comprised of experts, new and enthused users, influencers, edupreneurs, and other people alike.

Training/Onboarding Process and Customer Service

The process of getting started with Kajabi is easy if you follow their simple onboarding steps. You’ll get access to a ton of recourses, training videos, and educational content designed to make the onboarding process easy and help you get started on the platform.

For any questions and issues that may arise during the process, their customer service representatives are here to provide phone and live chat support in a friendly and professional manner and help you solve the issue you’re facing as soon as possible.

If you’re using their basic plan, you’ll get access to customer support at certain times during the day, whereas if you’re on the growth or pro plan, you’ll get access to customer support 24/7 a day, via chat or phone.

Aside from the great customer service they provide, they are dedicated to providing their users with extensive online training and a community of individuals that is here to support each other and improve along the way. That’s why they’ve created Kajabi University – called Hero University – where you can access free and paid courses and learn from leading experts in the industry on how to build, market, and sell online courses and other digital products.

3.    Marketing and Selling with Kajabi

Sales Tools

The sales and marketing tools available on Kajabi are some of its main draws. Each plan has a certain set of marketing tools and built-in features that are designed to help you sell more courses, offer all kinds of products to your customers, and build customer loyalty.

Here are some of the helpful features it provides:

• Setting prices. Kajabi offers users the ability to sell courses individually, bundle them together and sell them for a discounted price, give out coupons and team up with affiliates to sell even more courses and digital products. You can also offer your students payment plans so they can have more flexibility when paying for your courses.
• Integrated check-out. Through Stripe and PayPal, you can accept payments from anywhere in the world.
• 1-click upsells. Give your customers the opportunity to buy more from you with just one click and use that opportunity to earn more by providing 1-click upsells.
• Subscriptions. Build customer loyalty with weekly, monthly and annual subscription plans.
• Abandoned cart recovery. Give your leads another chance to buy your products when they’ve abandoned their cart without completing their order. Send them automated emails reminding them to complete their order so you can improve your conversion rate.
• Free trials. Offer free trials to prospective student so that you can give them a taste of your content and then convert them onto paying customers.

Sales Funnel Builder / Pipelines

A sales funnel describes each step someone takes in becoming your customer/client. Sales funnels illustrate the journey prospective customers go through, so understanding this process and the places in the process potential customers usually drop out and leave your site will help you convert more leads and grow your business faster.

You don’t need to be an expert in sales funnels to create one in Kajabi. With Kajabi the whole process is automated and you have tested and proven blueprints that you can use for every marketing purpose. Using these blueprints, you can easily customize and launch pre-built frameworks designed for lead generation and connect several different marketing channels into multi-channel funnels.

You can use Kajabi’s pre-written copy to create sales funnels that are guaranteed to work. They are designed by some of Kajabi’s best and most successful customers. All you have to do is fill in the blanks and do any tweaks and customizations and you’ll be ready to launch a new pipeline right away. Their automated pipeline software is designed to make the process of collecting leads and making sales easy, so you can grow your business and focus on continuing creating successful courses, webinars, and other types of digital content, instead of learning the ins and outs of pipeline marketing.

The pipeline marketing software that you can integrate with Kajabi is called Clickfunnels and is used for creating sales and landing pages.

Clickfunnels is used as the primary method of capturing leads, designing sales pages, making an offer to your customers, and completing a sale. This means that using Clickfunnels, you can guide your visitors through the entire sales process so they don’t get confused along the way and leave without purchasing the product you’re offering.

You can also use Clickfunnels to follow up with visitors even after they’ve left your site by quickly capturing your visitor’s contact information. This way you can generate new leads constantly and be able to contact them again and again so you can increase your conversion rates.

4.    Kajabi Integrations

Another relevant marketing feature on Kajabi is the integrations. Kajabi offers built-in tools that you can use to integrate many functions. Currently, there are 10 native integrations for third-party apps that are available, including Google Analytics, MailChimp and so on. We’ll get more into the subject of integrations below, as we go through each of them one by one.

For non-native integrations, you can use the Zappier app, which allows you to integrate third-party apps that are not available through Kajabi.

Email Integration

Kajabi is an all-in-one business platform that provides all the necessary tools and features you can use to create courses and then market and sell them to potential students.

Kajabi functions as your email service provider or ESP, so you don’t have to pay extra for those services.

Email integration is the process of tying together an email service provider with systems, software, and tools, including course builders, so that when customers purchase something from you or fill out a form their email address and details can be ported right onto your inbox. You can later use this information to send out newsletters, promotions, free giveaways or notifications of any kind so that you can engage with your audience and boost your sales.

Kajabi offers integrations with 5 email services, including:

• Aweber
• Mailchimp
• Drip
• ConvertKit
• ActiveCampaign

When you integrate one of these five email applications available through Kajabi, the platform will automatically export any customer contact data and create and update your list of contacts and subscribers.

The platform allows you to set up conditions for when your students complete a lesson, a test or some other milestone, so they can get an automatic email response to congratulate them on the successful completion of that step.

This way you won’t need to connect an outside email service and set up a subscription plan that would cost you extra.

If you don’t see your email service provider on this list, that doesn’t mean you can’t connect it to your courses. To achieve that you’ll need to use a third-party service called Zapier that’s available through Kajabi so you can connect your course provider with your email service provider.

Analytics

Kajabi offers three built-in analytics tools that you can use. Their analytics integrations allow users to track and measure the performance of their site. This way you can gain valuable insight into your customer base and get to know your audience better. By analyzing the data provided by these third-party integrations you can make more informed marketing choices and grow your business faster.

To use these analytics tools, simply put the tracking codes from these apps onto your site so you can track and analyze all data in one place.

Kajabi offers the following three integrations used for tracking and analytics purposes:

• Google Analytics. Web analytics service by Google that tracks and reports website traffic.
• Segment. Customer data platform that you can use to collect, clean and control your customer data.
• Facebook Pixel. Measure, optimize and build audiences, ensure your audiences are well-targeted, create custom audiences for your ad campaigns and learn everything there is to know about your website traffic.

Use these integrations to get rich insights about how people are interacting with your website, build a custom audience to reach your customers, and increase your sales.

5.    Kajabi Student Management Tools

Assessments/Quizzes

When you’re creating courses, you’ll probably want to create quizzes or assessments for your students so you can add an extra layer of engagement and provide your students with the chance to check their knowledge on the subject and see where they stand.

Assessments are a great tool for creating quizzes, tests, surveys, and more.

Using Kajabi, you can create super simple quizzes with multiple-answer questions as well as more complex ones, depending on your needs.

To create quizzes on Kajabi, simply open the “People” tab on the dashboard, then under “People” select “Assessments” and add a new assessment. Once that’s done you can start customizing your assessment depending on what you want to achieve with it.

Certificates

Kajabi doesn’t provide certificates through native integrations so you will need to use a 3rd party platform like Accredible or other similar platforms to offer your students completion certificates.

Webinars

Kajabi offers the option of adding evergreen webinars to your product and sales pages. These webinars can be done on a live stream or can be composed of pre-recorded videos. You can set up evergreen webinars as a way to generate passive income, while you focus on other aspects of your work. You can use these webinars to ease new subscribers into the onboarding process by giving them access to your foundational content and connecting to them via video, rather than a dull text or PDF document.

6.    Marketing and Selling Your Courses with Kajabi

Affiliate Program

You can use Kajabi’s integrated affiliate program to increase your reach and find new audiences so you can boost your revenue. The affiliate program is a great way to generate new leads and expand your audience.

Use this option to encourage others to sell your courses for a commission so you can maximize your revenue and grow your business.

Your affiliates do not need to have a membership to your site to be able to become your affiliate and begin selling your courses.

Using the affiliate program you can set up an affiliate marketing system, track affiliate conversions, create detailed reports, and more.

Note: This option is available with the Growth and Pro plans only.

Membership Sites

Kajabi allows users to create exclusive membership sites where their audience can access gated content. This is a really good way of getting your audience interested in more of your content. You can create as many membership sites as you want and have different offers for each of them. Simply select the payment options your audience can choose from as well as how often they’ll be billed for their subscription (monthly or annually) and you can start offering your members access to a gated community on your site where they can access exclusive content and you can bring in even more in revenue.

Blog

Blogging is a great way of boosting your website performance on the Search Engines and can help you rank better. If you’re updating your blog with useful information that’s relevant to your audience and you’re doing so on a regular basis the search engine algorithms will index your website more often and keep it on their radar.

Having a blog can also keep users on your website longer, which is another ranking factor for search engines.

You can use your blog to target certain keywords and attract more audiences organically. And most importantly, having a blog allows you to connect better with your audience and gain regular followers so you can start a continued relationship with the audience you want to reach.

Podcasts

Use Kajabi to create a podcast that you can use to market your business, grow your audience and increase your revenue. Each Kajabi member has the ability to host a podcast and distribute it to Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts.

On Kajabi, you have all the necessary tools to create, import, distribute and monetize your podcast, all while having everything neatly organized under one platform. You can have your courses, your website, your products and your podcast under one roof, so you can focus solely on growing your business without having to navigate from one platform to another.

Podcasts are great lead generation and branding tools that you can use to grow your audience. Through the platform, you can offer public and private podcasts. You can monetize your podcasts by making them private, or you can offer them to your membership program or as a part of another product.

7.   Kajabi Pricing Plans & Packages

Cost-wise, Kajabi’s plans start at $119/month and go up to $319/month.

Kajabi offers 3 different packages that range from basic to pro.

Let’s take a look at each package separately, so you can see which one works best for you.

Basic Package

Kajabi’s basic package is priced at $119 per month (paid annually) or $149 per month (paid monthly) and it offers the basic tools and features necessary to easily create, market and sell your courses and other digital products.

With Kajabi’s basic package you can get all the core features of the platform, including a few additional ones, like:

• Kajabi University
• 0% Transaction Fee
• Webinars & Events
• Ready to Use Templates
• Assessments (Quizzes & Surveys)
• 1 Customer Success Activation Call
• Chat Support
• Automations

This package is suitable for those of you who are starting out and looking to create your first courses or want to test out the platform and see if it’s a good fit for you. You can even test-drive Kajabi’s basic features for free by signing up for their free 14-day trial. This option is available for all of their plans.

If you start out with the basic package and decide to expand your business later on, you can switch to one of their more advanced packages that offer more features and benefits to meet the needs of your growing business.

Growth Package – Most Popular Plan

Kajabi’s growth package is priced at $159 per month (paid annually) or $199 per month (paid monthly) and it’s great for creatives and edupreneurs who are looking to create and sell up to 15 products.

Kajabi’s growth package includes all the basic features of the platform, including a few additional ones, like:

• 24/7 Chat Support
• Advanced Automations
• Ability to Remove Kajabi Branding
• Affiliate Program

The growth package provides more volume and more features in comparison to the basic plan and is suitable for growing companies and businesses who are looking to scale their business by using the additional benefits the plan offers.

The affiliate program feature that’s added to the growth plan can help business get more exposure and grow, the 24/7 chat assistance can be useful in supporting them with any type of issue they might face and the option to remove the ‘Powered by Kajabi’ can give them more brand independence. These are just some of the benefits offered by the growth plan in addition to the increase in volume in almost every feature in comparison to the basic plan.

Pro Package

Priced at $319 per month (annually) or $399 per month (monthly), Kajabi’s pro package is designed for those of you out there who are looking for even more than what the growth package can offer. Advanced customers who are looking to deliver online education at scale and digital agencies who manage multiple clients can benefit most from using this package.

With this plan, you can easily build an education empire as all the limits in the number of products, pipelines, websites, contact, users and everything else are increased.

Kajabi’s pro package includes all the growth features of the platform, in addition to its code editor.

Kajabi Access Plan

In addition to the three main plans they offer, you also have the option of adding the Kajabi access plan to your subscription plan for $99 per month so you can unlock even more services, resources, and 6 one-on-one guidance sessions with a Kajabi Customer Success Manager. They will help guide you so you can optimize your platform to the fullest and will provide strategic advice that’s unique for your particular business.

By getting a Kajabi Access membership, you can immediately double the number of products, pipelines, and everything else on the list so you don’t have to move straight to the next plan right away and save money in the process.

Another benefit of the Kajabi Access membership is that you’ll be able to get access to Kajabi’s custom code editor, which is normally available to pro plan users only.

With Kajabi Access, you can be the first to hear about new releases, new Kajabi features, and improvements and be able to participate in Beta launches.

These are some of the benefits that come with Kajabi’s access plan, so if the features and benefits unlocked with this plan sound like something you and your business could benefit from, give Kajabi Access a try.

Is Kajabi Expensive?

Since pricing is often the #1 objection course creators have when discussing Kajabi’s plans, we decided to shed some light on the matter and determine whether or not Kajabi’s pricing is too high.

Although Kajabi started out as a basic online course platform, over the years it has transformed into an all-in-one business platform that has virtually replaced any other online tool you would use for your business, from a website and online course hosting to e-products, e-mail marketing, lead/sales/checkout pages, video hosting, funnels, and payment processing. This means that Kajabi offers all the features you need to make your online business work in one single place.

While their plans might seem steeply-priced at a first glance, especially for people who are just starting out and looking to create their first course or other digital products, using Kajabi you would get all of those services in one place, which means you would actually save money by not paying each subscription separately.

Additionally, not only would you get all of those tools and features for one price, but Kajabi also keeps expanding the list of tools they offer while keeping the price the same.

Do They Offer a Free Plan?

While some course platforms, like Thinkific, have a free plan that you can use, Kajabi offers paid plans only. However, if you want to test out the features of the platform risk-free, you can sign up for their 14-day free trial and see whether Kajabi is right for your needs and budget.

Sometimes they run extended free trial promotions to give prospective users enough time to test out the platform’s tools and features and make an informed decision, so keep a lookout for those if you want to give Kajabi a try without any obligations.

Kajabi Review: Pros and Cons

Kajabi Pros

• Coupons and bulk sales: With Kajabi, you have the ability to offer discounts to your current and prospective students via bundles and coupons.
• Make selling easier: Make it easy for your customers to pay by offering different payment options, such as one-time payments, installments, subscriptions, trials, one-click upsells and more.
• Have everything in one place: Have your entire business and everything connected to your business all in one place.
• No transaction fees: Get paid in full for your courses, without paying any transaction fees to Kajabi.
• Useful automations: Kajabi offers integrated automations that are very useful to course creators and can help you scale your business, so you can focus on rolling out new content for your students.
• 24/7 support: Experienced and professional support team that’s ready to answer any and all questions regarding the platform at any time.
• Kajabi university: Hours of detailed training you can access through your Kajabi membership so you can master all of Kajabi’s tools and features.

Kajabi Cons

• No free plan: Kajabi only offers a 14-day trial period, but no free plan.
• No staging area: There’s no way to test out any changes on your website/s before publishing the content live, as there is no staging area that would allow that.
• No central media library: If you want to access media files from an old course a while back, you can’t go to a central media library and search for them there. The only media files that are easily and readily available to you are the 30 or so most recent uploads.

Kajabi Review: FAQs

If you’re still left wondering whether Kajabi is right for you and you have some unanswered questions regarding the platform, we’ve got you covered below!

Let’s take a look at some of the most frequently asked questions about Kajabi to help you decide if the platform is a good fit for you.

Is Kajabi worth it?

Kajabi is an all-in-one business platform that offers more than just course creation. It puts a major focus on marketing and sales and provides intuitive marketing tools to help promote and sell your courses. It provides access to tools and services which would cost more than Kajabi’s subscription if you were to buy them separately, which makes Kajabi worth it.

Does Kajabi offer a free plan?

No, Kajabi doesn’t have a free plan, but if you want to try it out for free, you can check out their 14-day free trial, so you can see if Kajabi is right for you without any risk.

Is Kajabi user friendly?

All of Kajabi’s available features and tools interact seamlessly. The platform’s navigation is very intuitive and user-friendly. Everything is easy to set up so that the user won’t need to have any technical knowledge to achieve their goals.

Is Kajabi SEO friendly?

Yes, it is. The platform offers users a variety of tools and features that can be used for SEO purposes.

Can I sell physical products on Kajabi?

Yes, in addition to courses, you can also sell physical products through the platform. However, Kajabi’s software is primarily designed for selling courses and digital products, which is why it might not be the best fit for you if your main goal is selling physical products.

Does Kajabi charge transaction fees?

No, they do not charge transaction fees.

Wrapping Things Up

Kajabi is an excellent “all-in-one” web-based software platform where you can create, market, and sell online courses and digital products. You can use the platform to create a range of digital products, design your website, create sales pages and funnels to boost your sales and scale your business, and much, much more.

The platform is simple and intuitive and doesn’t require any tech knowledge for you to be able to navigate through its features and tools and create something unique and creative.

While its plans are pricier than some of its competitors, the features and tools it offers make this platform a solid choice for those looking to create and sell digital products.

What is Thinkific?

Thinkific is an online course platform that helps educators and entrepreneurs to create and sell their courses online without any design or coding experience needed.

Thinkific combines plenty of features both for teaching and for selling which makes it a great all-in-one solution for anyone looking to sell an online course easily and efficiently.

Thinkific’s platform allows individuals and businesses to create online courses in their field of expertise as well as deliver and sell those courses to their audience. The opportunities to create courses are unlimited. From social media marketing to online hockey coaching programs, Thinkific caters to all types of creators and students.

They currently have over 25,000 creators on their platform, delivering classes to students in over 160 countries.

What’s Thinkific Used For?

From coaches, bloggers, and YouTubers to authors, speakers, and business owners, everyone can use Thinkific to provide students with online courses and achieve their business goals. Experts can use the platform to scale their business and monetize their expertise by creating an engaging student experience.

You can use Thinkific to book more clients, increase your revenue and grow your business. Using Thinkific’s course-creation, marketing, and selling tools, you can easily create a website where your audience can find and purchase your courses.

But what type of features does Thinkific offer, and how do they compare to other similar platforms?

Thinkific Review: Main Features

Before picking the right platform to sell your online courses on, you need to make sure that it works for you and your course-building needs.

To help you make a well-informed choice, we’ve covered all of Thinkific’s main features and benefits so you can check out whether they fit your needs.

Here are some of the main things that make this platform stand out in comparison to other platforms:

1. Thinkific Course Builder

Course Player

The course player is what your students will see when they take your course. It’s where they spend most of their time, enjoying your lessons and discussing them with other students who are also taking your course.

Thinkific allows you to customize several details of your course player appearance so it matches your branding or the look-and-feel you want to create for that specific course.

You can go with a course template, and upload your text, audio, or video content all at once. Or you can use their drag-and-drop option to build the layout of your pages and course in the way that works best for your content.

Here are some of the options that Thinkific offers when it comes to customizing the course player.

• Brand your course. Put your logo at the top of your course and use your brand colors so you can keep your branding strong.
• Select your color and font. Select the primary color of the course player (you can use your brand color) and the course player font.
• Select player theme. Select between their light and dark theme for each of your individual courses.

In addition to these features, there are other ways to customize your Course Player, so you can provide your users with the best possible experience. Those include:

• On-Lesson Discussions
• Completion Messages
• Course Reviews
• Free Preview
• Drip Schedule
• Prerequisite Lessons
• Individual Course Player Appearance Customizations

Some of these features are available on the free plan but the paid packages offer even more customization options like dark/light themes, custom fonts, your own course player logo and labels for each type of lesson.

No matter what your industry or business is, these white-labeling options can help you strengthen your personal brand and recognition.

Alternatively, you can also easily integrate Thinkific with your existing website in case you want some extra space for customization or want to bring your courses to your existing audience.

Content Support

Keeping your students engaged can be challenging so switching up your type of content can help you make the learning experience more interactive and entertaining.

For this purpose, Thinkific supports a wide variety of content types, so you can choose the one that best suits the lesson and learning needs of your students.

Here are the different types of lessons you can host on Thinkific.

1. Video
2. Quiz
3. Multimedia
4. Text
5. Survey
6. PDF
7. Audio
8. Downloads
9. Presentations
10. Brillium exams
11. Assignments
12. Live feed (beta)

Note: Thinkific allows you to upload your videos directly removing the need of paying for another hosting service. They host the files through Wistia and you can upload as many as you want as long as they are 2G.

Drip Content Schedule

Thinkific allows you to “drip” your content, controlling when your students get access to each part (or to all of it). This is especially useful when you do a pre-sell and don’t want students to get access to the course until the official launch or if you want to release one lesson at a time to help students pace their learning.

You can create a unique Drip Schedule per course based on three options:

1. Student Enrollment Date 
2. Student Course Start Date 
3. On a Specific Date (ie. Calendar Date)

This feature is not available of the free plan so you’d need to upgrade to the Basic Plan to use get access.

2. Thinkific’s Website Builder

Your website is where you will sell your course so naturally, it plays an essential role in the success of your online coaching business.

Thinkific doesn’t fall short when it comes to features for creating a high-converting website for your courses.

Here are some of Thinkific’s website functionalities:

Drag-and-drop Builder

Ten years ago, the process of creating a website was exclusive to those who knew how to code but nowadays anyone can do it thanks to drag-and-drop builders like the one Thinkific offers.

Their drag and drop feature which allows you to “grab” certain sections or objects and drag them to your desired location. This way you can easily build your course and go from concept to a fully-built course within a couple of hours, as opposed to having to code everything from scratch

You can choose between banners, call-to-action, checklist, countdown timers, image gallery, reviews, videos, and much more.

You can use their available layouts that are specifically designed for educational businesses and simply change some of the details you want to personalize or you can choose to use their drag-and-drop feature to create your layout from scratch.

Theme Library

Thinkific’s Theme Library comes with 10 pre-built templates that you can customize to have your website ready in a few minutes instead of having to start from scratch.

Their templates are focused on education businesses so you can make sure any of them would work well for selling your course.

Checkout Page

The “Design Your Site” section offers you the ability to customize your sign up and checkout pages and as you probably know they are an integral part in ensuring sales.

If you’re looking to improve your conversion rates, you should take the time to improve the design and layout of your sign up and checkout pages, using the customizing options offered in the “Design Your Site” section.

Thinkific’s Sales Pages

When it comes to sales pages, Thinkific is really easy to build with, using their niche-specific or business sector templates. You can easily employ their templates and do some CSS and HTML customizations to achieve the look you want.

For your Thinkific course to do well and sell, you’re going to have to design a tempting sales page to convince your audience to buy your course. With Thinkific you can easily achieve this, even if you have no knowledge in web design. Using their user-friendly site builder, you can add all the elements your course needs to be successful, including:

• A proper banner using whatever image you want
• A proper description of your course
• Your bio
• FAQs
• Testimonials and reviews
• CTAs and more

3. Thinkific Student Management Tools

3.1 Manage Learning Section

The “Manage Learning Content” section offers you the chance to create categories for your courses, which is a great way to group different courses together, giving your students more perspective as to which courses are related.

Use this section to create any kind of category you want, add images to each category, and group your courses accordingly. Other helpful features that you can find in the “Manage Learning Content” area include:

• Membership types. The “Manage Learning Content” section allows you to set differente membership types and payment options for your students to choose. Some of the options you can choose from include
  • Free membership plan
  • One-time payment
  • Subscription membership
  • Monthly payment plan
  • Custom pricing options

Although, you’ll need access to Thinkific’s Pro plan to use these membership options.

• Adding a free trial feature to your course. Learners can then sign up to your course for free and get access to the free part of your course, but will need to pay to access the rest of your content.

• Customizing the completion page of your courses so you can promote related courses, which is a great selling feature.

• Split revenue between instructors. If you have a pro or a premier account, and you’re selling courses that feature multiple instructors, you can use this section to determine the percentage in which the revenue will be split amongst each contributor.

• Bundle courses. If you’re using any of Thinkific’s paid plans, you can create bundles of courses that you can sell as a single product, which is another great marketing feature.

3.2. Thinkific’s Quizzes

Quizzes and tests are a great form of self-assessment for your students and give them the chance to check their knowledge and motivate them to continue learning.

Thinkific allows you to create simple and more complex quizzes using multiple-choice assessments.

They have a simple template that you can use to import your questions and answer alternatives as well as choose whether each question has one or multiple correct answers. If you’d like, you can also provide your students with further explanation as to why that answer is correct and offer them further guidance on how to get the right answer.

Thinkific will keep a record of your questions and answers stored there and the option to easily import them into a different system if you choose to.

If you’re using their Pro or Premier plans, you can also set your quizzes and tests as a prerequisite for moving on to the next chapter of your course, meaning your students will need to pass the quiz to continue.

With Pro and Premier plans, you also have the chance to randomize your questions, by pulling from a bank of questions you’ve previously set up.

If you’re just starting out by offering a couple of courses to your audience, and aren’t planning on creating really elaborate quizzes, then the basic plan will work well for you. If, however, you’re an advanced learning business that’s planning to scale up, even more, you should consider taking advantage of Thinkific’s Pro or Premier plans.

3.4 Certificates

With the help of Accredible, Thinkific issues completion certificates to students who successfully finish a course, so each learner who finishes your course can be presented with a personalized certificate.

If you want to give your students certificates at the end of each of your courses you will need to use Thinkific’s Pro or Premier plan, which offers such options. The cost of a pro-level or premier-level license is something that might be worth considering, especially if you’re serious enough about what you’re teaching that you want to provide certificates for it and it is something students will value.

If you decide that you want to provide your students with certificates for completing your course, you can use Thinkific’s certificate templates to provide personalized certificates to each student. You can also set a time period for which the certificate will be valid. 

If you’re not satisfied with Thinkific’s certificate template, you can also browse different designs on Accredible. Due to Thinkific’s integration of Accredible, you can customize your certificates to suit your needs best. Using their editor, you can change and remove elements of the certificate, change the branding, the text, and everything else, by adding or removing “dynamic” elements, until you achieve the look you want.

4. Thinkific App Store

Earlier this year, Thinkific launched their Thinkific App Store, making the process of creating professional-looking content much easier. Their app store has around 30 apps across 4 different categories, including automation, email marketing and growth, analytics/tracking, and student experience.

The Thinkific App Store allows creators to more fully customize their courses and other learning products they’re offering.

In addition to helping course creators, developers can also benefit from creating and selling apps for the Thinkific App Store by accessing a global market of over 50,000 active course creators.

5. Marketing and Selling with Thinkific

Unlike academic learning management systems, Thinkific is a platform that’s specifically designed for marketing and selling purposes. Since marketing and selling online education is one of Thinkific’s main uses, it provides a range of features course creators can implement to achieve their marketing goals.

Most of these features can be found under the “Market and Sell” section on the panel, but you can also find some of the other marketing and selling tools in other sections, so if you want to make use of everything Thinkific can offer, make sure not to skip out on these.

Here’s where you can find some of Thinkific’s most valuable marketing and selling features, beginning with the “Market and Sell” section.

Market and Sell

The “Market and Sell” section offers a range of options when it comes to selling and marketing. Some of those include:

• Setting up coupons. If you’re using one of Thinkific’s paid plans, you’ll have the option of setting up coupons that can be used when purchasing your courses or bundles. You can set the discount percentage for the coupon, set an expiration date (optional) and the number of times the coupon can be used (also optional).

• Adding affiliates. Thinkific’s platform allows you to add a person or more people as affiliates, who will help sell your courses for a commission. This process is pretty straightforward and simple. All you have to do is add that person as a user and select “affiliate” as his role. You can also do this with existing users.

• Use the sales widget feature. Generate an HTML code using Thinkific’s sales widget feature that you can place on your existing website and have users go straight to a landing page or to checkout. You can customize the widget to display as a button or add a product image to it and any text you want displayed.

No Transaction Fees

Unlike other similar platforms, Thinkific doesn’t charge course creators transaction fees when a student purchases their course, nor does it take a commission from their sales.

The amount you pay on a monthly or yearly basis depends on the level you select. In addition to their free plan, they have packages ranging from $49 to $499/month, so you can choose the one that works best for your needs and change it at any time.

6. Thinkific Integrations

Simply put, the term integrations describes pieces of software that are able to “talk to each other” and pass information through some type of coding. Integrations matter a lot when it comes to online course platforms because they improve the users’ experience and can make the whole process a lot easier when implemented properly.

So far, Thinkific offers integrations in the areas of automation tools, e-commerce, tracking/analytics, email marketing, student experience, and growth tools. Depending on the plan you have, you will have access to different areas of integration, although the essentials will be available to all users, including the ones using the free plan.

Thinkific’s app store is constantly growing, allowing users to find all kinds of apps specifically designed to help course creators in their process.

When you get started with Thinkific, there are a few essential integrations that you should set up so you can start marketing and selling your courses.

Here’s what those areas are, and where you should begin when you’re just starting out with Thinkific.

E-commerce

Thinkific supports direct integrations with two payment gateway services, Stripe and Paypal. You can integrate one of those options or use both if that’s what you prefer. You can set up your payment gateway by navigating to the “Payments” tab, located under “Settings”.

You can use PayPal for one-time payments only, and when it comes to Stripe, in addition to one-time payments, you can also set up subscription and payment plans. Stripe also allows you to change your currency, while PayPal integration supports USD only.

Other integrations in the area of e-commerce include Stunning, a service that’s designed to identify and recover failed Stripe payments, and Quaderno, which helps users manage their taxes.

There are a ton of other apps under the e-commerce section that you can integrate to sell more courses and scale-up.

Some of the most useful ones you should consider setting up, include:

• Shopify. Add a new revenue stream and grow your online course business by creating a Shopify store and selling related products and services to your audience.
• Keap. Grow your business and increase sales using this automated sales and marketing automation software.
• eWebinar. Sell your courses on autopilot and automate the whole sales process.
• DropInBlog. Add a blog to your site and boost your search engine ranking.
• CartStack. Send targeted emails, SMS and web push reminders to recover lost sales from visitors who’ve left your site without completing their purchase.
• Capture. Create engaging quizzes and pop-ups to grow your email list.

These are just some of the available apps and integrations you can use to grow your business and sell more. Depending on the plan you have, you might be able to implement some or most of these integrations to get more customers, more sales, and grow your business.

Tracking/Analytics + Growth Tools

By using Google Analytics and other tracking and analytics tools that can be integrated with Thinkific, you can gain valuable insight into your customers’ activity. Using the tools Google Analytics offers, you can get to know your audience better, analyze all data in one place, get detailed reports and use those to make more data-driven decisions to grow your business.

To use Google Analytics, simply put your tracking code and site verification code into Thinkific so you can track and analyze all data in one place.

Apart from Google Analytics, Thinkific provides a few other useful integrations that you can use for tracking purposes. 

Those include:

• Facebook Pixel. Which you can use to track conversions from Facebook Ads, build your audience and optimize your ads based on the data you collect.
• Mixpanel. Track in-depth student actions using this advanced analytics platform. Improve student experience using real-time data, behavior tracking and data insights.
• Segment. Clean, collect and control customer data to create your ultimate data foundation and understand how your customers are interacting with your site.
• Sumo. Increase your website leads and conversions, drive traffic, market your content better and automate your site’s growth.
• Wizebank Analytics. Keep all your analytics data and everything you need to know about your e-learning business in one place and save time and money in the process. 

Email Marketing Integration

Email integration is the process of connecting the email service you use to the course builder, so that when a customer purchases your course that email can be ported right over to your inbox.

Thinkific connects with you to use 6 different email email marketing platforms so you can add your students to your mailing list and automate the entire process. These include Mail Chimp, ConvertKit, AWeber, ActiveCampaign, Infusionsoft and ConstantContact.

This is not the case with most course builders, which typically connect with 1-2 email services.

While this may not seem like a big deal, as even if your email service provider is not on the list of available providers, you can use a third-party service to connect your email service to the course provider if you don’t want to spend extra money on additional services choosing a course builder that connects with multiple different email services can save you a lot of money.

This is a really important step for online course sellers so they can add Thinkific students to their mailing list and be able to send them updates, promotions, offers, and so on.

Using your preferred email marketing platform, you can build powerful email and marketing campaigns. You can use the tools these apps provide to grow your online course business by finding new customers, keeping them engaged, and coming back for more by using segmented and automated emails.

Student Experience

There are a ton of different apps you can integrate with your Thinkific account to deliver better student experiences. Here’s an overview of a few of those integrations:

• Accredible. Issue digital course completion certificates to your students to help motivate your students and boost completion rates.
• Beastnotes. Offer your students a better way of taking notes that’s designed to be distraction-free so they can learn better and engage more effectively with your content.
• Community Box. Turn your classroom into a community and enable your students to network with each other and with other visitors on your site.
• Ding. Keep your students informed and excited about your latest content, new courses and other events by sending them smart, personalized notifications.
• Lessonspace. Create engaging one-on-one or group teaching sessions for your students. Teach using video conference, whiteboards, text chat, document editors, or even code.
• Motrain. Use a personalized reward system to motivate your students with prizes, virtual coins and more!

And if you have a premier-level account, you can make use of the Thinkific Brillium integration to create advanced examinations, surveys, and more.

Accessing Your Apps

To access all your apps simply visit the Thinkific App Store, where you can find, set up and access a variety of apps and integrations. You can install any of the apps straight from the store and once they’re installed, you can access them through your Apps page in your Admin Panel.

What If You Can’t Find the App You Need?

And finally, if you can’t find the perfect tool or app among the array of integrations available on Thinkific, you can either:

• Use Zapier, which is a tool that allows users to integrate the web applications they use and automate the whole process.
• Contact Thinkific’s support team and request an app that you think might work together well in their ecosystem. If they like your idea they might implement it and you might see that app in their constantly growing app store.
• Alternatively, you can join the Thinkific Partner Program and build the app you want yourself, if that’s something that might interest you.

7. Thinkific Pricing Plans & Packages

Thinkific offers 4 different packages that range from free to premier. 

Let’s take a look at each package separately, to see which one would be the best choice for you.

Thinkific Free Package

What makes Thinkific really stand out from other online course platforms is that they offer a free plan in addition to their paid subscription plans. The free plan allows you to use the core features of the platform so you can create a limited number of courses completely free of charge.

• Limited courses (up to 3)
• Unlimited students
• Email support
• Quizzes & surveys
• Content hosting 
• Instant access to your funds

This package is suitable for those of you who are starting out and looking to create your first courses. You can test-drive Thinkific’s core features for free and later on if you’re looking to expand your business, you can select one of their paid plans that offer more features and benefits to meet your needs.

Thinkific Basic Package

Thinkific’s basic package is priced at $39 per month (paid annually) or $49 per month (paid monthly) and it offers the basic tools and features necessary to prepare and launch your first course.

Thinkific’s basic package includes all the core and free features of the platform, including a few additional ones, like:

• Unlimited courses & students
• Live Chat support
• Coupons 
• Email students 
• Drip (scheduled) content
• Affiliate reporting
• Custom domain
• Email integrations 
• Zapier triggers 
• Manual student enrollment & exports 
• Thinkific App Store

Thinkific Pro Package – Most Popular Plan

Their pro package is priced at $79 per month (annually) or $99 per month (monthly) and it offers course creators including authors, speakers, creatives, consultants, coaches, and trainers a complete suite of tools and features necessary to create an amazing student experience.

Thinkific’s pro package includes all the basic features of the platform, including a few additional ones, like:

• Unlimited courses & students
• Live chat support
• 2 Site admin accounts
• 5 Course admins/authors
• Private & hidden courses
• Advanced course pricing options 
• Memberships and bundles 
• Certificates
• Advanced Customization 
• Priority Support
• Assignments
• Communities 
• Live Lessons with Zoom

Thinkific Premier Package

Priced at $399 per month (annually) or $499 per month (monthly), Thinkific’s premier package is designed for advanced customers who are looking to take their courses to the next level and deliver online education at scale. With this plan, there are no limitations that can stand in the way of you building an education empire.

Thinkific’s premier package includes all the pro features of the platform, including a few additional ones, like:

• Unlimited courses & students
• Live chat support
• 5 Site admin accounts 
• 15 Group Analysts 
• 50 Course admins/authors 
• Single sign on (SSO)
• Onboarding package

Thinkific Plus Package

For those of you out there who are looking for even more than the premier package can offer, there is one more plan that’s available and can be requested by contacting Thinkific directly. The plan comes with a few extra features, such as:

• Course-specific branding
• Plus API Allowances
• Custom migration planning
• Dedicated Customer Success Manager
• Dedicated sandbox site
• Advanced password complexity
• Service Level Agreement (SLA) 99.5%
• Master Services Agreement (MSA)
• Course duplication
• Robust launch preparedness review

Thinkific Review: Pros & Cons

Thinkific Pros

• Free basic plan: This is one of the main advantages of Thinkific vs. other course creation platforms. Many educators and entrepreneurs don’t a big budget when starting their business so this reason alone is enough to draw them to Thinkific.
• No transaction fees: Thinkific doesn’t charge any additional transaction charges on the payments made by students which can make a big difference for most educators.
• Instant access to your funds: Regarldess of the plan you’re using, Thinkific offers you instant access to your funds which is a feature lacking in platforms like Teachable and Udemy.
• Custom domain: For those planning to use their own domain, Thinkific provides custom domains from its Basic plans which helps you build your online presence and recognition.
• Phone support: Thinkific is one of the very few platforms offering phone support. Additionally, Thinkific’s email support is quite responsive.
• White-labeling solution: If you want to crate your own course platform you get rid of the Thinkific branding and can leverage their siftware and features with your own brand. Availabe with Growth packages.
• Third-party integrations: Thikific intergates seamlessly with some of the most popular email autoresonder and payment gateways which makes up for the lack of integrated email or marketing tools. Their app store also has around 30 apps for automation, email marketing and growth, analytics / tracking and student experience.

Thinkific Cons

• Two-step checkout process: Thinkific has a two-step checkout process where users are required to create an account before purchasing a course which could increase cart abandonments. 
• No marketplace: Thinkific doesn’t offer a course marketplace which could be a drawback when trying to marketing your course. However, Thinkific is not seeing as a marketplace and doesn’t get organic visitors looking for course which explains why mot of the educators that use the platform already have an audience or other source of traffic.
• No email marketing tool: While Thinkific comes with various third-party email integrations, it doesn’t provide its email autoresponder, which means you need to pay for a separate software.

Thinkific Review | FAQs

If you’re still left with some unanswered questions regarding the platform, its features and anything else related to it, we’ve got you covered below!

Let’s check out some of the most frequently asked questions about Thinkific that might help you decide whether the platform is a good fit for you.

1. How good is Thinkific?

Thinkific is one of the best course creation platforms available. It is designed to help educators, entrepreneurs, and business coaches promote and grow their business seamlessly thanks to their integration with multiple third-party platforms and apps.

2. Is Thinkific free forever?

If you choose the free plan, yes. However, their free plan is limited to three courses, so when you want to scale up and create more courses, you will have to upgrade to one of their paid plans.

3. Is Thinkific safe?

Yes, Thinkific is a very safe and reliable platform with secure cloud hosting and daily backups. All updates are automatic so you always have access to the latest features. It also has built-in security and SSL. Their Support and Engineering teams are trained to report, review and monitor any possible incidents that might occur so they can be resolved right away.

4. What makes Thinkific different from other course creation platforms?

Thinkific is really easy to set up and use since it doesn’t require any coding knowledge or experience. The platform is designed to provide you and your users with an incredible experience. Their Support and Engineering teams are here to help you out every step of the way so you can create and sell your courses seamlessly.

5. Can I build my entire website on Thinkific?

Thinkific gives you the freedom to build not only your courses but your entire brand within one seamless platform. You can achieve all of that without having any knowledge or experience in web design, since the platform is designed to facilitate every step of the process from start to finish, from building to marketing, selling, and so on.

6. What is Thinkific’s Growth package and how much does it cost?

Their Growth package is designed to help course creators scale and expand their business. This package is available as an add-on to Thinkific’s Pro plan and provides course creators with additional features like bulk emails, bulk enrollment, student groups, advanced segmentation, and more. The package price is set at $0.10 per active student, with the first 100 students being free.

Thinkific Review: Wrapping Things Up

Thinkific is an all-in-one platform for course creators where they can seamlessly create, market, and sell their courses to earn revenue and grow their business. Thinkific allows coaches, instructors, and creators to create engaging courses and high-converting sites without any coding or design experience.

The platform is suitable for everyone from small businesses to coaches, authors, creatives, professional trainers, universities, and larger companies. Everyone from solo edupreneurs to large corporations can get benefit from the platform and the variety of features it offers.

Even if you’re still not sure whether Thinkific is the platform for you, there are no risks in trying out their free plan so you can see for yourself if this platform is the way to go.

In fact, the numbers may vary from one blogger to another, but some blogs are able to generate up to $100,000 a month in profits or even more!

While starting your own blog back in the day required deep knowledge of web design and several internet skills, the process has become much easier today with the help of web host services like Bluehost and content management systems like WordPress.

If you want to know how to start a WordPress blog on Bluehost, you’re in for a treat!

In today’s article, we’ll walk you through a comprehensive step-by-step guide with everything you need to know to help you get your WordPress blog up and running. So without further ado, let’s dive right in!

What You Need to Start a Successful WordPress Blog

Before diving into the details of this guide, the first thing you need to do is to know what you need to get the job done right.

Ideally, if you want to start a successful self-hosted blog website, you need to have several points covered. These points are picking a domain name, subscribing to a web host plan, and installing a content management system (WordPress).

Understanding the importance of each one of these aspects is essential for the guide, so let’s start by having a quick look at each one of these requirements:

1. Getting a Domain Name

Despite being one of the simplest requirements for a blog, domain names remain the absolute most crucial part to start your blogging website or any other website for that matter!

The domain name is simply the line of text that maps you to a specific IP address, which is used by any client software out there to access your website. If that still sounds a bit confusing, let’s put that in simpler terms.

If all websites out there are properties or houses that “users” can visit, your domain name would simply be your address.

In that case, it’s the words that visitors and users type into their browser window (regardless of its type) to reach your blogging website.

A domain name usually has a “.com” or “.net” at the end of it. For example, Google’s domain name is simply “www.google.com”.

Like in real life, no two websites have the same domain names. And to ensure that, all domain names are managed by what is known as “domain registries”.

These registries rely on “registrars” to reserve these domain names for each website. According to Businesswire.com, there are more than 366.8 million domain names registered by the end of 2020’s first quarter.

Since you’ll need a new domain name, it’s essential that you make sure that it’s unique and catchy so that more visitors are attracted to the blog. Here are some valuable tips that you should consider while picking a domain name:

• Always keep your domain name as short and simple as possible
• Try to pick a domain name that ends with “.com” over other Top Level Domains like “.net” or “.org” because average users prefer it and most modern browsers shortcuts exclusively to “.com”
• Consider a domain name that has a keyword related to your niche to boost your search engine optimization (SEO) score.
• Avoid vague and unclear domain names because they’re difficult to guess by the user. Instead, make the domain name as simple and easy to spell as you can.
• Pick a domain name without obvious double letters, as a single typo is enough to take your customers to a completely different website.
• If you’re planning to expand your blog’s scope of interest, don’t limit your domain name to a specific part from the beginning. For example, you may start a blog about mobile photography, but then you want to expand to all kinds of photography. In that case, a domain name such as “mobilephotography.com” would be obsolete in the future.
• Try to consider other forms of social media, such as Facebook and Instagram to make sure that your name isn’t already taken there. It’s always best if you use the same letters for both domain names and social media accounts.
• Similarly, perform a trademark search to avoid running into any legal troubles in the long run.

TIP: You can get your domain directly and for free when you sign up through which makes the whole process way easier. You need to get at least a 12-month subscription but that also makes it cheaper. If you want to get your domain for free this way, just continue to the next step as you can buy your hosting and get the free domain all in one step.

2. Picking a Hosting Service

After settling on a domain name that is suitable for you and also not taken, you’ll need to subscribe to or buy a hosting plan.

Web hosting is a type of internet service provided by several companies and businesses in which they provide their clients with an allocated space on the internet.

Typically, there are tons of companies out there that provide web hosting services. However, for this guide, you’ll need a web host that is also compatible with WordPress, such as Bluehost.

WordPress hosting providers are those hosting websites that allow you to install WordPress with a one-click installation, so you can immediately start adding blogs and other content to your new website.

In addition to WordPress compatibility, we recommend using Bluehost for several other reasons that make it ideal for any startup online enterprise, or small business, including WordPress blogs. But more about them in the following section.

3. Installing a Content Management System (WordPress)

In addition to a domain name and a WordPress-friendly hosting service, you’ll need WordPress itself to run your content smoothly.

For those who don’t fully grasp the idea of WordPress, here’s a quick explanation of content management systems and what they do.

WordPress and other types of content management systems are internet applications that you can use to manage and customize all the content that you put out on the internet.

This allows multiple individuals to contribute to the blog site by creating, editing, and even publishing content.

The source of WordPress itself is saved in databases and is usually displayed in the form of templates, giving you the chance to benefit from a huge variety of features, such as:

• Personalizing your blog site’s appearance and style using plugins and main themes
• Allow you to put out an unlimited amount of pages and posts to enrich your blog with content
• Assign roles and privileges to various users to make the workflow smoother, such as admins, editors, writers, and more.

Ideally, there are several content management systems out there. Yet, if you start your blog, WordPress should always be your pick. Let’s talk about some of the reasons that make WordPress the overall best option out there.

• For starters, WordPress as a content management system is free for all users, giving you some of the greatest features out there that other systems would charge you money for.

• That’s why a whopping 39.5% of all websites on the planet are currently managed by WordPress, according to Search Engine Journal.

• The system that WordPress has created throughout the years is incredibly easy to work with, so you should expect to get the hang of it as soon as you start using its features.

Tip: When you get your hosting through Bluehost, you can install WordPress automatically so you don’t need to worry much about that.

A Step By Step Guide to Set Up Your WordPress Blog on Bluehost

Now that you have a better idea about what you need to start a WordPress blog on
Bluehost, it’s time to put in the work and get your website up and running.

In this section, we’ll walk you through every step you’ll need to take in order to start your blog site, providing you with recommendations and tips along the way:

Step 1: Head on to Bluehost’s Website to Get Started

To start your website creation journey, the first stop should be at your web host, which is Bluehost in that case.

Many web hosting services will require you to create an account on their database and sign in before choosing a plan and creating your website.

Bluehost tried to make things a whole lot smoother by walking you through a simpler process. Although you can always register for a new account before going through this step, following the “getting started” route of Bluehost is much simpler and more efficient.

To do that, all you need to do is head on to Bluehost’s main web page in your browser and click on the blue “get started button” button at the center.

Step 2: Choose a Suitable Plan for Your Needs

After clicking on the “Get Started” button, you’ll be prompted to another page where you need to choose the suitable Bluehost plan for your needs.

All these plans are available in the form of a monthly subscription, although you can only sign up in terms of renewable months-based terms of 12 and 36 months.

For example, if you subscribe to the 12-month plan, you’ll pay a constant fee on a monthly basis for 12 months. On the other hand, if you sign up for a 36-month plan, you’ll still pay on a monthly basis, but your contract will extend up to 36 months.

The array of Bluehost’s plans include Basic, Plus, Choice Plus, and Pro. here’s a quick look at each one of these plans and what they have to offer:

The Basic Plan

The Basic plan comes at $4.95 on a 12-months basis or $2.95 on a 36-months basis. The plan is considered the simplest one offered by Bluehost and is typically ideal for those who are starting on a strict budget or those who aren’t expecting a huge return on Investment from their blogs.

The basic plan allows you to host one website with 50 GB of data storage as well as all standard website builder features that Bluehost offers on all of its plans.

The Plus Plan

The Plus Plan is typically ideal for small businesses and ambitious startups that run a wide variety of websites. It’s also great for blog websites that expect a relatively quick profit, such as bloggers with a small base of followers and experienced authors.

The plan costs $7.45 monthly on a 12-month plan and 5.45 monthly on a 36-month plan. With this one, you’ll get unlimited websites and unlimited SSD data storage.

Additionally, you’ll get all standard website builder features of the Basic Plan as well as free access to Microsoft Office 365 for 30 days.

The Choice Plus Plan

This one is ideal for those who are looking for a maximum level of security and privacy. The Choice Plus Plan is extremely similar to the Plus Plan, except that it also offers a free automated backup for 1 year as well as additional domain privacy.

By opting for this plan, Bluehost will mask your personal information, such as your name, email address, and home address from the ICANN domain directory and replace it with their own information.

Surprisingly, the plan costs as much as the Plus Plan in both the 12-month and 36-month terms.

The Pro Plan

If you don’t mind splurging a little more money to enjoy all kinds of features and benefits that Bluehost offers, there’s no better plan to opt for than this one.

The Pro Plan costs $18.95 on a 12-month basis and as little as $13.95 on a 36 months basis. It gives you all the features available by Bluehost.

This includes unique ones like Optimized CPU resources, which guarantee an unmatched loading speed and performance to your blog website.

Additionally, the plan includes all the privacy and security features of the Choice Plus Plan in addition to assigning an exclusive IP for your account, which helps in securing your account, avoiding captchas, and facilitating online payments without compromising your privacy!

How to Choose the Best Plan for a WordPress Blog

Although there’s a huge variety of options on Bluehost, almost all of its plans are suitable for hosting a WordPress blog.

In fact, a lot of small business owners and bloggers start with the Basic plan because it’s the most affordable one out there and has all the necessary features to get the job done.

Moreover, Bluehost has a flexible policy that allows you to upgrade your plan in the future, so you don’t have to sign up for the most premium plan they offer.

One thing you should know here is that there are some hosting websites that offer basic plans for free.

However, these web hosts are severely limited and will typically do your blog more harm than good in terms of attracting traffic.

That’s why you should consider your subscription fee on the internet as a “necessary initial investment” or “upfront costs” that you’ll quickly make up after launching your site!

If you’re a beginner who doesn’t want to spend too much on the blog website, you should consider going for the Basic option and sign up for a 36 months plan.

This way, hosting your website will cost you as little as a cup of coffee every month, so it shouldn’t be a burden to bear.

Step 3: Register Your Domain Name

Once you’re settled on a plan, hover over the select button beneath the plan and click it. This should take you to the next step where you choose your domain name.

As previously mentioned, your domain name is extremely essential for the success of your blog, as search engines start their optimization process of the results from the domain name.

There are plenty of websites out there to register your domain name from. Some of these domain name providers may cost you anywhere between $9.99 to $20 or even more, depending on the domain name registrar that you’re going to use.

Lucky for you, Bluehost will provide you with a domain name that you can use completely free of charge for the first year!

This is actually one of the main reasons why Bluehost is highly recommended for beginners by a lot of experts.

While registering a domain name for your website, Bluehost will give you one of three options to pick from, so let’s have a quick look at each one of them:

Create a New Domain By Bluehost

If you don’t have a domain name, you can create one for free with Bluehost. The process is as simple as typing your domain name in the “Create a new domain” box and choosing the Top Level Domain (TLD) in the end.

The default choice by Bluehost is “.com”. However, you can choose from a wide range of popular TLDs, such as: “.net”, “.org”, “.info”, “.co.uk”, “.blog”, and more.

Once you settle on a domain name, you’ll need to check the domain name for availability before you continue. Don’t worry, Bluehost will automatically do that for you as soon as you click “Next”.

If the domain name isn’t taken, Bluehost will let you know that the domain name is available for registration.

If the domain is taken or not available by Bluehost, the website will suggest any possible alternative domains that you can use. Alternatively, you can try other domain names that you have in mind until you settle on one.

Use a Domain That You Already Own

If you already own a domain name and want to use it as an address to your blog site, Bluehost will facilitate the process.

All you have to do is type your full domain name and carry on with the process by clicking “Next” This is also a good option if you have a better deal from a third-party domain registrar, such as GoDaddy or NameCheap.

Moreover, you can use various websites that are dedicated to finding the best domain name deals on the market.

Create a Domain Later

If you still haven’t made up your mind about your domain name or your domain name registrar, Bluehost will also give you the option to skip this step for now and create the domain name later.

The option is typically found under the two boxes on the same page. Click the “I’ll create my domain later” if you want to go with this option.

This option has the added benefit of letting you take your time to research the market and come with the best possible name that isn’t taken.

Step 4: Create a New Bluehost Account

To finalize your registration and claim your reserved domain name, all three options will typically prompt you to the following step where you create your Bluehost account.

The process of creating a new Bluehost account requires you to fill out multiple boxes. All the information required in this page is mandatory, including the package information and extras.

The problem here is that some of them aren’t as straightforward as you might’ve expected during account creation.

Unlike the previous step where you could skip this step and fill it out later, this step is unskippable, so here’s what you need to know about the account creation process:

Account Information

The account information section is the simplest part of the sign up process because all you need to do here is fill out basic personal information requirements.

This includes your full name, business name (an optional requirement if you have one) as well as contact information, such as an address, phone number, email address.

Keep in mind that Bluehost will send you the receipt at the email address that you’ll provide in this section.

It’s also the email that you’re going to use to log in, reset your password, and receive any emails from Bluehost, so make sure that you have full access to the mail’s inbox.

Package Information

The package information is basically a confirmation of the plan you’ve chosen in step 2. As previously mentioned, Bluehost will require you to pay for the agreed term in advance.

Here, you’ll choose whether you’d like to sign up for 1 or 3 years, showing the total amount paid in both situations.

Some people prefer to pay in 12-month terms because it’s a shorter commitment to the blog website. However, if you’re in it for the long haul, going with the 36 months is always a worthy investment because of the additional discount that ranges between 30% to 55%.

Since SSL encryption is a free bonus on all plans, it shouldn’t add any additional cost to your plan, all the while enhancing your blog site security and giving your SEO score a boost.

Packages Extras

The package extras are quite confusing because they add several features that a lot of beginners don’t understand.

Adding these extra features to your account will increases the total costs of the monthly plan you’ve signed up for

Ideally, none of these extras are critical for a blogging website, so you can simply uncheck them all and move on to the following section.

However, some of these features are quite handy for those who would like to have a head start. If you’re interested in knowing more, here’s a brief overview of each one of these features, so you can figure out whether they’re essential for your needs:

• Codeguard Basic: This tool allows you to get automatic backups of your blog site every day, and allows you to restore any deleted content with one click. (There are other methods to backup your website content)
• Bluehost SEO Tools Start: An SEO boosting tool that will help you optimize your content to rank higher on search engines by providing you with keyword suggestions, personalized market reports, and search engine submissions.
• Single Domain SSL: This one is similar to the Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate but with an extended duration and features.
• SiteLock Security: This one provides you with extended protection against hackers, spammers, and other forms of malicious attacks using monitoring tools and malware detectors.

If you’re interested in any of the previously mentioned extras, all you have to do is check the boxes.

Keep in mind that most of these extras are billed annually, except for the single-domain SSL, which is billed every month. Also, some of these features come free with advanced plans.

Payment Information and Terms of Service

This section requires you to enter your payment information for future billing and renewals. Bluehost will accept payments in two methods, whether they’re through PayPal or using a credit card.

After filling in your billing information, make sure that you read Bluehost’s terms of service before you accept and click “submit” to head on to the next step.

Step 5: Log In to Install WordPress

After reading and accepting Bluehost’s terms of service, you’ll be prompted to a welcoming message and a confirmation of a successful purchase.

All that’s left now is to get your blog site up and running to log in so you can install WordPress. Lucky for you, this step is a pretty straightforward one because WordPress will start installing automatically in the background as soon as you log in.

Before you log in, you’ll need to finish your sign-up process by creating a password to your account. To do that, click the green button that reads “Create Your Password”.

A good tip here is to use a strong password to protect your account from brute-force hacking attacks. Ideally, the password needs to be relatively long, containing lower case letters, upper case letters, special characters or symbols, and numbers.

You can even use a random password generator tool to help you create a strong yet memorable password.

After creating the password and logging in to your Bluehost account, your WordPress installation should be underway on its own.

Meanwhile, you should receive an email from Bluehost with all the login details you need to access your account. This email will also include login information regarding WordPress login, which will come in handy in the following sections.

Step 6: Pick a WordPress Theme for Your Blog

Once WordPress is finally installed, it’ll request that you pick a theme for your blog. You can simply go ahead and pick one you like.

It’s worth noting that whatever theme you pick at that moment isn’t permanent, as you can easily change the theme later with any other one that you like more.

In fact, you can scroll down to the bottom of the page and choose to skip this step and get back to it later on, so you don’t really need to stress yourself out about choosing a theme.

Despite that, we recommend that you pick any template that you find appealing for testing purposes. This should give you a better idea about the whereabouts of different features and buttons.

When it comes to themes, WordPress offers an insanely massive collection of options that will guarantee that your blog website is unique and highly personalized.

In addition to WordPress’s own themes, there are tons of other paid themes available for download, which are more aesthetically appealing, significantly easier to use, and highly customizable.

The list of themes is constantly updating with new options coming out regularly, so make sure that you check them out whenever you want to freshen things up!

There are also some third-party theme providers that you can try out whenever you’re ready to choose a theme for your blog, such as Theme Forest.

Step 7: Log In to WordPress

Whether you’ve picked a theme or you’re going to make a decision later, you’ll now be able to access your Bluehost dashboard!

This control panel is where you’ll be able to manage all aspects related to your website(s) including domain names, email, marketplace, and more.

Your dashboard is also where you log in to your WordPress account in order to access and manage content on your blog.

The easiest way to access your blog is by clicking on the blue “Log in to WordPress” button at the top right of the screen.

However, you can skip the dashboard and access your WordPress blog directly through the browser. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open your web browser
2. Type in your blog’s domain name into the address box
3. Follow up the domain name with “/wp-admin” – The final result should be something like “https://www.[yourdomainname].com/wp-admin”
4. Click “Enter” or “Go”

This should take you to the WordPress login screen of the blog. Here, you should type in your WordPress username and password that are within the login details provided in the email you’ve received earlier from Bluehost.

Step 8: Access and Familiarize Yourself with WordPress Dashboard

When you log in to your WordPress dashboard, you’ll find several tabs on the left-hand side where you can control just about any aspect of your blog website.

Let’s introduce you to these various tabs and sections, so you can have a better idea about what they do and how you can benefit from them:

• Posts: The core of your content production. In this section, you’ll be able to compose, view, edit, arrange, and remove your blog posts and articles.
• Media: This section is where you upload and manage all the multimedia content and files that you can use in your web pages, including photos, videos, audios, slide shows, etc.
• Pages: This allows you to can add and manage your individual pages, which are typically found at the top or the bottom of the web page
• Comments: This section allows you to manage all comment-related features that are added to your blogs, including approvals and replies.
• Appearance: This is where you can search for and install new themes to personalize your WordPress blog.
• Plugins: One of the most useful sections of WordPress. Here, you can find and install plugins, which are add-ons (free or paid) that are used to add new features to your blog or improve existing ones.

Step 9: Install WordPress Plugins

If there’s anything that WordPress really stands out at, it would be the huge range of plugins that you can use to add tons of features to your blog.

These can be anything from facilitating your job and making it quicker and more efficient to collecting a substantial amount of data that you can use to maximize your benefits from WordPress and Bluehost.

However, you should know that picking the right plugins is quite essential because if you add too many plugins, it may slow down your website. On the other hand, adding too little will have you miss out on essential features for growth.

To add a new plugin to your WordPress blog, click on the “Plugins” tab in the dashboard and select “Add New”.

There, you can either search for specific plugins that you prefer or check the most popular ones on the plugins market.

Pick the most suitable plugins for your needs and click “Install Now”. Wait until the button turns to “Activate” and press again to finalize the installation.

Here’s a quick look at some of the most popular plugins for new blog websites:

• UpdraftPlus: This one allows you to create backups of your website for free, saving you the additional costs of extra features from Bluehost
• All in One SEO: An excellent tool that will help you optimize your content so that it ranks higher on search engines.
• Broken Link Checker: Scans your website to alert you for broken and outdated links.
• Google Analytics Integration: An ultra-essential add-on to the WordPress dashboard that shows you various analytics regarding your visitors and what they do on your website.
• Social Warfare: One of the most efficient plugins out there that adds those nifty social media sharing buttons, which helps in increasing your traffic and followers base.
• Wordfence Security: One of the best security plugins on the WordPress store, which protects you against hacks, spam, and malware. It’s also a decent alternative to Bluehost’s SiteLock Security.

Finally, always make sure to update the plugins and remove unnecessary ones to keep your dashboard skimmable and prevent unnecessary plugins from slowing your blog down.

Step 10: Create Your First WordPress Blog

With that said, you have now started your first WordPress blog site on Bluehost. Now that you have successfully chosen your theme and installed your plugins, it’s finally time to start writing new blogs and enrich your website with content!

Writing your first blog post isn’t only a great way to get yourself started, but it’s also a great way to familiarize yourself with the document editor and how it works.

Since writing articles and blog posts is the primary purpose of launching your website, let’s end this guide by walking you through the process of writing a standard blog.

To start your first blog, head on to the WordPress dashboard and click on “Posts”, then “Add New”.

1. Add a Title

Having a proper title is one of the most essential SEO points in a blog post. Make sure that your title is descriptive of what the article is about.

To add a title to your WordPress article, you need to press the “Edit Snippet Button”. This will open a window where you can insert the title, description, and meta description of the article.

Alternatively, you’ll find a box in the editor with “Add Title” written in large font. Click on this box and type in your title.

2. Add Headers and Paragraphs

The space under the title is where you write all your content for the blog. This is where SEO tools come in handy to help you optimize your articles to rank on search engines.

Luckily, the WordPress editor is incredibly easy to use and you shouldn’t find any trouble working with it.

Make sure that you keep your paragraphs short and use plenty of headers to enhance the readability of your articles.

Ideally, there isn’t a toolbar to add headers in the WordPress editor. Instead, you hover over the paragraph and several options will show up, which includes adding headers, bulleted lists, and inserting images.

3. Formatting and Style

Similar to headers, formatting is typically hidden as long as you’re not typing a paragraph. However, as soon as you start writing one, the formatting toolbar will pop up.

This one has all the other features that you can use to style your article, such as colors, fonts, font size, bold, italic, underline, inserting links, aligning, and more!

4. Adjust Publishing Settings

Once you’re finished with the writing, you’ll need to publish the article so that it shows up on the website.

Ideally, the publishing settings are found on the right-hand side of the WordPress editor. The default setting for publishing the article is “immediately”. This option means that the article will show up as soon as you save your article and click the “publish” button on the top right.

However, WordPress gives you the ability to schedule your content by publishing the article at different times.

To adjust this setting, you need to click on the “immediately” button and choose the date and time where you want the article to be published.

Moreover, you can change the visibility settings of the post, which is set to public by default, allowing anyone to view the article. The other settings available are:

• Password Protected: the post will only be available to those who know the password to the post. In that case, when a visitor clicks the post, a password box will pop up before letting them in
• Private: The post will only be visible to the owner as well as other administrators that you assign on the website.

In addition to changing the visibility settings, you can also set the post to show up on the front page by clicking on the “Stick the Post to the Front Page” option.

5. Deleting the Posts

If you want to remove any articles that you’ve previously posted, simply navigate to “posts” then “all posts” and choose the one you want to delete. After that, click on the “move to trash” button, then click “update”.

Getting Familiar with Bluehost

One thing you need to know about choosing your hosting service is that it’s pretty much as essential as picking a landlord for your house or business.

This is because the hosting platform affects your website’s loading speed, intuitiveness, uptime, performance, and more!

In other words, choosing the web host has a massive impact on the success of your blog website. That’s why you need to take extra care while picking one.

While there’s a ton of hosting websites out there that you can use to host your WordPress blog, a lot of experts and users recommend Bluehost as the best overall option on the market for a variety of reasons.

Let’s have an in-depth look at the web hosting service and what it has to offer:

About Bluehost

Bluehost is one of the largest web hosts on the market that is currently considered a “one-stop-shop” for all kinds of services related to creating, designing, and hosting a WordPress website.

The company was founded in Utah by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth in 2003. The co-founders of Bluehost have immense experience in building websites since 1996.

Not only that but the company is also known for hiring some engineers who have previously worked on the WordPress software itself, making them one of the biggest experts in the WordPress hosting industry.

It’s worth mentioning that in 2010, the company was acquired by Endurance International Group (EIG), which is a renowned IT services conglomerate. Currently, the company’s CEO is Suhaib Zaheer, who has been leading the company since 2017.

The company is now the host of choice for over 2,000,000 websites on the internet and has its official headquarters based in Burlington, Massachusetts, and has over 700 employees in its facilities.

What Makes Bluehost Unique

While choosing a web hosting service, budget isn’t the only thing that you need to consider. However, when you’re a beginner, getting a decently priced service that gives you the highest value for money is critical for your success.

In this case, a hosting service like Bluehost should be exactly what you’re looking for, as they take out the difficult parts of the process, so you can focus on building up your starting business.

As previously mentioned, there are many web hosting services out there, so why do all these experts and blog website owners recommend Bluehost over other options? Let’s find out:

1. WordPress Recommends It

WordPress has a specific set of requirements that are essential for any web host to meet to become eligible for the services. Yet, there are tons of hosting services out there that have these requirements met.

However, to make the most out of the WordPress features and options, you need much more than the basic requirements for compatibility, and that’s where Bluehost rises head and shoulders above the competition!

Since 2005, WordPress has been recommending Bluehost as the most WordPress-optimized service, calling them “The Ultimate WordPress Platform”

2. Affordable Prices with an Excellent Bang for the Buck

To make your blogging website profitable, you need to keep all your spendings in check and avoid unnecessary aspects that can make you lose a lot of money.

Since a web hosting service is one of the first places where you need to spend money, you must make sure that you’ve made the right investment.

The problem with low-priced web hosts is that they’re either extremely limited or difficult to work with. Additionally, some of them don’t support data transfer if you’ve decided to migrate to a better host, making the transition process a nightmare!

That’s why it is always recommended that you start with a decent host that also happens to be affordable, so you don’t have to worry much about migrating to a better host later on.

Luckily, Bluehost is one of the most affordable web hosts out there. Meanwhile, it gives you more value for your money than almost all other options out there.

Not only that, but it also gives you multiple free bonus features that other hosts may charge you up to $20 a year for, such as a free domain, email accounts with custom names, global Content delivery network (CDN), and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates.

Since a lot of people have subscribed to and tested out Bluehost services, it’s fairly clear now for everyone that the company also doesn’t have any kind of hidden fees that they don’t tell you about.

Moreover, Bluehost offers a 30 days money-back guarantee, so you can easily cancel your subscription without losing your money or having to go through extensive forms or calls.

3. Incredibly Intuitive and Easy to Use

Bluehost is designed and optimized so that it can be used even by beginners who have little to no experience in building websites or hosting them.

The dashboard of Bluehost supports a cPanel dashboard, which is known for its simplicity and ease of use.

Using these simple “drag and drop” style menus, you’ll be able to create a suitable blog-friendly website that is also functional and easy to navigate.

4. Incredible Performance

The performance of a web host is one of the golden standards to measure its quality. After all, it doesn’t matter if you have the best blog website on the internet if no one is able to access it.

Among the most essential aspects of performance for any web host are uptime, speed, and data infrastructure.

Uptime stands for the time that your website’s server is up and running vs. the time it isn’t, and it’s usually measured in percentage.

For example, a 99% uptime means that your website is down for 14 minutes and 24 seconds every day or 6 hours and 43 minutes every month. Downtime means potential customers lost, which is why you should aim for the highest possible uptime.

Thanks to the incredible infrastructure that Bluehost has with tier 3 certification data centers, the hosting service guarantees up to 99.99% uptime.

This means that your blog will be up and running almost all the time, with a maximum downtime of 4.3 minutes a month.

These numbers are confirmed by Hosting Facts, which measured the uptime of Bluehost from December 2018 all the way to September 2019.

5. Excellent Customer Support

Web hosting is the kind of service you’re consistently going to need some help with. That’s why you always need to take the customer support level into account.

Luckily, that’s another aspect that makes Bluehost stand out among other service providers. Bluehost has a 24/7 support policy when it comes to customer services that span across all support avenues. This includes email, live chat, support tickets, and even telephone lines!

Moreover, the company has a help desk with several in-house technical support members that are highly knowledgeable, helpful, and trained to maintain the highest level of professionalism while working.

FAQs

How much profit should you expect from blogging using WordPress?

The answer to this question depends on a wide variety of factors that may have direct or indirect impacts on the success of your blog. 

The amount of success you should expect from blogging is directly correlated with the amount of time, effort, and commitment you’re willing to put into your blog. Additionally, different sources have different estimates regarding the average revenue of blog websites.

Despite that, there are some speculations about the amount of monetary profit that you should expect from running a blogging business online.

For example, According to Financial Samurai, 60% of bloggers who are consistently publishing strategic content at a rate of 3 posts a week should expect their earnings to rise from as little as $1,000 – $10,000 on year 1 to more than a whopping $500,000 – $1,000,000 on their 10th year!

How Much Does WordPress Cost?

WordPress in itself is a free content management system software. However, it’s essential that you know that there are two versions that exist of this software. One of them is known as “WordPress.org” while the other is known as “WordPress.com”.

The WordPress.org version is the open-source software that is available for downloading and installing free of charge. When using this version, you’ll be hosting your own website using a web host, such as Bluehost, and rely on WordPress to manage and customize your content.

On the other hand, the WordPress.com version is a paid service that is relatively easier to work with but is quite restricted.

You also don’t own your website or domain name by using the .com version, which is why WordPress.org is the recommended version.

It’s also worth mentioning that, despite being free to download and install, setting up your website with some features from WordPress isn’t necessarily free. This includes themes, plugins, analytics, security, and protection.

Wrap Up

There you have it! A complete guide that shows you how to start a WordPress blog on Bluehost in simple steps.

Bluehost is specifically designed so that anyone can use it regardless of the level of expertise they have in the topic of web hosting or creating websites using WordPress, so you shouldn’t have any hard time following this guide to enjoy a one of a kind WordPress Blog!

As you can see, starting a website requires a domain, a website host, and a website builder. Luckily, since Bluehost offers almost all these necessary features in one package, you technically don’t need anything else to get yourself started.

Now that you know more about Bluehost, their benefits, and how to use their services to launch your WordPress blog, all that’s left to get yourself started is to head on to their website and subscribe to one of their plans!

If you’re a beginner who’s still testing things out, there’s no shame in starting with the Basic plan that gives you all the necessary features.

Once you’re ready, Bluehost gives you the ability to the Plus, Choice Plus, or Pro plans anytime! Click here to find out more about Bluehost’s offers and plans to get yourself started!

Either way, you’ve come to the right place! Today’s article is a complete guide on how to start a food blog. From choosing a niche and naming the blog, all the way to promoting and monetizing your content, we’re here to walk you through every step of the process.

1. Choose a Food Blog Niche and Name

The very first step of creating a food blog is figuring out your niche. If you observe any successful food blog, you’ll see it focuses on a specific niche and sticks to providing relative content to that niche.

Why choose a food blog niche

Well, because if you dab into everything, you won’t be remembered for anything. If you keep things random, you won’t be the go-to blog for a certain cuisine or style of cooking.

With a niche-oriented food blog, your readers will have a good idea of what to expect. They’ll trust that you know what you’re doing because you mostly talk about that specific area. So when they have a question about it, it’s you who they’re going to ask.

How to choose a niche for a food blog

The question now is, what food niche should you pick? The key is to choose something you’re passionate about and won’t get bored of pursuing. Selecting a niche that you love also makes it easier for you to keep creating content and coming up with new ideas to incorporate into your blog.

Luckily, there are tons of food and food-related niche ideas, so finding one for your blog shouldn’t be too much trouble. Here are a few examples of food blog niches to get you started:

• Few-ingredient meals
• Quick desserts
• Vegan dinners
• Affordable recipes for students

While deciding on a niche, keep in mind that being more specific is better. Also, don’t pick something with absolutely no competition because if it’s not being talked about, chances are it’s not interesting enough to lots of readers.

That won’t be very profitable now, is it?

Instead, go for topics that are talked about but have nowhere to call home. A good idea here would be surveying different forums to find out what people are currently into.

Of course, you won’t find that everyone is invested in the same area of food. To narrow down your choices, make a list of the 3 most popular niches that you also have a passion for.

Then, for each of these niches, make a new list of topics you can discuss and create content around. From here, choose the richest niche with the most ideas. This way, you’ll be able to pump out content regularly.

Finally, ask yourself the following:

• Am I passionate about this niche?
• Do I see myself talking about it one year from now?
• Are people searching for topics that niche online?
• Can it make me money? Does it offer room for participating in affiliate programs or selling digital niche-related products later on?

If the answer is yes to all of the above questions, then congratulations, you got yourself a food blog niche!

How to choose a food blog name

Giving your food blog a good name is one of the most crucial steps you’ll encounter when starting brand new. You need to put quite a lot of thought into the process of naming your food blog because that name has to accomplish multiple goals as follows:

• Your food blog’s name should be catchy and easy to recall
• Your food blog’s name should be meaningful
• Your food blog’s name should be unique to stand out among the ocean of other food blogs online.

To help you choose a food blog name, we decided to share a few tips on how to come up with a name that’ll check all the boxes we listed above.

1. Decide your food blog niche first

Giving your food blog a name should happen after you’ve decided on the niche you’ll be talking about. Trying to come up with a name before knowing exactly the type of food blog you’ll be starting is simply not going to work.

You need to figure out your specific niche so you can pick a name that doesn’t only clue readers in about the content you’ll be uploading but also stands out among competitors and the millions of other blogs on the web.

2. Draw inspiration from already existing food blogs

Once you’ve decided on your food blog niche, search for other blogs online that belong to the same niche. This will help you get an idea of the type of names that are popular among readers.

Check if there’s a theme in common between names or a certain number of syllables that seems to catch on quickly with people. You may notice a shared structure in those popular names, so you may want to apply the same structure when coming up with yours.

Seeking inspiration from other successful food blogs won’t just help you in naming your blog, but it can also be a great opportunity for you to find some elements design- and content-wise that’d be beneficial to add to your blog.

3. Create a word bank of vocabulary related to food and your blog niche

Once you’re done getting inspiration, it’s time to sit down and do some brainstorming. Create a vocabulary bank of words related to your blog’s specific niche as well as food in general.

Such brainstorming sessions are an effective method of coming up with as many ideas as possible until you have a hefty bag to pull from. This allows you great freedom to play around with combinations of words until you find one that clicks!

The best way to create a word bank is by making two separate lists: one for general words related to cooking, kitchen, eating, and food, and one for words focusing on your specific niche.

Be sure not to exclude anything that pops into your head. Write down or type whatever words or phrases you can think of — just let them flow.

If you’re planning on using a name generator for your food blog, having a rich word bank at your disposal can be a huge help as you get to feed it different words you like and wait for it to spit out various name ideas.

4. Stay away from generic word choices

Next, you should review your lists of words and try to make them as non-generic as possible. This means taking out the words that seem too general or “regular”.

One helpful tool you can use to spice up your word bank and include a few more interesting options is a thesaurus. There are several thesaurus websites online that can help you with this task.

5. Mix and match to formulate the ideal food blog name

With your extensive lists of words, it’s finally time for you to mix and match words until you arrive at a name that you love.

This may take a while, so be prepared to spend some time trying out a lot of word combinations. You don’t want to jump on the first decent option that comes up. Instead, simply save it and continue trying other combinations of words.

This will give you a chance to compare the names so you can pick the best one. During this step, keep the following tips in mind:

• Use other add-on words such as conjunctions to better round out the combination of words. But make sure this part sounds natural and not forced.
• When mixing and matching words, use words from your general list with your niche-related words to give readers a quick idea of what you usually talk about in your blog.
• Try to use alliteration. This is a fantastic way to get your food blog’s name stuck in people’s heads. Just think of how easily you can recall franchise names like Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ Donuts. This also applies to food blogs such as the popular Budget Bytes and Love and Lemons.
• Don’t be afraid to play with your words. People are more likely to remember a blog’s name with an interesting play on words like a play on words or a pun than a “safe” name.
• Include your name in the mix. This can spice up your name generation process and it’s more common than you think in the world of blogs. Throwing your name into your food blog’s name can give it a personal feel that many people like and associate with trustworthiness.

2. Set Up Your Food Blog

We’re now at the most technical part of starting a food blog, which is setting it up to go online. This stage is critical in the success of your food blog because it determines how readers see and interact with your content. So without further ado, let’s discuss how to set up your food blog:

Step 1: Buy the domain name

Now that you’ve chosen a name for your food blog, try not to get too attached until you make sure it’s available as a domain name. The standard domain suffix is “.com” and you may need to try a few potential names till you land one that’s available in .com.

Remember not to include hyphens or any special punctuation marks in your domain name. You want to keep it as simple as possible so it’s easy to remember.

Step 2: Find a web hosting service

Next, you need to seek a reliable web host to support your food blog website. We recommend you subscribe to an affordable hosting plan at first, preferably one that installs WordPress automatically like Bluehost.

There are a bunch of details you need to consider when choosing a web hosting service, so be sure to do your homework first. Examples of reliable web hosts include GoDaddy and Bluehost.

Step 3: Install WordPress

WordPress is a standard blogging software in the industry. The ease of this step depends on the web hosting service you subscribed to.

If you got one that automatically installs WordPress like Bluehost, then you’re good to go right away. If not, you can manually install WordPress from the company’s website. Either way, it won’t cost you extra money.

Once you’ve installed WordPress and logged into your site, open ‘Settings’ then ‘Permalink Settings’. On this page, select the permalink structure to be ‘Post name’ so that each permalink links to a specific post.

Click ‘Save’. Now get ready to make your food blog look stylish.

Step 4: Choose a WordPress theme

This is one of the more fun steps in your food blog setup journey. Here’s how to install a WordPress theme:

1. Hover your cursor over ‘Appearance’ in the sidebar.
2. Select ‘Themes’. Choose whether you want to browse the available free themes or upload a theme.
3. Hover your cursor over any theme to get links for previewing and installing it.

The look and feel of your food blog directly depend on your WordPress theme. So, you must choose wisely. To help you pick the right theme for your website, here’s a list of points to consider:

• Your theme needs to have a well-thought design, meaning it should look up to your standards while providing enough features for a user-friendly experience for both the creator (that’s you!) and the readers. Not to mention, it should be coded by an expert who knows their stuff.
• Your theme should be responsive. This will allow your readers to smoothly view and interact with your site regardless of the platform they’re using (smartphone, computer, or tablet). We all know how annoying it can be when you have to zoom and pinch over the screen to read posts properly.
• Your theme should be optimized to rank high in search results. This goes hand in hand with the aspect of a well-designed theme since such themes will have no issues appearing frequently in the top spots of search results.
• Your theme should be creator-friendly. This means including simple, built-in design options to allow content creators and blog owners to customize their sites and change basic elements without having to deal with complex coding. This will save you tons of time and frustration!
• Your theme needs to offer helpful customer support so whenever you encounter technical problems, you can get solutions as soon as possible.

In addition to the tips above, we have some tips to help you ensure the design of your food blog is user-friendly. You can apply them when you’re selecting the settings of your WordPress theme:

• Make sure all the elements of your site’s design are clean and clutter-free to provide a smooth navigation experience. This helps visitors quickly find what they came for.
• Incorporate the following elements in all your site’s pages: RSS feed prominent links, email subscription feature, and social media shortcuts after each post to facilitate sharing your content.
• Enable commenting without asking readers to log in or require CAPTCHAs.

Step 5: Sign up to Google and set up tools

The next step in setting up your food blog is to sign up to Google and create an email address with Gmail.

Your food blog is better off with a separate account and email because this adds to its credibility and professionalism. Don’t go using an old account and email that you use personally or for other work.

Once you have your Google account and email ready, you can set up the following tools:

• To help you gain a deeper insight into your audience and keep track of your site traffic, set up Google Analytics.
• To help make sure your food blog is working properly, set up Google Search Console.

Step 6: Download and install WordPress plugins

The final step of setting up your food blog is to polish up your site by downloading and installing WordPress plugins. Here’s how:

• On your WordPress dashboard, locate ‘Plugins’ in the sidebar.
• Hover your cursor over ‘Plugins’ then select ‘Add New’.
• Find the ‘Search Plugins’ option and type in the name of the plugin you want to download and install.
• Once the search result appears and you find the plugin, click ‘Install Now’ and proceed as directed to configure the settings of the plugin.

Plugins can be quite valuable as they often provide features that may not be included by default in your WordPress theme. Here are a few plugins we recommend considering for your food blog:

• Tasty Recipes — although this plugin costs some cash, the services it offers are well worth the price. You get a beautiful format for your recipes with smooth scaling, star ratings, search engine optimization (SEO), a print-friendly layout, and a lot more. Not to mention, this plugin helps promote the appearance of your recipe’s photo in search results, which makes readers more likely to click on your blog and check out what you have to say.
• Yoast SEO — helps you tackle the bases of SEO, which can be a complicated department for content creators and blog owners to deal with when first starting. Keep in mind that you’ll need to invest some time to complete all the setup steps to get it running smoothly. Don’t forget to use this plugin to set up the Google tools we talked about in the previous step.
• jQuery Pin It Button For Images — allows your visitors to easily pin images on your site via a ‘Pin It’ button that shows up when you hover over any picture.

Very straightforward to use, this plugin lets you choose which images you want to feature the ‘Pin It’ button, which images you don’t, the source of the pin description, as well as whether or not you want the button on the home page, certain pages, specific posts, or category pages.

What’s more, you get to select the level of transparency according to your needs and even use your preferred design of the Pinterest button.

• Akismet —  reviews comments to filter out spam, preventing the publishing of malicious content on your blog. The best part? It’s free and doesn’t require CAPTCHAs.
• A plugin for Share Buttons — you can easily find a bookmarking plugin for social media platforms that’ll add share buttons for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and more. This is necessary to help spread the word about your food blog.
• Subscribe To Comments Reloaded — when you reply to a visitor’s comment, this plugin will have the visitor receive your reply via email. This feature can be rather beneficial in boosting engagement.

3. Create the Content and Start Blogging!

Now that your food blog is all set up, what you need to do next is create the content so you can start blogging. To make things easier for you, we’ll talk about the content you need to put up in two main categories: written and visual.

How to create written content

Before all else, you need to know how to properly write a recipe. After all, recipes are the cornerstone of any food blog.

• Make sure to check out this article later on how to write articles that rank on Google

First, you should write the name of the recipe. Then, you should include the following details if appropriate: number of servings, serving size, prepare time, and total time.

Next, comes the core of the recipe, which consists of two main parts: the list of ingredients and the preparation instructions. Here are some general guidelines and tips for writing each section:

The ingredient list

• All the ingredients should be listed in the order you use them in the step-by-step directions for preparation.
• If in line with the order of use, the most important ingredients should be listed before the less significant ones.
• Keep consistent about the format of your measurements. For example, if you use abbreviations for units such as tbsp for tablespoon, keep using the same abbreviations throughout the entire recipe.
• If the recipe consists of multiple elements, divide the ingredient list using a heading for each element. For example, the ingredient list for a pie recipe should be divided into ‘crust’ and ‘filling’.
• If the recipe calls for the use of multiple ingredients at the same time (for example, when mixing dry ingredients in baking), list the ingredients by volume where the largest volume goes first.
• Never type two numerals back to back. In this case, you must separate the second value in parenthesis. You’ll often encounter this when talking about the sizes of containers or packages.
• For ingredients that start with a letter rather than a number, capitalize the first letter only.
• If the recipe calls for easily prepared ingredients such as chopped carrots or beaten eggs, list the technique next to the ingredient in the list. For example, “1 large carrot, chopped” or “1 tablespoon butter, melted”.
• If the recipe calls for the same ingredient to be multiple times, the ingredient list should mention the total amount of that ingredient at the spot where it’s first used according to the instructions, followed by the word ‘divided’. Then, in the preparation portion of the recipe, specify the amount used of the ingredient when it comes up in each step. place in the ingredient list where it is first used, then add “divided.” In the method part of the recipe, indicate the amount used at each step.
• Always call ingredients with their generic names, not their brand names.

The preparation instructions

• Mention the size of the cookware whenever helpful. For example, “a large saucepan or a small mixing bowl”.
• Be as concise and to the point as you can. There’s no need to write full sentences.
• Whenever you’re writing instructions cooking on a stove-top, indicate the heat level.
• State the cooking times, whether approximate or exact. Include descriptions to hint at the doneness if applicable. For example, “Fry 2 minutes per side, or until golden brown”.
• Like you did with the ingredient list if the recipe calls for multiple elements, divide the instructions using a heading for each element. For example, the preparation steps for a pie recipe should be broken up into ‘crust’ and ‘filling’.
• Each step should be a paragraph on its own. For example, if you’re talking about cutting dough to make different cookie shapes, all the directions for that step should be in one paragraph.
• Save the serving directions till the last step. This includes garnishing, plating, and serving temperature.
• If there are instructions related to storage, these should be in the very best step.

Non-recipe content

If you’re wondering what else you can write besides recipes, you have two major directions to consider: writing about the food itself or sharing stories.

Writing about food

Here are a few ideas of writing materials surrounding food itself:

• Tips on how to perfect certain cooking techniques.
• Tips regarding the storage of various foods.
• Talk about your favorite ingredients in specific categories.
• Talk about traditional ingredients and preparation methods of a recipe.

Sharing food-related stories

Here are a few ideas for how to relate stories to food:

• Write a story describing what made you want to make the recipe.
• Write a story about what inspired you to make the recipe or what it means to you.
• Write a story about the person who gave you the recipe from when they served it to you.
• Write a story about the event or season associated with the recipe.

How to create visual content

In addition to recipes and food talk, a successful food blog should also feature visual content. This mainly consists of pictures of food, so we decided to give you a few tips to help you get started with food photography:

• Try to take photos of food only in natural lighting. Avoid using the flash on your phone or camera, lamps, or overhead lights.
• Take several test shots from different angles to make sure you find the best lighting. Move around the food and remember that you don’t have to take photos in the kitchen only. The lighting may be best in your living room in the morning and your bedroom in the afternoon.
• Be sure to take several photos from various orientations (top, side, and angled views) so you can pick your favorite shots when it’s time to post.
• Keep clutter around the food to a minimum. This means removing unnecessary items from the shot such as utensils, napkins, ingredients’ containers, or anything else that doesn’t add to the aesthetics of the image.
• While you want to focus on the most important part of the dish, don’t zoom in so much that visitors can’t recognize the food.
• If your pictures often come out blurry, try the following:
  • Train yourself to hold the camera with a steadier grip.
  • Mount your camera on a tripod that supports remote control.
  • Try taking shots with a higher shutter speed by opening up your aperture and/or finding a room that lets in more light.
• If the colors of the food in your pictures are often not true to life, you can resolve the issue via image editing software. In many cases, adjusting the white balance of the photo can fix your food looking too pink, yellow, green, or blue. Also, try the RAW format in shooting to make it easier to adjust the color balance when editing later on.

4. Promote Your Blog and Grow Your Audience

Now that you’ve started blogging and pumping out high-quality content, you need to promote your food blog to gain a wider audience. Contrary to what most people think, the most important popularity metric is the number of followers, not the number of page views.

Here are some pointers to help you drive traffic to your site:

• Use SEO tactics to rank high in search results. Although this is one of the most effective ways to boost traffic, it’s also one of the most challenging because competition is usually quite stiff.
• Promote your blog on traditional media platforms such as magazines and newspapers. A lot of folks say that these platforms are outdated, but food blogs that get featured on such mediums get much more exposure than ones that don’t.
• Share your blog on social media. This is probably the easiest way to get the word out about your food blog since there’s a whole bunch of social media sites with millions of people on them. Not to mention, most social sites offer paid promotion services to ensure your content reaches the audience that finds it most relevant.
• Employ email marketing to keep people who don’t browse the web every day engaged.
• Do guest posts on already established blogs. This is a wonderful way to build connections in the industry and widen your target audience.

How to Use Social Media to Promote your Food Blog

The following are the top 4 social media networks where you should focus your promotional materials:

• Facebook — with more than 2 billion active users per month, this social network is invaluable when it comes to promoting content and growing your followers count. You can use it to post in relevant groups,  start a page for your blog, and do targeted ads.
• Twitter — use it to start conversations with individuals who share your interest, link posts back to your blog, as well as reply to questions from potential collaborators and followers.
• Instagram — you can share pretty pictures of your recipes to attract millions of visual-oriented users on this site.
• Pinterest — as a search engine that relies on visuals, this is probably the biggest traffic source for bloggers. You can use it to feature pins that link visitors to your blog.

5. Monetize Your Food Blog

Once you begin generating good traffic, go through the following methods to make money off of your food blog:

• Allow ads to appear on your site using programs and plugins such as Google AdSense and WordPress Ad-inserter.
• Consider being an Amazon affiliate where you directly link your visitors to products available on Amazon.
• Sign up for affiliate programs with other websites and services that are relevant to the content you present and your audience. For example, a fresh meat delivery subscription or a vegan food delivery subscription.
• Consider creating and selling digital product related to your niche like recipe e-books, meal plans and shopping lists.
• Finally, when your food blog is established with a solid base of visitors, you can feature sponsored posts for companies looking to promote their products to foodies and get reviews from popular food bloggers to gain market credit.

Check out this article later for more ways to monetize your blog.

Wrap Up

As you can tell by now, you need to invest time, energy, and money to start a food blog. Becoming a successful food blogger doesn’t just happen when you post recipes and wait around, it’s a whole process that requires you to do a lot of research in departments of web design, marketing, and finance.

But as complicated and frustrating it can be, starting a food blog is a fantastic way to develop a wide set of skills (inside and outside the kitchen), share your passion for food, make extra money, and most importantly, have fun!

According to reports, over 70% of college students are stressed about their finances. Being “broke” in college is so widespread that it’s now considered the new norm. Sad, but unfortunately true.

The good news is that there are multiple ways to earn a passive income in between classes. In this article, we’ll show you some of the best passive income ideas for students. Once you commit yourself to a certain strategy, it can be a tremendous way to make long-term income and create financial security while in college. 

What Is Passive Income?

Passive income is income that requires little to no effort to earn and maintain. It flows in regular or semi-regular intervals without direct intervention. As it runs on auto-pilot most of the time, money is still earned even while you’re sleeping.

This type of income stream allows students to earn a little extra cash without having to work a part-time job. College students rarely have time in between schoolwork and projects, which is why passive income is ideal. It doesn’t interfere with school priorities and often takes minimal upkeep.

In some cases, passive income takes a lot of initial effort and upfront work. It’s quite similar to building a business; it’s all hands on deck until it stands on solid ground and runs by itself.

Despite its ‘get-rich-quick’ appeal, passive income almost always involves hard work in the beginning. But once you overcome the initial hurdle, you’ll reap the rewards in the form of steady-flowing passive income.

Passive Income vs. Active Income: What’s the Difference?

Students often use “passive income” and “side hustle” (AKA active income) interchangeably. However, passive income and active income are two completely different methods of making money.

Examples of side hustles include hourly photography sessions, driving for Uber, and writing freelance. On the other hand, passive income involves investing in real estate, renting out your car, and publishing a book. Notice the difference?

As mentioned earlier, passive income involves making money on auto-pilot. It doesn’t take a considerable effort to run. Most of the time, it’s earned through investment or work completed in the past. Due to this, passive income is often dubbed as the “holy grail of income streams.” It can sustain your lifestyle for a number of years if done right.

Active income is earned through an equal exchange of time and effort. This includes hourly wages, tips, commissions, salaries, etc. It’s the regular 9 to 5 job. Although passive income is preferred by working individuals, many choose active income because it’s secure. Passive income doesn’t always bring in money, but active income almost always does.

For students, passive income is the best way to make money. This type of income stream allows them to focus and put all their efforts into their studies rather than worrying about dividing their time earning money. 

Best Passive Income Ideas for Students

Now that you know the difference between active and passive income, here are some of the best passive income ideas to try, from investing to social media.

1.   Make YouTube Videos

YouTube is a great place to make passive money. You can rake in hundreds of dollars per video if it goes viral. If most of your viewers watch the ads on your videos, you’ll earn about $4 per 1,000 views. It’s not much, but you’ll still have enough to buy yourself a new pair of jeans or two at the end of the month.

Becoming YouTube famous isn’t your goal here—making passive money is. Therefore, you don’t have to dedicate much of your time and energy to your channel.

If your YouTube channel is already monetized, upload an educational and/or entertaining video every week or two. Once your videos gain a bit of traction, you’ll be amazed by how quickly they can turn into a profitable source of passive income.

Usually, per every dollar paid by advertisers, you’ll receive a commission of 55%. If most of your viewers watch the ads on your videos, you’ll earn about $4 per 1,000 views.

2.   Stream on Twitch

If you play a lot of video games in your free time, streaming might be up your alley. Twitch streamers have multiple ways of making money, including advertisements, donations, subscriptions, and sponsorships. Depending on your average view count, you can make anywhere between $50 to $1500 per video.

When you’re in the mood to play games, pull out your camera and record yourself. Some of the most popular and most-viewed games on Twitch include the following:

• GTA V
• Fortnite
• Minecraft
• Call of Duty: Warzone
• CS: GO
• Dead by Daylight
• Valorant

Playing these games increases your chances of people viewing your content. However, don’t be afraid to play other games too. Some communities, while small, have dedicated viewers that’ll keep coming back if you set a streaming schedule. Play whatever you have available like you normally do in your spare time.

3.   Rent Your Place

If you’re going away for spring break, renting your house, apartment, or even a single room (basement, attic, guest room, etc.) is a brilliant way to earn passive money.

Storage spaces like closets, garages, and RV pads can be rented out by small companies and businesses that have run out of space. Websites such as Airbnb, VRBO, and Vacasa help you rent or lease an apartment/house space on short-term contracts. You can also list your space on peer-to-peer platforms and Facebook groups.

Depending on the location, space, and demand, you can make anywhere between $500 to $2000 a month.

4.   Rent Your Car

Too busy with schoolwork or other campus activities to use your car? If your answer is yes, rent it out to others and earn some passive income while you’re at it!

The amount of money you earn depends on your location and the type of vehicle you’re planning to rent out. Apps like Turo, Kayak, and Virtuo allow you to turn your car into a short-term rental vehicle. You can also rent out your car through trusted peer-to-peer platforms.

Gain and retain clients by ensuring your car is clean, roadworthy, and in an overall excellent condition. Once you’ve established a decent clientele, gradually raise your vehicle’s rates. Renting your car allows you to passively earn up to $1000 every month.

5.   Rent Your Personal Stuff

Do you have a camera, a gaming console, a bike, an extra laptop, or even unused college books? If so, earn passive money by renting them out to trusted individuals.

You can rent out just about anything under the sun. Popular websites such as Fat Llama, Loanables, and Rentah allow you to list things like tools, sporting products, electronics, instruments, furniture, and more.

You can also rent out clothes and accessories you don’t need. Some people are more than willing to rent used clothes for a day or two rather than buying them new. This is the perfect opportunity for fashionistas and individuals with closets full of designer clothes they don’t want to get rid of.

Style Lend and Rent My Wardrobe are websites that make renting out your clothes possible.

6.   Start a Blog

Blogging helps budding entrepreneurs earn passively through sponsored posts, affiliate links, courses, book deals, and more. You can also use it for advertising or selling your own products. It’s one of the most sustainable ways to generate a steady stream of clientele through social or organic traffic. Per 1,000 monthly page views, you’ll likely earn anywhere between $10 to $100.

Moreover, blogging allows you to turn one asset into several different streams of income.

Creating a blog is one of the best ways to share your thoughts and knowledge. Choose a topic you’re interested in and go from there. It may take a bit of upfront work initially, especially if you’re trying to grow a business online. But once you’ve established a solid online presence, you’ll passively earn money year-round.

You don’t need any special coding or design skills to start a blog. Hosting services like WordPress, BigCommerce, and Wix allow you to create your online store or website in no time.

If you can spare a couple of dollars for web assistance, consider using online marketing companies like Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Moosend, and others. These content management systems help you increase your online visibility through email, social media, SEO, and other forms of online marketing.

7.   Start an Etsy Shop

Opening an Etsy store is a swell way to make passive money. Use your creative mind to sell unique, niche products that no one has ever seen. Depending on your item cost, you can earn anywhere between $30 to $1,000 a month.

Design, print, photograph, and list a minimum of two new items each week. Then, take captivating product photos and sell them at a reasonable price. Your price should account for the cost of the materials you’ve used and the time that went into making the item.

Some of the best selling items on Etsy are as follows:

• Miniatures
• Handmade jewelry
• Stickers
• Digital designs/graphic designs
• Notebooks and journals
• Posters
• Pendants
• Candles
• Personalized blankets
• Pet treats/toys

Between college courses and schoolwork, you probably don’t have a lot of free time to make overly complicated products. But that’s okay. Minimalistic items are rising in popularity nowadays, which is brilliant news for college students who want to make a quick buck.

8.   Become a Social Media Influencer

Do you have a ton of followers on social media like Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook? If so, why not become a social media influencer?

As a typical student, you’ll likely spend at least two to three hours of your day browsing the internet. Instead of mindlessly scrolling through hundreds of posts, earn a passive income through your social media.

Create a community of people using groups or pages, and invite and/or add as many people as possible. Then, post engaging and informative content to attract more and more people. Once you reach enough followers, you can start promoting affiliate products, sponsors, services, and graphic designs.

When a follower clicks on the link you’ve promoted and made a purchase from the third-party affiliate, you’ll receive a commission that ranges from 3% to 7% per product. The larger your social media presence, the more money you’ll obtain.

9.   Invest in Stocks

Some of the world’s richest people are stock investors. The act of investing in stocks is pretty passive. As company rates increase, a fraction of their earnings is funneled back to investors. Investors can then decide to pocket the cash or reinvest it into other shares.

Luckily, there’s no minimum amount of money needed to start investing in stocks. Theoretically, you can open a brokerage account with just $1.

Yields vary significantly from one company to the next. Some yield double or even triple your initial investment. Others return only 10 to 15%. The more shares you own, the higher your payout.

10.  Invest in Fractions

Rather than investing in one full share of stock, why not invest in fractions?. Fractional shares, as the name suggests, allow you to purchase a fraction of the stock you want to invest in. It also lets you buy the amount of stock you can afford—whether it’s $5, $50, or $500—rather than spending thousands for a single share.

If you have a small budget, partake in an exchange-traded fund (ETF). Although mutual funds often have minimums of $1000, ETF allows you to purchase them for a shared price between other individuals.

Fractional shares also help you develop a more diversified portfolio, as they allow you to invest in baskets of ETFs. Moreover, they can mitigate some of the risks in your portfolios.

When investing in stocks, your goal is portfolio diversity and risk reduction. Therefore, you shouldn’t skimp on research. Find stocks that’ll amass a nice residual income over time.

11. Invest in a High-Yield CD or Savings Account

If you have a couple of thousand dollars to spare, it’s worth investing in a high-yield certificate of deposit (CD) or savings account. Truly, this is one of the best ways to make passive income.

According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC), no one has lost a single cent invested in FDIC-insured CDs. Usually, it’s much more advantageous to go with an online bank rather than your local bank because you’ll be able to choose a bank with the highest interest rates in the country.

Before investing in a high-yield CD, it’s worth doing a quick search of the nation’s top CD rates or savings account. Some banks offer returns of up to 1% of the deposited amount. Others, like CIT Bank (Savings Builder) and Discover Bank (Online Savings), yield in the neighborhood of five to six times the national average.

Although by no means a large amount, it’s an investment with fixed, predictable returns and flexible terms.

12. Invest in Crowdfunded Real Estate

Investing in real estate is the ultimate form of passive income. For college students, investing in crowdfunded real estate is a smart investment strategy because you don’t have to drop hundreds of thousands of dollars on a single property. In fact, some projects cost as little as $10.

Here’s how it works: multiple investors put money into a real estate investment trust (REIT), where it’s then dispersed back to investors when the REIT buys properties.

Crowdfunding has the benefit of transaction transparency as members know exactly when and where their funds will be invested. It also gives you the chance to diversify your investment to various countries and assets. Best of all, you don’t have to worry about real estate or landlord duties. 

13. Invest in Cryptocurrency (Bitcoin)

There’s a lot of risks when investing in cryptocurrency. The price of Bitcoin and all other types of cryptocurrency fluctuates significantly due to its volatile nature. It can wildly swing within a day or even within several minutes. Therefore, like most investments, you need to fully accept the risk of both gain and loss.

With that said, investing in cryptocurrency can be extremely profitable, especially with the number of users it brings.

Two of the most common ways to invest in cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin, are through Bitcoin mining and Bitcoin trading. Bitcoin minings entail solving mathematical problems that appear in the currency software. Oftentimes, mining requires specialized skills and software.

Bitcoin trading is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a buy-and-sell strategy. Once the rate of Bitcoin increases, Bitcoin traders either trade or sell them for cash. This strategy is easier than Bitcoin mining because you only need to link the purchased cryptocurrency into your bank account and wait until the exchange rate increases.

14.  Advertise With Your Car

As a student, you won’t have much time to find innovative ideas to make money. This is why advertising with your car is one of the easiest and most time-effective ways to generate passive income. Offset the costs of gas and car maintenance by using your car as a moving billboard and earning cash while doing so.

Advertising with your car is as simple as adding stickers or wraps on your vehicle and driving around town. Companies such as StickerRide, Wrapify, Carvertise, and ReferralCars all pay you a couple of hundred dollars to advertise on your car.

Simply download the app, select a campaign that piques your interest, and start earning money. Most of these companies pay you every other week via direct deposit. Advertising campaigns usually run anywhere between one to three months, so you don’t have to worry about long-term commitments. Plus, you can participate in as many campaigns as you like.

Of course, there are certain “rules” to follow when advertising your car depending on the company you choose. For instance, Carvertise won’t hire you if you drive less than 30 miles per day. Your car must also be a 2008 or newer model. With that said, Carvertise can pay you anywhere between $300 to $1,200 per campaign.

15.  Help Businesses Bring in Clients

Tons of businesses are willing to pay individuals to bring in clients to help increase their online exposure.

Freelancers, photographers, solopreneurs, and budding musicians often pay referral fees and bonuses for every client that supports or signs a contract through your introduction.

With your connections, you can start building a passive income by helping said businesses increase their clientele.

16. Sell Your Photography

Photographers don’t only make money from taking photographs, but by selling them too. If you have a keen eye and a top-class hand camera or phone, snap a couple of neat pics and sell them to stock image sites, magazines, and e-commerce websites like Amazon or Etsy.

Stock photography agencies like Shutterstock, iStock, Getty Images, Dreamstime, and 500px give you access to a much broader audience and therefore increase your chance to sell your photography. You can also use social media like Instagram and TikTok.

17.  Write an eBook or Publish Your Works Online

Ebooks are a hugely popular medium. Although physical books remain the most popular format for reading, a decent chunk prefers eBooks, as they’re convenient, readily accessible, and cheaper than physical copies.

Not anyone can publish physical copies of their books, but everyone can publish eBooks. If you’re confident with your work, you can build a fanbase of loyal readers that’ll follow your characters’ journey through thick and thin. You can self-publish your works through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble Press, iBooks, and more.

You can also use popular writing websites such as Wattpad, One Story, and Craft Literary. These websites allow you to publish short 1000 to 8000-word stories or chapters, so you don’t have to write the entire book before selling it. Instead, you can get paid per published chapter.

Set a price for your book, advertise it to friends and social media, and watch the passive flow of income increase. Per eBook or chapter sold, you can earn an average of $2 to $10.

18.  Create an Audio Track

If you have a keen ear for music, beats, and remixes, why not put them to work? It doesn’t have to be overly complicated or long. A simple jingle or podcast intro will do.

Making audio tracks for people is an awesome way of making extra cash. It also increases your musical talent online. Submit your tracks to music platforms like SoundCloud, Spotify, and Audiosocket and earn some passive income through royalties. You can also upload them to your YouTube account and social media.

You never know—your tune might suddenly make its way to TikTok’s trending page!

19. Create a Mobile App

If you have a talent for coding, creating a free mobile app is another fantastic passive income idea. After the initial investment you’ve put through making the app, you’ll be rewarded for your time as more people download and use your app.

Bring something new to the mobile app market so you can outdo your competitors right from the start. Make it functional, entertaining, and/or useful. Once you reach a decent amount of downloads, implement ads, subscriptions, in-app purchases, and other transaction fees. You can also add premium features for a specific cost.

Submit your app to the App Store and make sure it’s compatible with Android, iOS, and Huawei devices.

As your app gains popularity and feedback, start adding incremental features to keep it relevant and satisfy the needs of certain users. Per 1,000 application downloads, you’ll likely earn anywhere between $10 to $100.

20. Sell Online Merch

Unlike Etsy and eBay, where you need to source, design, advertise, and ship your products yourself, selling online Merch simply requires you to create an item, set a price, and start selling. Said website would then handle the rest—production, shipping, customer service, etc.

Teespring, Merch by Amazon, Redbubble, and Shopify are some of the best platforms to create and sell merch. They’re easy to use and feature a decent deal of print-on-demand merchandise. This includes t-shirts, hoodies, stickers, bags, phone covers, water bottles, and more.

Redbubble and Sellfy are terrific options for individuals who aren’t too big on marketing or SEO as they both have in-built marketing tools, SEO & analytics. 

All the websites mentioned give designers and artists a chance to earn a living—or, in this case, passive income—from their creativity. Best of all, they support worldwide shipping, unlimited bandwidth, and embed shopping cart or “buy now” buttons for easy purchase.

21. Fip and Sell Stuff on eBay

Selling items on eBay is an easy and inexpensive way to start making passive income, especially if you have a ton of items in your home. You can also flip items from Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, garage sales, and local thrift stores for a little extra cash.

To give you an idea, here are some of the best things to sell on eBay:

• Old toys (1980s to early-2000s)
• Stuffed animals and dolls
• Vinyl records and electronics
• Collectibles
• Sports and music memorabilia
• Lego
• Authentic Disney merchandise
• Car parts
• Video game controllers of current consoles
• Broken crayons (to be used as wax for crafts and arts)
• Empty or partially used perfume bottles
• Empty makeup containers
• Pokémon cards

As you can see, there’s no limit to what you can sell on eBay. During your weekend, feel free to browse local vintage shops, garage sales, and thrift stores and search for things you can flip on eBay. To help you with your search, go through eBay’s recently sold or popular items so you’ll have an idea of what to look for.

Once you’ve bought the item and flipped it, take several flattering photos and upload them to eBay. Let the website do its magic as it fills your account with a steady stream of passive income.

22.  Open a Patreon Account

If you spend your time on YouTube, you’ve surely heard of Patreon. Patreon is a membership platform that allows content creators to run a paid subscription service for loyal fans. It’s an excellent way to earn extra money for things you’re already creating (music, art, books, webcomics, etc.).

Unfortunately, Patreon only works if you already have an established fanbase. It doesn’t have to be large; as long as people regularly (or even semi-regularly) follow your content, you’ll be able to make money with Patreon. Casual fans can pay a low rate of $1 per month, while more dedicated followers can pay as much as $20 or even $30 per month.

Depending on the type of creator you are, you can offer exclusive “rewards” and unique benefits to your members—rewards that non-Patreon members can’t access. This includes additional content, engaging experiences, and exclusivity.

Fiction writers, for instance, may release a new chapter to Patreon two to four days before its official release on their writing account. YouTubers may publish exclusive never-before-seen videos, outtakes, and even one-on-one sessions with top-tier fans. Webcomic artists may post early scribbles of their work and full-size images and wallpapers of their characters.

23.   Become an Audiobook Narrator

Do you love reading books out loud for an audience? Do you want to be a voice actor? If so, becoming an audiobook narrator is the perfect niche for you.

Websites like ACX, Spoken Realms, Findaway Voices, and BunnyStudio help individuals earn money from narrating audiobooks. You can also generate leads and outsource your work to freelance platforms like Fiverr.

Depending on the length of the book, expect around $50 to $200 per finished hour of your audiobook narration. You can also choose to set your own per-finished-hour rate or, alternatively, split royalties 50/50 with the rights owner. This means that per audiobook sold, you’ll receive 50% of the commission, making it an ideal source of passive income. 

With that said, becoming an audiobook narrator does take a bit of upfront work at first. In fact, some of the work involved goes way beyond simply recording the voice-over. It requires hours and hours of editing and other technical learning curves. Therefore, it’s best to start with smaller jobs before taking on lengthier projects. 

24. Create an Online Course

Creating an online course not only polishes your skills but also shares your knowledge with individuals globally. It takes a bit of upfront work—research, making a script, and filming your course—but once you’ve uploaded your course online, it shouldn’t take long to earn passive money.

The e-learning market is one of the most profitable online businesses. All you need is knowledge and passion for your work. You can sell your course as a package or allow people to access individual “episodes” or chapters for a fixed cost. You can also establish a membership site accessible only to paying members.

As long as members are subscribed to your work, expect a steady flow of income.

To make money through online courses, choose a subject that sells. Some of the most sought-out online course subjects are as follows:

• Computer and technology
• Arts and crafts
• Writing
• Lifestyle/personal development
• Health and fitness
• Entertainment
• Science and math
• Social science
• Business and entrepreneurship
• Languages

Of course, you don’t have to cover the subject entirely. Try to find a more niche topic within these subject matters; ideally, something that’s less talked about but equally important. You don’t have to have high credentials or professor-level speech, but you do have to have better-than-average knowledge on the topic.

Once you’ve created your course, upload it to a popular learning marketplace like Udemy or Skillshare.

25. Repurpose Your Transcription Work

Home-based transcription services are currently in high demand. You’ll find tons of opportunities out there across all fields, industries, skill levels, and professions. There’s something for everyone!

Since you’re working for passive income, search for work related to your college course or interest. Most transcriptionists make anywhere between $15 to $25 per hour.

I know what you’re thinking—this sounds more like an active income rather than a passive income.

Well, here’s the thing: if you’ve got content that includes audio files, there are multiple ways to convert them into resources that can be sold for passive income.

When repurposing transcriptions, always make sure to convert the content into your own masterpiece to avoid copyright issues. It should work as a separate entity from the original. Expand on what you already have and adapt it into a new medium. With this, you can turn an active income into a passive income.

26. Consider Peer-to-Peer Lending

In a nutshell, peer-to-peer lending (P2P lending) allows investors to lend money from other individuals at a fixed rate. You, as the lender, will receive the money you’ve lent plus the agreed interest when it’s repaid by the borrower.

It’s quite similar to a traditional bank or lending institution, but without the complicated paperwork. It’s an easy way to earn passive income at the end of every month.

P2P lending comes with its fair share of risks. The loan may go bad, for example. There’s also the psychological risk of lending money: constantly asking yourself whether or not the money will be returned.

Due to the many risks P2P lending poses, lenders need to choose a trusted P2P platform to get the most bang for their buck. Websites such as Vincent and Lending Club manage the risks by performing background and credit history checks on the borrower.

Other Low-Effort Income Ideas for Students

If you have a bit of free time on your hands before or after your college classes, consider the following low-effort income ideas:

27.  Do Translations Online

If you study or speak more than one language, earn money by doing translations online. Being a translator not only helps you earn money online but also allows you to widen your vocabulary and discipline your mind.

Websites like LiveTranslation and Speakt allow you to apply as a freelance translator from the comfort of your own student accommodation. You can also offer translation services to freelance companies like Fiverr, Upwork, and Outsourcely.

If you love reading foreign mangas or manhwas, apply as a typesetter/translator to international publishing groups like Amimaru and INKR. Amimaru and INKR work directly for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese publishers from Lezhin, Tapas, Webtoons, Tappytoons, and more.

28.  Baby Sit

Babysitting isn’t only for teenagers but also college students. Babysitters get paid at least $15 per hour. In large cities, the hourly wage can go up to at least $25.

Babysitting comes with multiple advantages. For one, it’s flexible. You can do it before or after your courses. It also provides work experience to put on your CV, showing that you’re both reliable and responsible.

On top of that, it can potentially help you make trustworthy relations with busy, working parents who can vouch for your character. The fact that you can squeeze in college work while you’re watching a child is a nice bonus, too.

There are a number of ways to get babysitting jobs. For instance, you can hold out business cards to parents at schools, parks, playgroups, etc. To increase interest, consider creating a website or online profile that tells your story. Similarly, you can join online communities or agencies.

If you’re new to babysitting, offer your services to people who already know and trust you. This is the easiest way to get the ball rolling and get glowing references in your profile.

29.  Pet Sit

Pet sitting is a fantastic way to earn easy money. If you’re an animal lover, it’s a win-win situation: you get to spend time with a pet and earn a little extra money doing what you love.

The best way to earn money by pet sitting is to advertise your service through pet care apps like Rover, Wag, and Care. Unless the owner requested extra services (bathing, walking, administering medicine, etc.), you’ll only have to watch and feed the client’s pet until they return home. You may also need to play with said pets to encourage mental and physical stimulation.

Pet sitting services usually take no more than two to three hours a day. Plus, it’s usually stress-free and simple, especially if you have experience with animals.

Most pet sitters charge $10 to $30 per hour, so in a two to three-hour day, you’ll likely earn an average of $30 to $50.

30. Art or Writing Commissions

If you have a talent for digital art and writing, commission your works to individuals online. Publish examples of your work through social media like Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can also use freelancing websites like Fiverr, Upwork, 99 Designs, Art Wanted, and WriterAccess.

When doing commission work, don’t be afraid to state your terms. Be clear with your descriptions and check in with the client at certain intervals throughout your work process. Depending on the quality of your work, you can earn anywhere between $10 to upwards of $100 per commission.

To make sure your time is well spent, always ask for a mandatory fee in case the project is canceled midway. It’s also best to ask for payment upfront. Freelance artists/writers usually ask for as much as 50% upfront to cover the cost of materials and time.

31.  Edit Videos

With the rise of YouTube stars and influencers, the demand for video editors is at an all-time high. This is especially true for YouTubers who upload videos daily or every other day.

If you have a talent for editing videos, use these skills to earn a couple of hundred dollars a month. YouTubers and influencers usually search for editors on Fiverr and social media such as Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and Instagram.

Take advantage of tags like #searchingforaneditor or #editorialwork to get started. You can also advertise your work on the same platforms.

32. Make Money Through Mobile Apps

As a student, you’re likely spending most of your free time scrolling through social media, browsing the internet, and chatting with friends. Alongside your online activities, make extra money through mobile apps by completing small tasks, signups, surveys, answering questions, and playing games. Such apps include Mcmoney, Poll Pay, Cryptotab Browser, and more.

Install said apps in your free time and spend about 10 to 30 minutes every day completing the required tasks. Once completed, rewards range anywhere from Amazon gift cards to real money. Other applications, like Raketen, reward you with cash-back for shopping through their application.

Sweatcoin is another excellent moneymaker. It converts your steps into a virtual currency called “Sweatcoins,” which you can spend on gadgets, sports kits, food, and more. You get paid on something that you’d do anyway—walking—and become healthier in the process. Think of it as a personal gym trainer!

33.  Surveys Online

You’ve surely heard of this easy moneymaker. By completing surveys online, you get paid for your thoughts and opinions. Although the payout won’t push you to financial freedom, it provides enough to be considered a feasible income at the end of every week.

Some of the most popular survey sites include:

• Swagbucks
• Opinion Outpost
• LifePoints
• Toluna Influencers
• Survey Junkie
• i-Say
• MyPoints
• InboxDollars

Depending on the site you choose, you can earn anywhere between $10 to $100 doing surveys online. Some even allow you to earn up to $50 per survey. The points you earn can be redeemed as gift cards or cash via PayPal.

Some sites, like InboxDollars and GrabPoints, reward you with cash for watching videos and playing games. If you’re willing to put in the work, you can make as much as $50 per day doing surveys.

As a college student, you probably won’t have a lot of free time doing surveys and watching videos. Spending 10 to 25 minutes a day doing surveys is enough to generate passive income at the end of the month.

34.  Sell Your Notes

As a college student, you’ll have likely written a ton of notes, papers, essays, and projects. Instead of discarding them, earn passive money by selling them to students that need them.

Educational blogs, agencies, and essay sites like StudySoup and Course Hero buy content from students all over the world. Depending on the size, type, and content you sell, you can easily make hundreds of dollars per month without disrupting your college life.

Apart from StudySoup and Course Hero, you can sell your notes to the following websites:

• Nexus Notes
• Notesmate
• Notesgen
• Notesale
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35.  Become a Virtual Friend Online or in Real Life

It might sound weird, but there are actually a ton of people who find it difficult to find friends. This is why rent-a-friend services are so popular. If you love making new friends, consider selling your friendship. Who knows, you might actually end up developing real friends!

Rent-a-friend services range from phone calls, video calls, text messaging, and real-life hangouts. Tourists may also use these services to find a friend willing to show them around the city. Rent-a-friend services are strictly platonic, so you don’t have to worry about the other party’s expectations. Per hour, you may make anywhere between $30 to $100.

Passive Income Tips to Consider

When it comes to passive income, time is everything. The whole point of passive income is to make money with the least effort possible. That said, don’t fall for any passive income ideas that promise quick and huge amounts of return. In most cases, passive income stems from a lot of upfront work.

Making YouTube videos, for instance, requires months and months of prior content creation. The same is said for writing a book or eBook. Investments require hours of research beforehand to minimize the risk of monetary loss.

Here are some passive income tips to consider to save both your time and effort: 

Utilize Your Skills

The best way to boost your income is to attract long-term paying clients through your skills. Use your passions, experience, and other parts of your life that make you unique and provide value for other people. If you’re fond of writing, publish a book. If you’re an artist, make a webcomic. If you’re a coding genius, flip websites and sell them for a profit.

Ask yourself this: what are you good at? What differentiates you from others in your space? What value can you add to someone else’s life? The answers to these questions will help you decide what product or service you can offer to the world at large.

Be Mindful of Your Time and Resources

College students have limited time and resources. Creating passive income can quickly become a trap if you don’t consider the time and effort you spend when building your niche.

Passive money makers often require learning new topics and skills alongside those you already have. The goal of passive income is to minimize your time investment once the initial upfront work is over. It’d be a shame to have all the work and time you’ve put through your project fail.

Therefore, you should always be mindful of the time and resources you’re planning to spend on your work. Be realistic about your commitments. If you don’t have much time to spare in the beginning, it might be best to consider investments rather than long-term projects like making videos for YouTube and online courses.

Listen to People’s Voices

In other words, listen to what people are asking and what they’re interested in. Scroll through social media, Google, and YouTube. Look at the numbers. What’s the most popular “thing” right now? Based on your skills, choose something you’re knowledgeable in and turn it into something people can consume.

Frequently Asked Questions

Read on for some of the web’s most frequently asked passive income questions!

How many streams of income should I have?

As a student, your main priority should be studying hard for your degree rather than building multiple income streams. Nonetheless, it’s always beneficial to have a little extra cash to splurge from time to time.

Three to four streams of passive income are preferable, but not required. It all depends on your personal needs, time, and college fees.

Is passive income taxable? If so, how can I minimize it?

Similar to full-time jobs, passive income is entirely taxable. The amount you owe depends on several factors, like your source of income and how much time you usually spend in maintaining your business. Therefore, approach an accounting professional before pursuing long-term passive income opportunities.

The best way to minimize passive income taxes is to receive a tax identification number for your business. You can do so by registering with the IRS. Then, contact a broker who can help you open a self-employed account like Charles Schwab or Fidelity.

Note that you have to own a legitimate business to qualify to the terms set by the IRS. Otherwise, you’ll have to pay your taxes normally.

Is investing worth the risk?

For many people, yes, investing is worth the risk. When investing, risk and reward are closely linked. Profit isn’t always guaranteed. If the company you’ve invested in doesn’t do well, you might lose a ton of money. This is why research is extremely important. The more you know of the market, the better you’ll be at predicting its performance.

Final Thoughts

There are multiple ways to generate a passive stream of income, from investing to making revenue from YouTube videos. There’s passive money to be made almost anywhere, and while it may take a bit of funding and effort to get started, you’ll reap the rewards long after you’ve put in the work.

The wonderful thing about passive income is that it doesn’t interfere with your college work. So, what are you waiting for? Establish your financial goals and decide which of the above moneymakers fits your style of making money. Good luck!

Almost 20 years later, there are than 30 million bloggers in the USA alone, so starting your own blog and figuring out how to name it can be a little bit overwhelming.

However, you want people to be interested in what you have to offer regardless of the niche, and that starts with picking the right name.

In this article, we’ll discuss how to name a blog using several methods that successful bloggers have used to create and expand their brand names. So, keep on reading.

Choosing a Unique Name for Your Blog

Bloggers spend a long time trying to come up with unique yet valuable content that keeps their readers interested. But sometimes, they don’t know how to create the right blog name that actually represents their brand.

Picking the right blog name is an art because it’s the first thing that your potential readers will notice. By choosing a unique yet relevant name, readers will be interested in viewing your content and remember it to share it with others or come back later.

So, if you’re interested in starting a blog or thinking about updating your blog and your overall online brand, you need to focus on choosing the right name for your blog. With more than 600 million blogs on the internet today, finding the right blog name might not be the most straightforward task.

You want your blog name to be memorable, relevant, unique, while at the same name, show the true nature of your brand and content. So, how can you create a blog name that stands out when people search for your niche or relevant keywords?

There are actually different trusted and tried methods that can be used to create a blog name. Following these strategies guarantee that you’ll end up with a brilliant name that your readers will definitely recognize and remember.

Your blog name should be the same (or very similar) to your domain so it is not something that should be changed after your blog is launched. This is why it is important that you take your time choosing your blog’s name and making sure you are happy with it.

Changing your blog and domain name down the road is not only confusing for your readers but will also cause you to lose all your domain authority, which is key to growing your traffic.

How to Name a Blog: Best Techniques

Choosing a blog name is just like choosing a name for your brand. You need to pick a clever name, but it doesn’t always have to tell people what to expect.

There are several brand names that people recognize and connect with immediately, although they don’t have anything to do with the product or service offered. Take Kodak, for example. The name doesn’t have anything to do with the company’s products and is actually chosen because George Eastman, who invented the first Kodak camera, liked the letter K.

Another example is the company Apple. Today, the name Apple is equivalent to creativity and success, although the fruit doesn’t really represent any of the products or services offered by the company.

This means that creating your brand name or finding a name for your blog can be smart and unorthodox as long as you want to take the risk. You can also keep it simple and choose a method that directly relates to what you have to offer.

In our article, we’ll discuss both conventional and less traditional techniques, so you can find a blog name that you can actually connect to. In some instances, your blog name can tell all about your story and what users can expect from your brand. In other cases, it will be a surprise once your readers click to view your new content. So, let’s dive in.

1.   Use Your Name or Nickname

Since your blog is your brand, starting with using your personal name or nickname seems to be actually a good idea. This technique will work for you if you have a lifestyle blog where you offer your own experience and advice. It will also work if you talk about a service that you excel at.

If you have a unique name, things will be much easier for you because it will attract people’s attention. It will also be easy to remember.

Sincerely Jules is an excellent example of a lifestyle blog where the blogger, Julie Sariñana, used her nickname to create a fashion blog where she shares all her lifestyle hacks. As a fashion icon, readers and viewers trust her fashion inspiration and can feel safe about their fashion choices because they know that they’re wearing an outfit styled and recommended by her.

With a blog like this, people learn to associate the content with a person. They trust this person, and they follow their visual content as well as the written articles.

Len the Plumber is a website that offers different plumbing services. The blog is connected to a firm founded by Len Bush in 1996 and currently runs a business in Baltimore, Washington D.C., Northern Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey.

Although this company was acquired by an equity firm in 2020, it’s still one of the most successful plumbing services providers. The blog became successful because it’s associated with a well-established firm. If you already have an existing business that is performing well, following this technique will be a good decision.

2.   Study Your Niche

Deeply studying your niche is the first step you should take before thinking about launching your blog. You need to study the most famous names in your business, what they offer, the trends, and the latest discoveries.

This technique won’t only help you find good content to share on your blog but will also allow you to find a unique name that is related to your niche. In addition, it’s a good idea for new bloggers because people will be able to recognize what you’re blogging about once they check out your name.

However, before choosing a name, you need to make sure that other bloggers are not using it. You can also get inspired by other industries and businesses if they’re related to your niche.

Blogilates is a workout and fitness blog founded by Cassey Ho where she’s sharing the latest trends in the world of workout and Pilates. The blog became extremely successful that she even launched an app to help people commit to their workout routine.

Mint is a finance-related blog where people can find advice about budgeting and managing their finances. The blog name is related to the phrase “in mint condition,” which means that something is perfect although it’s been pre-owned. The blog is run by financial experts who teach you new approaches to deal with your money.

BuzzFeed is a blog that posts about the latest news in several niches. The name is related to the fact that exciting news creates a hype or a buzz that attracts people’s attention. Over the years, this blog has become one of the most popular comprehensive blogs that people check for news about movies, lifestyle trends, and the latest products and trends.

3.   Choose Words Related to Your Industry

Your blog focuses on a particular niche, and you will create your content based on several keywords that people use if they’re interested in this niche. This can also help you find a suitable blog name because people will be interested in these words.

People in a niche-centric domain can use this technique because readers will be interested in these specific topics when they’re looking for advice. You can also choose a word that represents a problem or a challenge. If you’re in the cosmetics, home improvement, travel, or technology business, this idea might work for you.

Hot and Flashy is a blog devoted to lifestyle and beauty advice and recommendations for women in their 40s, 50s, and beyond. While this age is closely associated with hormonal changes that make women experience uncomfortable hot flashes, the blogger Angie managed to use these words to create her brand name and offer a specialist’s advice to mature women, helping them to look their best.

Budget Traveller is a budget-friendly travel blog founded by Kash Bhattacharya to help people learn more about budget traveling. He covers everything from the best hostels to the hidden street food gems across the world without crossing a budget limit to make traveling more accessible to people.

Color Me Courtney is a special fashion and lifestyle blog that focuses on using quirky styles and bright colors. This is why the blogger Courtney Quinn chose to include the word “color” in her blog name. People who look for brightly colored outfits or colorful clothes will be interested in checking out this blog.

4.   Use a Thesaurus or Dictionary

The more you research about your niche, the more you’ll come up with interesting topics to talk about. Even using the dictionary or thesaurus can be helpful because you can interest readers by covering all topics and subjects related to your niche.

You can use a thesaurus or dictionary when you’re blogging in a popular niche. You want your content to look unique, so readers can remember it and connect with it. You will find a lot of interesting words or ideas related to your theme.

Chow and Chatter is a food blog founded by US and UK-registered dietitian Rebecca Subbiah, who used informal and less common words to name her blog. Chow means food, while chatter means to talk, so her blog is mainly talking about different kinds of food, recipes, and nourishment.

She uses an easy approach and friendly tone to talk to her followers, which makes them feel comfortable reading her blog and trusting her advice. At the same time, the unusual words make the blog’s name easy to distinguish among hundreds of other food blogs.

Legal Nomads is a travel blog founded by lawyer turned traveler Jodi Ettenberg. She talks about what traveling is like for someone who suffers from a chronic condition, sharing her insights about food, culture, and everything else. Her blog name is related to what she used to do, being a lawyer working in legal matters and a nomad or traveler who visited several interesting destinations.

5.   Think About Your Content

You already have a good reason to start your blog, so you can use your content as an inspiration when you’re trying to pick a blog name. Think about your passion and why you want to create a blog in the first place. You’re probably good at something or have a story that you need to share.

Your content is the core of your blog, so it makes sense if you want to use a name related to your story or field. In addition, the name should be related to your message, what you want to communicate to your potential readers, and why it matters to you in the first place.

Freelancers Union is a blog dedicated to new and old freelancers, telling them about the ins and outs of working in the world of freelancing. As a reader, you’ll be able to find content about the tips and tricks that can help you launch your career as a freelancer, in addition to the challenges that you can face, new government regulations and how they impact you, and how to protect your brand in the world of freelancing.

LivinRVision is a website created by Brian and Michelle, who created a blog to share their vision about RV living and how it impacts their lives. The couple took a leap of faith by selling everything they have to invest in an A-class Coach and live in it full-time. Because they share all the pros and cons of their experience, reading the blog will be rewarding for anyone who is considering investing in an RV.

6.   Choose a Name Related to Your Readers

Your readers can also inspire you to pick a new name for your blog. Think about who your target audience is and what matters to them. Who are they? What do they do? And what will they be interested in?

By answering these questions, you’ll come up with an interesting list of ideas that you can use to write articles. You’ll also be able to find a good name for your blog.

The idea is to find something that you and your readers have in common because this will make them trust your content. Therefore, the blog name should reflect your knowledge or this close relationship, so your readers feel that you actually know what you’re talking about.

By getting personal and sharing your fears and the challenges your face, your readers know that you have something valuable to offer. Therefore, the content will be related to what you know and feel, and the name you choose should reflect that.

A Mom’s Take is a popular example of how the name relates to your target audience. The blogger Janel shares a mother’s perspective on various topics, from holidays to food, travel tips, self-care advice, home improvement, and activities. The inspiring content can be helpful to lots of new mothers who try to balance several aspects with multiple kids in the house.

Autoimmune Wellness is a blog founded by Angie and Mickey, who share their life journey with living with autoimmune disease. Between them, they share five different autoimmune diseases and multiple annoying symptoms that other people suffer from. As a result, they share meal recipes, lifestyle tips, and other valuable advice that readers can apply to their lives and cope with their illnesses.

7.   Use Alliteration To Name Your Blog

Alliteration refers to the usage of the same letter at the beginning of every word. It’s an interesting way to rename your blog because it’s catchy and fun.

People use alliteration in literature because it creates internal rhyme that makes names easy to remember. As a result, it will be a great way to name your blog if you’re starting a new blog in a popular niche.

Lots of well-established brands use this technique because it’s straightforward. These include brands like PayPal and Dunkin’ Donuts. It will also work for you if you want to choose a nice name for your blog.

Cats Who Code is a web development and web hosting blog that started in 2008, focusing on PHP, HTML/CSS, and WordPress. It offers great resources and tutorials for those interested in web hosting and coding. The blog’s founder is fond of cats and coding and chose this funny and quirky name to express his life for both of them.

Savouring Simplicity is a lifestyle blog where Raeesah Omar Patel posts about food, fashion, and lifestyle. The two words used to name the blog tell you about the content you’ll find. Everything posted on the blog is dreamy, simple, with some of the best life hacks and lifestyle tips and recommendations that she has tried herself.

8.   Find a Pun Related to Your Blog Name

Puns are popular marketing tools that are still used by the world’s biggest brands. However, it will also work for you if you want to create your own online brand by starting your blog, regardless of its niche.

As a matter of fact, puns are quite common in the world of blogging, as every blogger tries to create unique content that catches readers’ attention. So, it’s quite common to find puns in article names and throughout the posts. So, all you have to do is find a well-known pun and incorporate it or part of it into your blog name.

Other-Wordly is a blog named after the word otherworldly, which refers to something out of this world. However, it focuses on words that sound great in their own language, describing unique feelings that can’t be translated.

Planet of the Grapes is a blog related to a brick-and-mortar wine bar and shop which offers some of the world’s best wines. Although the blog isn’t even remotely related to the famous movie Planet of the Apes, the blog’s name will most probably ring a bell, which makes it easy to remember. You can shop for wine, check wine-friendly food menus, and even book a table to enjoy your favorite drink by checking the blog.

9.   Use Fun and Humor to Name Your Blog

Using fun and humor can be a great way to create a catchy and memorable name for your blog. People will be able to remember the name and will most likely visit your blog often because you managed to catch their attention.

Even if you’re interested in a serious niche, a fun name can be an excellent way to name your blog and tone down the seriousness. As a matter of fact, a fun name is an excellent way to discuss a heavy topic by showing the positive or humorous part of it, unless making fun of the topic isn’t appropriate. For example, this technique doesn’t work if you’re discussing a sensitive topic like mental illness or miscarriage.

Ugly Duckling House is a home improvement blog where the blogger shares her DIY and repair ideas in a fun and lighthearted way. She used a catchy name, though not related to her niche because it relates to her journey as a single person who was trying to improve the way her house looks.

Runs For Cookies is a lifestyle and fitness blog where the blogger talks about her weight loss journey where she tries to balance her love for running and cookies. The light tone of the blog is apparent, as she inspires other people to choose their health and happiness without stressing themselves.

Brainless Blogger is a blog founded by Nikki Albert where she discusses one of the most famous symptoms that are related to migraines and fibromyalgia. She chose the word “brainless” to introduce painful symptoms in a funny way, as she helps people live with chronic illness and manage their lives.

10.  Try Something New

Naming a blog doesn’t always have to make perfect sense. As a matter of fact, you can use a name that doesn’t relate to the content, and it will still attract people’s attention.

Searching for new blog content can be overwhelming, and trying to find the perfect name for your blog will sometimes be too challenging. In some cases, it might feel like the more you push yourself towards finding something that relates to your niche, the less you’ll be able to do so.

Taking a break might be what you really need. You might have an interesting conversation with someone where they tell you something that you can find inspiring. Even a book or a movie might work.

Rotten Tomatoes is a clear example of a name that doesn’t relate to the content of the blog, although it’s inspired by it. This is one of the world’s most famous blogs that discusses the ratings of movies and TV shows, giving them scores based on the opinions of critics and experts.

The blog’s name is related to the practice of throwing tomatoes to disapprove a poor performance, which is a scene featured in the Canadian movie Léolo. Although there’s no clear relationship between tomatoes and cinema or TV, the blog is quite successful.

11.  Use Made Up Words

You need to get creative while working on your new blog content, and this also applies to finding a new blog name. You don’t have to feel limited by the real words, as you can make up your own, even if they don’t make sense when taken out of context.

Some of the world’s biggest brands used this technique to choose their names, and you can apply this strategy when you’re picking a blog name. Häagen-Dazs is an example of this technique as the brand’s founders wanted to find a name that sounded Danish, and they choose a word that doesn’t mean anything in any language. Still, it’s still one of the most recognized ice cream brand names in the world.

However, this method might be a little tricky to use. The word you invent won’t make any sense until you’ve established your name in your niche. But once you do, your name might be equivalent to the service you provide.

The Imgur Blog is a fun website devoted to funny stories and images that people share from all over the world. The word “imgur” isn’t real, but it’s well-known now because of how popular this blog is.

12.  Be Straightforward

As opposed to some of the previously suggested ideas, you can pick a name that is directly related to what you offer. This is a great idea to launch your blog if you’re specializing in a popular niche because your readers will be able to know what your content is about by checking out your name.

This is a great idea because the people who check your blog will know exactly what to expect. Using this method will help you get a dedicated group of followers who regularly check your blog for new posts because they know that you offer something they’re actually interested in.

The Smart Passive Income Blog offers exactly what the name suggests; smart ways to generate passive income. The blogger Pat Flynn shares all his tips about finding the best online business opportunities and the right ways to generate passive income.

Since generating passive income is a dream for many people, the readers are always interested in following the blog and checking out the latest tips and tricks that allow them to achieve success in a highly competitive environment.

Fat Positive Fertility is a blog founded by Nicola Salmon for mothers who are struggling with their weight and fertility. In her blog, she advocates for the way overweight women are treated on their fertility journeys and the challenges they face as they are trying to get pregnant.

Since there are a lot of women who are challenged by medical conditions like PCOS that cause weight gain and affect fertility, the blog has a lot of devoted followers who find it extremely positive and inspiring.

13. Use Opposite Words

Using contradicting words is a fun way to attract people to your blog. You need to pick words that are related to your content, so readers can know what to expect when they read your blog.

Antonyms or opposite words are often used in literature because they emphasize a specific idea or highlight it. A name that contains opposite words is also easy to remember, which is a must because there are probably several blogs that publish closely related content.

White Sugar Brown Sugar is a blog about adoption. Rachel, the blog founder, is diagnosed with type-A diabetes, which made it challenging for her to become a mother in a conventional way. Instead, Rachel and her husband considered open, domestic, and transracial adoption.

The words white, brown, and sugar can be related to motherly love, race, and diabetes, so it’s a unique name that attracts the attention of anyone who might be interested in the same experience.

14. Think About Your Location

If you want to celebrate a specific culture or location, including the name of the city or country in your blog name might be what you need to do. This way, people can tell exactly what the content is about, so they can feel more connected to it.

Homesick Texan is a cooking blog founded by Lisa Fain and mainly focuses on preparing delicious Texan recipes. Unlike other blogs that try to generate different keywords and multiple ideas, this one is solely devoted to Texan cuisine, so it offers valuable content if you want to explore Southern food.

Hip Paris is a lifestyle blog that focuses on life in Paris. The blog targets first-time and regular visitors who want to explore the real essence of the city.

It goes beyond the famous and well-known landmarks to discuss the hidden spots, the best tips to enjoy your Parisian stay, challenges that other people face, and how to make the best of your stay in Paris. As a result, this blog has become very popular among people who consider visiting Paris for a short period or want to consider living in it long-term.

The Soul of Seoul is another travel and lifestyle blog that’s solely devoted to life in Seoul. Life in other parts of the world is incredibly different, so most people who move to South Korea deal with a cultural shock that makes them unable to cope. They might also offend someone because they’re ignorant of what should be done or how to react.

The website focuses on everything from the spots you shouldn’t miss to Korean etiquette and reviews about the places you can visit in South Korea.

15. Think of Another Language

If you can’t find a word that interests you, you can try another language to come up with a name for your blog. When the foreign name is related to your blog content, readers feel more connected to your blog and see that you have something valuable to offer.

Muse Gelato is a good example of using a foreign word to show the nature of a blog. It uses the word “gelato,” which is the Italian word for ice cream, as the company offers various dessert options. Readers can order their favorite ice cream and other desserts by checking out the blog, knowing that they’re made by real experts.

Meraviglia Paper is another example of combining an Italian word with an English one. The blog is devoted to hospitality, talking about various hotels, residences, and vacation homes, that the bloggers explore and review. It uses the Italian word for “marvelous” to attract readers who are interested in a unique and wonderful experience.

16.  Use a Blog Name Generator

If you can’t find a suitable name on your own, you can use a name generator to create an interesting name for your blog. Luckily, there are several smart applications that can help you come up with a unique name to attract your potential readers. Moreover, you can make sure that your name isn’t taken by anyone else.

The best thing about using a blog name generator is that you will have multiple options to choose from. This will give you a chance to take your time and pick the name that appeals to you.

Blog or domain generators work when you enter a keyword that relates to your niche or blog. Then it offers several variations, using related words or alternative spelling, so you can end up with a unique name for your blog.

• Name Generator is an excellent tool that you can use if you’re not sure about the right name to pick for your blog. First, you need to choose adjectives that describe your blog tone and the nature of the content. Then you should use verbs that relate to your niche. After that, you will add your name and location, so the app can come up with different suggestions using the information you provided.

• Panabee is a great blog and domain generator as it offers a lot of extensions for international bloggers. It also checks the name you choose, so you can make sure that it’s not taken by another blog or brand. One of the perks of using this app is that it checks the way your name looks on several social media platforms, so you can guarantee that your online branding will be consistent.

Final Thoughts

It takes creativity and research to come up with a good name for your blog. Luckily, there are several techniques and methods that you can follow based on the nature of your blog, tone, and the content you want to share with your readers.

All you have to do is make sure that you spend time studying your target niche and audience. You should also check other blog names in your specific niche to check for naming trends.

Stand out from other bloggers by picking a name that you can relate to. Remember that your name will be your online brand, so you need to think carefully before committing to one.

If you are ready to start your blogging journey, make sure to check out this article for a step my step guide to start a blog that actually makes money.

It shouldn’t cost a lot. In the end, all you need is a website and a theme, and you’re done. Right?

Well, not exactly.

To make a blog and earn money from it, you’ll need to spend some in return for the domain, housing, theme, logo, marketing, tools, and much more.

Overwhelmed?

That’s normal, but don’t be. All of these combined don’t cost as much as you think. Creating a blog at the start only needs around $200 if you already have a laptop, which isn’t a scary amount for a beginner. However, if you’re aiming at high professionalism, you’ll typically need to add some more money down the road.

This article will cover all costs associated with creating a blog, including the essential and non-essential ones.

A Break Down of The Essential Costs to Start a Blog

When thinking of starting a blog, you’ll mostly only think of the essential needs. That includes the domain, hosting, and theme. What you don’t know is, those are only a fragment of all the things you’ll need.

You may be missing a lot of details, and this list will help you. Here’s a breakdown of all essential costs included in creating a blog.

Hosting

Web hosting is essential for anyone opting to create a blog or a website. There’s no way around it; you’ll inevitably need hosting for your blog, and you can’t avoid it unless you go for a really cheap subscription.

You’re basically buying a place for your blog; it’s the same concept of renting a place for creating a store or so.

The good news is, web hosting isn’t among the expensive costs. You can get plans starting from $3 a month, although these won’t perform as well as ones that cost more.

There are also some free options on websites like Wix or Weebly. However, if you get a free plan, you won’t be able to get a domain name. So, if your blog is named Foodies, for example, the domain will be something like foodie.wix.com. But, of course, that’s not ideal for SEO purposes, and it’ll affect the professionalism of your blog.

On the other hand, there are some affordable options, like Bluehost. It offers plans starting from $3.5 per month, and it can go down to $2.50 with this discount. Bear in mind that you’ll have to pay a full year upfront, though.

Domain

The domain name of your blog is the URL; it’s the web address that’ll appear in the browser’s bar. For example, the domain name for Facebook is facebook.com.

Just like hosting, the domain is an essential cost, and you can’t go around it. The good news is, the domain doesn’t cost a lot. You can get it for $15–$25 annually on average, depending on your hosting service of choice.

The domain cost needs to be paid each year, though, or else your blog will become out of service. Not only that, but someone else may buy the domain if you stop paying for it, which is an unfortunate occurrence.

You can get a domain at GoDaddy for $10–$20 per year, depending on the name you choose. More famous names typically cost more to acquire. If you want to pay less, you can get a domain name at NameCheap for an average of $9 per year.

Theme

The blog’s theme is its design template. It’s basically what the visitors will see when they visit your blog, and it dictates the shape of all buttons and plugins. It also includes the colors of your pages.

There are a lot of free themes on the internet, so it’s not exactly hard to ditch this cost. However, it’s not recommended to get a free theme because they’re, well, cheap! They’ll look a bit tacky compared to any professional blog, and they’ll often be poorly coded, so you’ll inevitably face an issue or two down the road.

It’s best to pay for a professional theme from the start, especially that themes usually don’t cost a lot.

One of the most popular themes of WordPress for bloggers is the Divi theme. Upon purchasing it, you get access to more than 800 premade layouts for websites. Plus, it’s pretty easy to use for beginners, thanks to its drag and drop features.

At the time of writing, acquiring the Divi theme for a lifetime costs around $249. If you want to get done with this cost and forget about it, I recommend paying for the lifetime subscription. It’s the more cost-efficient option. If you prefer paying month by month, the Divi theme will cost you nearly $90 monthly, which isn’t exactly affordable.

Logo

A logo isn’t essential per se for your blog, but it’s necessary to make your blog more professional and help you market for it. Creating a brand for your blog can help significantly with marketing, and it adds a professional look.

So, even if you don’t need a logo at the start, you’ll need one eventually if you want your blog to go places.

Luckily for you, there is a lot of design software where you can create your logo for free. The most popular one among bloggers is Canva. If you rather have someone create it for you, you can find designers on Fiverr that will do it for $5-50.

Email Software

You’ll need Email software if you’re serious about making money from your blog. This way, you’ll have a service that grows your email list for you and sends out newsletters to all subscribers.

These kinds of services are essential for growing a blog. Without them, you’ll only stop to an extent.

Some of the most popular email service providers for bloggers are Convertkit and ActiveCampaign. The free trial of Convertkit is ideal for beginner bloggers who don’t have a list of email subscribers. It’ll allow you to grow your list and attract more people to subscribe.

ActiveCampaign is a more powerful option; it’s suitable for bloggers with more than 1000 subscribers or so. The service offers a lot of features you’ll need if you have a long list, including automated emails delivery.

The cost of the service depends on the number of your subscribers. Typically, as they grow more, the price gets higher. However, the starting price is around $84 annually for 5000 email subscribers.

ConvertKit also offers a free plan that you can get if you’re on a tight budget. It doesn’t provide the same features as the paid plans, but it still provides the basics. It’ll allow you to create sign-up forms, promote offers, send newsletters, and grow your list of subscribers.

Once you have a long enough list, you can convert to a paid plan.

Social Media Tools

Social media is now your best bet to market for your blog and get a solid fanbase. On top of that, some social media tools make your life much easier by offering facilities and features for monthly or annual subscriptions.

For example, Pinterest is now the leading social media platform for bloggers to attract viewers. If you want to get the best out of it, you can sign up for Tailwind.

Tailwind is basically a Pinterest app that gives you non-Pinterest features. For one, it allows for scheduling pins for days or even months. This way, you can plan your month ahead and get your posts ready without having to interfere yourself.

In addition to that, Tailwind allows you to join Tribes, which are online communities that let you share your blog posts with other bloggers, so they can promote them and vice versa. Of course, this can help expand the numbers of your followers to thousands or more.

Tailwind costs around $15 monthly, but there’s a free trial available if you want to try your luck first.

But Tailwind isn’t the only social media tool you can get. There’s also Buffer, which manages your social media for you. It allows you to publish your content across different platforms, and it starts at $15 monthly.

Moreover, there’s HootSuite, which is a more advanced social media management tool that costs around $30 a month or more. Lastly, if you need high-quality images for your blog, you’ll need to subscribe to Shutterstock, which starts at around $49 monthly.

Plugins

Nearly all bloggers use plugins to add advanced functions and interactive gestures to their blogs. WordPress, for example, offers a ton of plugins for websites and blogs, and a lot of them are free.

If you’re on a tight budget, there are a couple of free plugins your blog could use. For starters, Instagram Feed allows you to show your feed on your blog, which is an excellent function to have if your blog depends on visuals.

There’s also Envira Gallery Lite, which allows you to create galleries on WordPress with more options than what the web hosting service offers.

Here’s a brief list of more free plugins and what they do:

• Yoast plugin: Allows you to check the SEO score of your posts
• Convertkit plugin: Allows you to add Convertkit forms to the blog
• Under Construction plugin: Alerts visitors that you’re designing your blog still
• MaxButtons: Allows you to add responsive and interactive buttons to your blog
• MonsterInsights: Allows you to connect Google Analytics to your blog
• Social Warfare: Allows you to add social media platforms sharing buttons

All these plugins are free, which is an excellent opportunity for beginners. However, if you’re already a professional and want to upgrade, you can opt for their paid plans. For example, the Yoast plugin offers a paid plan for around $89 annually. Additionally, MonsterInsights has a paid plan of $99.5 annually.

And, of course, if you want to add more advanced features to your blog, you’ll need to pay more. But in most cases, paid plugins only cost around $100 per year.

Landing Pages

If you’re not familiar with the term landing pages, they’re standalone web pages that are created explicitly for marketing purposes. A landing page is an essential part of a marketing campaign, and it can be a call of action, a social media profile, or even an email address.

You can use landing pages for a lot of different purposes, such as converting a lead into a customer. The pages will show the customer a promotion, a discount, etc., to convince him to buy right away.

To add landing pages to your blog, you’ll need software that creates them for you. The most common one among bloggers is LeadPages, which offers a standard plan for $27 per month and a pro plan for $59 per month. If you choose to pay annually, you’ll save $120 per year for the standard plan and $240 per year for the pro plan.

Laptop

If you don’t have a laptop, it’ll be extremely hard to manage a blog. You won’t be able to create it if you don’t have one. No matter how advanced, a smartphone isn’t enough to create a blog and keep maintaining it.

If you’re aiming high, you can get a Macbook Pro. It’s currently one of the best and most secure laptops on the market. And, its performance is unrivaled to the moment. You’ll be able to do everything you desire at once without a hitch.

If you’re on a tight budget, you can always opt for a budget-friendly laptop that gives you all the basic functions. The Lenovo Ideapad 3 is a nice option to consider. Its visuals are excellent, and the screen is large and clear. Plus, the keyboard is comfortable and high-quality, making the laptop one of the best options for writing.

Another affordable option to consider is the Dell Inspiron 15. Its Intel UHD Graphics card is quite decent, and it offers sufficient storage for your use.

Other Hardware Tools

Besides the laptop, you’ll need a couple of hardware tools to create your workstation. The word ‘workstation’ may imply that you’ll pay a lot, but that’s not necessary.

For starters, you’ll need an ergonomic keyboard and a mouse. You’ll be spending most of your time on your desk if you want to do serious blogging, so you’ll have to make sure you stay comfortable.

The Perixx Periboard is a nice option to consider for the keyboard. It’s quite affordable, and it features a smart design that ensures your wrist stays supported and comfortable throughout your working hours. If you like split keyboards, you’ll love this one.

As for the mouse, any option will suffice. You can go as low as you want with its cost.

In addition to the keyboard and mouse, you’ll need a webcam if you intend to upload courses or videos. The YQE webcam is a pretty solid option, and it won’t break the bank. Not only that, but it also comes with a built-in mic, so you don’t have to pay for it separately.

Summary of the Basic Costs of Starting a Blog

A Break Down of The Optional Costs to Start a Blog

The previous costs are all essential. Meaning there’s no going around them. You’ll have to pay for them to start a blog.

On the other hand, these costs below can be delayed to a few months or even years after starting a blog. When you start to grow your blog and become more professional, you may need to start paying them.

Course Platform

If you want to share your expertise with your fans, you may be thinking of creating an online course. In the long run, this can help you earn loads of money. In this case, the first thing you’ll need is a solid online platform to host your course.

You can opt for Teachable, which is a website for coaching and online courses services. It allows you to upload all your course materials, including videos, comfortably without a hitch. You can also create sales pages with templates and attractive features.

On top of that, the website handles your payments for you. This way, you don’t have to suffer the hassle of signing up for payment gateways.

Teachable is pretty affordable, too. If you want to sell your online course using the platform, you’ll need to pay around $39 per month. If you want to pay annually, the cost will go down to $29 per month.

Content Writers

In the beginning, you may resort to writing your own content. It’ll allow you to engage with your fans and write your ideas exactly as you want them. However, down the road, you’ll need to hire content writers to help you when the load gets too much. In the end, you’re one person, and you can only write a limited number of posts per month.

You have a lot of options. For example, you may hire a freelance writer. In this case, you can share your ideas in an audio recording with the writer and let them implement them in the article. Then, you can edit the article to your preferred form.

In this case, you may have to pay around $50 per 1000 words, depending on the writer’s quality. Generally, high-quality content costs around $70–$100 for 1000 words, but that may be too much for a beginner blogger.

To find freelancers, your best bet is job-seeking sites like Upwork. If you don’t want to go through the hassle, you can always opt for a content writing service, such as ContentFly, for example.

The agency’s pricing starts from $250 per month for around 4000 words, but you can always explore your options and find the most suitable plan for your needs.

Courses

Courses may not be vital for blogging, but they’re an excellent way to invest your money and stop you from making mistakes. No matter how experienced you are, you’ll need to gain more knowledge if you want to get serious results with your blog and earn money out of it.

The courses will tell you exactly how to make more money, research keywords, rank in search engines, get more traffic, collect a fanbase, and keep your blog updated for the fans. You won’t find this advice in any other place.

The most popular courses platform for blogging is Udemy. The website offers courses of all kinds for blogging. The latest course yet is the 2021 Masterclass. It currently costs $9.99, but the promotion may run out soon.

If you want to explore your options, you can take a look at other courses platforms, such as SkillShare and PluralSight. To get some courses on SkillShare, you’ll have to make a premium subscription, which will cost you around $99 per year. The website also offers a two-week free trial plan.

Generally, getting a course for blogging won’t cost you more than $20 or an annual subscription of $100.

Assistance

Once you start making money out of your blog, the work will typically become more. Eventually, it’ll be too much for you to handle. You’ll be too busy creating content and viewing the fans’ needs to do basic tasks like posting.

So, even if you have content writers for your posts, you’ll need any kind of assistance for the daily tasks. You can ask your virtual assistant to do the tasks that seem frustrating to you, along with the tasks that you simply don’t enjoy.

A virtual assistant can cost anywhere from $100 to $500 a month, depending on the kind of tasks they’ll do.

Summary of the Optional Costs of Starting a Blog

How Much Does It Cost to Maintain a Blog?

You may think you’re done paying for your blog once you start it. Well, you’re wrong!

If you want to keep your blog up and running, you’ll have to pay more money. And if you ask any experienced blogger, they’ll tell you that consistency is key.

As long as you’re paying and posting, you’ll keep getting visitors and expanding your fanbase. Once you stop doing so, the fans will stop coming in.

So, whether you’re a hobbyist, a standard blogger, or a professional one, here’s a brief overview of the maintenance costs.

Hobbyist

If you have a blog merely to fill your free time, you may have around 100–200 monthly visitors. In this case, you’re a hobbyist blogger, and you’ll only need to pay $5–$25 a month to maintain your blog.

Your money will be going to the basic essentials, such as domain registration and hosting. You’ll be basically paying to stay on the internet, which is the most basic cost of all. You won’t have to pay for content writers, designs, etc.

Any basic hosting package you choose will be enough to keep your blog running, and it’ll offer you all the functions you need. Not only that, but it’ll also do so for a pretty low cost.

To maintain the low costs, make sure to go for free plugins and tools. Paid tools will be of no use if you don’t intend to give the blog much of your time.

Here’s a brief list of the average maintenance costs you’ll pay:

• Domain registration: $1 per month
• Hosting: $10–$15 per month
• SSL License if not included in hosting package: $10 per month

Standard

If you’re a standard blogger, that means you give your blog enough time to make money out of it. You’re in the exact middle of the scale between hobbyists and professionals. In this case, you’ll need to pay around $20–$60 per month to maintain your blog.

Standard bloggers usually don’t pay much for advertising, which is the aspect that costs the most. Instead, they pay for advanced hosting, which gets them some additional functions that raise them a bar over hobbyists.

Some bloggers also use anti-spam tools and plugins.

Furthermore, standard bloggers may need content writers to write their posts, but those don’t cost much. As for photography, posting, and similar tasks, they’re usually done by the blogger or the site owner to save costs. And, the themes are mostly offered by web hosting services for free, which typically saves more money.

So, we can say a standard blogger pays for the following maintenance costs on average:

• Domain registration: $1 per month
• Hosting: $10–$20 per month
• Technical maintenance: $20 per month
• Plugins and tools: $10 per month
• SSL License: $10 per month

Professional

Professional blogs have thousands of visitors coming in every month. Of course, this means they need more maintenance and more advanced options than their counterparts.

The largest expenditure goes to marketing and advertising, whether it’s through Facebook, Google, or other social media platforms. After that comes photography, content creation, writing, and similar costs.

Professional bloggers often hire licensed photographers and freelance writers for content creation. These add to the cost as well.

That’s in addition to the social media tools and plugins that these blogs need to keep the visitors engaged. Professional bloggers will have to pay to get the advanced versions of the plugins that hobbyist bloggers get for free.

Generally, professional blogs need around $300 per month for maintenance, or less depending on how much money the owner is willing to pay.

Here’s a brief list of the average costs:

• Domain registration: $1 per month
• Hosting: $20 per month
• Theme and design: $50–$100 per month
• Technical maintenance: $50–$100 per month
• Plugins and tools: $20–$50 per month
• SSL license: $10 per month

Can You Start a Blog Without Money?

Well, you can. But the real question isn’t whether you can do it or not. It’s whether it’ll get you the desired results or not.

It’s generally not a great idea to start a blog for free, or do anything for free, really.

For one, it’ll be extremely hard to make money using a blog you made for free—almost impossible. The blog will look unprofessional and a bit tacky, and you’ll be limited as to what you can do.

You won’t be able to add advanced plugins or interactive buttons. Plus, you won’t be able to use smart social media tools that make your life much easier when it comes to managing your posts.

There’s also the fact that free blogs aren’t even as free as you think. You’ll find yourself paying for a lot of extras you didn’t know you needed. Those will appear over time when you’ve already spent a lot of effort on your blog.

Aside from that, you’ll have to pay for the essential costs, including domain registration and hosting.

Moreover, free blogs don’t grow as exponentially as professional blogs do. You’ll have to wait for a long time if you want to see real results or an expansive fanbase. Some bloggers may not see that at all if they keep the no-paying policy.

So, a free blog will eventually lead to you giving up because you’ll be frustrated by how slow everything is going. Or, you’ll realize that you need to start paying to upgrade your blog. In both cases, it’s better to pay from the start.

Conclusion

Starting a blog is a great way to build a passive income source but is not easy or for everyone. Ultimately a blog is a business and as such, it requires some initial and ongoing costs.

If you want to make a profit out of it, you’ll need to put money and time to make sure you get the results you desire.

Luckily for you, we compiled all the necessary and unnecessary costs above, so you probably have a good estimate of how much you’ll need to start your blog.

What’s important is, only opt for free tools and plugins. When it comes to themes and hosting, it’s better to pay to make your blog as professional as it can be.

As long as you have a good laptop and a solid plan, you’ll be just fine!

If you are ready to start your blog and make money with it, make sure to check out this article for a step-by-step guide.

For example, Tim Chen from Nerd Wallet makes $100 million in annual revenue from his 10-year-old blog and one of his main income sources is affiliate commissions from credit cards.

This might seem like an unreachable goal and you might only want to replace your current income so you can finally quit your job. But it goes to show you the possibilities available in this industry and what you can achieve with some work and consistency.

Credit Cards are seen as valuable and exclusive products by consumers so as an affiliate in this niche, you won’t need to “sell’ them. It’ll be enough with communicating their benefits and helping your audience find the best ones for their lifestyle and financial record.

This is also a niche where you want to promote different offers so you have a credit card that suits best each one of your readers. So, pay attention to the following list with the best affiliate programs for credit cards.

Best Credit Card Affiliate Programs

1. USAA Credit Cards

• Commission Rate: Up to $20 per lead
• Cookie Length: 30 days
• Join here

The United Services Automobile Association (USAA) was founded in 1922 by a group of U.S. Army officers as a mechanism for mutual self-insurance when they were unable to get auto insurance out of the perception of them being a high-risk group.

They have since then, expanded their services and provide a full range of financial products including banking, investing, real estate, and credit cards by Visa and Amex.

This is a might And your potential audience for these cards is any of the

The target audience for these services includes the 24+ million active or retired military personnel so if you already have them among your readers, this is a great program that offers them a mainstream credit card, with a number of perks.

They also work with family members of military personnel and some of their products are even available to the general public.

As an affiliate, you get $20 per approved credit card which is on the lower end of commission when compared to other programs but since this is a very niche-specific card, it will be easier to target and you’ll have less competition.

Additionally, you can negotiate a better rate based on volume and performance.

While we are focusing on credit cards, it is worth mentioning that you also get paid per lead for the following products:

+ $5 for a rental insurance lead
+ $10 for an auto insurance lead
+ $25 for an enterprise deposit lead

Their affiliate program is run by Commission Junction (CJ) and you’ll get access to marketing material and real-time tracking.

2. Credit.com

• Commission Rate: Varies
• Cookie Length: Varies
• Join here

Credit.com is a financial platform that offers loans, price comparison, credit scoring, and a credit card network. They also offer free tools, education, and resources to guide people through their financial decisions.

They offer users access to all mainstream credit cards like Chase, Citi, American Express, First Progress, Mastercard, Group One and have their own credit card that works for almost any niche.

They are known for having one of the highest affiliate payouts and conversion rates but although they don’t share them publicly so you need to get approved to find out.

As an affiliate, you also get the benefit of promoting some of the best credit cards which are often only working with super-affiliates

One thing to notice is that you can promote individual credit cards so your affiliate link will direct people to their homepage where they can browse all of the products they offer.

But that is not a problem since they have a credit card for every niche so visitors will be able to find the best credit card for individual needs and credit scores.

As an affiliate with Credit.com, you will be able to enjoy high conversion rates and payouts. Their affiliate program is managed in-house and gives you access to exclusive offers, creatives, and live reporting.

If you can manage to get approved, this is a great program to promote no matter your audience.

3. OpenSky by Capital Bank

• Commission Rate: $25
• Cookie Length: 30 days
• Join here

Capital Bank is a reputable bank known for its consumer and user-friendly approach to banking.

Their OpenSky card offers customers the opportunity to repair and build their credit score and it doesn’t ask for any credit check to get started so anyone can apply.

Due to these advantages, this is a great program to promote for any audience, especially if you create content around subjects to building and repairing credit score which will attract the type of audience that will benefit from this card.

Since it is a secured card, it requires a one-time refundable deposit and doesn’t offer any rewards or perks. But giving people the chance to bring their credit scores up is attractive enough.

As an affiliate, you make $25 for every successful referral and. due to the easy approval process, the conversions and payouts are worth it.

According to Commission Junction, they pay an average EPC of about $27 and the cookie lasts 30 days which is pretty average in the industry.

While a lot of people look for a credit card because that offers the best rewards, this card has a selling point that will appeal to a broad audience. Additionally, and since users don’t require credit scores to get this card you can easily offer it to any audience. 

4. Avianca LifeMiles Credit Card

• Commission Rate: Up to $200
• Cookie Length: 30 days
• Join here

Avianca is a Colombian airline that has been the flag carrier of Colombia since 1919. It offers a travel credit card with some of the best benefits in the market for both users and affiliates.

Card owners receive 0% APR for the first year along with no unauthorized charges nor foreign transaction fees. They also get coverage for accidents.

As an affiliate, you get $200 per referred sale, which is one of the highest commissions in this niche and a great way to build a significant income with just a few sales.

As mentioned, the airline’s hub is in Colombia so while it flies all around North, Central and South America and even some European routes, most connections are in Colombia so it makes more sense for travelers who fly this route frequently.

Ultimately any international traveler or digital nomad could enjoy the perks of having no foreign transaction and free travel accident insurance. The travel points can also be used among the 26 airlines of the Star Alliance to which Avianca belongs but the points are worth “less” for other Airlines.

This is a great program if you are in the travel niche or if you have an audience that travels to South America. It might be a small niche but again, you don’t need a lot of conversions to make some good money with this program.

The affiliate program is run by Commission Junction and according to their data, it has an EPC of $545.06 so if you have the correct audience, this is a very profitable offer to promote.

5. Luxury Card

• Commission Rate: Up to $405
• Cookie Length: 30 days
• Join here

As the name suggests, Luxury Card is very much a premium card, which becomes more obvious at the moment you hold it. It is made of stainless steel and carbon and if that is not luxurious enough, clients can order a 24-karat gold version of it.

They offer their exclusive clientele a 2% cashback and air miles redeemed at a rate of 2% as well but with no blackout dates or seat restrictions.

But that is not all. Users also get access to certain airport lounges and a 24/7 concierge service to help them with anything they need from making a reservation to finding the perfect gift for a loved one.

They will also enjoy amenities such as room upgrades, complimentary food and beverage, spa credits, and more when they book with their Luxury Card at over 3,000 properties worldwide. Not something you will find in other cards.

So, how much does a luxury card pay its affiliates? Nothing less than $405 per successful referral. The market is very niche but just a few commissions a month can make a huge difference to your income.

Wealthy people are not usually searching the web for a credit card but if you are in the luxury niche whether it is travel, shopping, dating, etc. you can present this offer to your audience as an exclusive opportunity they should be a part of.

6. Scotiabank Credit Cards

• Commission Rate: $99 CAD or around $73 USD.
• Cookie Length: 30 days
• Join here

Scotiabank is one of North America’s leading financial institutions and Canada’s most trusty international bank. It serves nearly 19 million customers in more than 55 countries worldwide.

They offer a broad range of products including 14 credit cards from VISA, Mastercard, and American Express. They also offer flexible rewards programs and attractive sign-up offers like ow APR, cashback offers, and travel rewards that you can use to promote them.

As an affiliate, you get an average of $99 CAD or US$73 on a cost per acquisition (CPA) basis that can vary based on the type of credit card.

It’s a great option for any financial blogger, especially the new ones since it doesn’t have much competition.

7. Credit Karma

• Commission Rate: $0.25 per sign up
• Cookie Length: 45 days
• Join here

Credit Karma is a credit monitoring platform that offers credit scores, reports, comparisons, and personalized recommendations on how users can make better financial decisions.

They don’t sell any products but instead provide recommendations about third-party services. In this sense, they also earn money as affiliates for the financial products they recommend.

As an affiliate, you get paid $0.25 for every person that signs up. This is not much but you can still make a significant income if you have a lot of traffic just by adding some links in your content or placing a banner on your site.

The services they offers are really helpful and free so the conversion rate is higher than for credit card applications.

Their affiliate program is run through Flexoffers and you get access to tools, educational articles, and a dedicated management team to help you create effective promotional strategies.

8.Indigo Platinum MasterCard

• Commission Rate: $35
• Cookie Length: 30 days
• Join here

The Indigo® Platinum Mastercard® is targeted towards those with less than perfect credit. It offers a pre-qualification tool that doesn’t affect your credit score and lets you know quickly if approval is likely, making it easier to attract and convert leads.

The program reports to all three major credit bureaus, which can help users improve their scores and build a positive payment history.

Due to the fact that this card is designed to improve credit scores, it’s easy to promote to any audience and also comes with attractive Annual fees which are another huge selling point.

As an affiliate, you get a $35 commission on successful referrals and since it is really easy to get approved, they have high conversion rates.

It is important to mention that your traffic sources need to be evaluated and approved by the affiliate network so your commissions are considered valid.

The affiliate program is run by Commission Soup which is is an affiliate financial network and also runs other offers in this list so if you get accepted it’ll be easier to be approved for other programs as well.

9. Petal Visa Card

• Commission Rate: $35
• Cookie Length: 45 days
• Join here

The Petal Visa program offers two credit cars with different benefits for every type of customer:

• The Petal 1 “No Annual Fee” , designed for those with either no credit or a nonprime credit score.
• The Petal 2  “Cash Back, No Fees”, for consumers with no credit or good credit.

They differentiate themselves from other cards because they look beyond credit scores to create a Cash Score based on banking history which can help users qualify for more credit at better rates.

They also offer attractive features that will help you promote it to your audience like no over-limit fees, no annual fee, no late fee, no foreign transaction fee, and cashback rewards of up to 1.5%.

You can join its affiliate program via Impact Radius, and get paid up to $36 per successful referral sale. It is an easy program to promote due to the many benefits it offers and the wide variety of audiences that it suits.

10. American Express (AMEX)

• Commission Rate: Up to 200 CAD or around $150 USD
• Cookie Length: 7 days
• Join here

American Express, popularly known as AMEX, is one of the big three credit card companies, along with Visa and Mastercard.

They are known for benefits like cash-back or flexible rewards and since they are pretty popular promoting them comes easy.

Their benefits for affiliates are not less impressive. They offer a $200 CAD ($150 USD) commission rate per successful referral.

They have a more strict approval process so the acceptance rate will be lower than for other programs. However, you won’t have any issues sending customers their way and with the generous payout, they boost a generous EPC of $644.89.

The program is available in both the US and Canadian markets but There is currently a push to expand the program in Canada, so they offer higher rates for certain products.

As an affiliate, you get access to well-developed resources including, APIs, technical assistance, and customer support 24/7 for your referrals.

11. Upgrade Credit Card

• Commission Rate: $60
• Cookie Length: 30 days
• Join here

The Upgrade credit card is a hybrid credit card/personal loan product that offers customers the possibility to get a Visa credit card with a credit line of up to US$20,000 without the horrible interest rates that most other cards charge. Instead, it offers them an interest rate closer to that of a personal loan.

In the example that they show, it’d mean that users would pay off $14,000 in two years instead of 28 years.

The size of the line of credit will be based on a person’s credit score regardless of the amount, but they’ll be able to benefit from a bigger credit line and lower interest rate than other cards.

As an affiliate, you get a flat commission of $60 for every approval of an Upgrade card.

This is a good card to promote as an alternative for a low interest rate and the option to pay off the debt way sooner than with other cards.

12. Barclaycard

• Commission Rate: Varies
• Cookie Length: 45 days
• Join here

Barclays is one of the leading global credit card providers with a great reputation in the industry so promoting their cards will help you build your authority and gain your readers’ trust.

As an affiliate, you can promote any of Barclaycard’s credit card services and get commissions based on the package you choose:

• The Barclaycard Arrival Plus World Elite Mastercard, a travel rewards card with double miles on all purchases.
• Barclaycard CashForward World Mastercard with 1.5% cash rewards on every purchase,

Their affiliate program is run through FlexOffers and you get access to text links and banner ads along with increasing the reliability of your website or blog by association with its reputable brand.

13. Experian

• Commission Rate: $0-$100
• Cookie Length: 45 days
• Join here

 Experian is a global leader in consumer credit reporting. It collects and aggregates information on over 1 billion people and businesses including 235 million individual U.S.

They have delivered over 20 million credit reports and provided more than 3.1 million members with credit monitoring products.

They work in more than 80 countries so if you have an audience from outside the US, you can promote this offer without worries

While this is not a credit card affiliate program, by offering your audience credit reports and scores, you can help them better understand their current credit situation and make an informed decision on what cards they’d qualify for.

They use Commission Junction to manage their affiliate program. and you get a 20% commission on the revenue from the customers you bring.

14. Credit Assistance Network

• Commission Rate: $1.25 per lead and $95 per sale
• Cookie Length: 365 days
• Join here

Credit Assistance Network is the leader in the market of credit card repair. It helps users with issues such as later payments, debt repair, and improving their credit score. They have a strong track record and they have an A+ rating on the latest Better Business Bureau Ranking.

They also have one of the highest-paying credit repair programs offering up to $95 commission per sale. Additionally, you also get paid $1.25 per lead which might not seem much but it can really up and allow you to make money even if your leads don’t turn into sales.

The program also offers a 365-day which is the longest duration of all programs on this list. It is managed by ShareASale which is a reputable network so you can be confident you’ll get paid for your referrals.

As an affiliate, you get access to banners, coupons and high-converting offers along with real-time tracking and detailed reporting.

This offers works for any blogger or content creator in the financial niche and will allow your audience to get their credit score on good track and be able to access better credit cards.

15. Commission Soup

• Commission Rate: $30-$40
• Cookie Length: ~30 days
• Join here

If you have noticed, a lot of credit card affiliate programs are run through affiliate networks since banks prefer to use an intermediary instead of deal with affiliates directly.

Commission Soup is one of the biggest affiliate networks for credit card programs, focusing on cost-per-action (CPA) financial services offers since 2000.

The affiliate program has different credit cards you can promote including some of the most high-profile credit cards available online like:

• Capital One Affiliate Program – Open Sky Credit Card
• American Express Credit Card
• Indigo Credit Card
• First Access Card
• Milestone Credit Card
• Total Visa Credit Card 
• Credit One Bank
• First Premier Card

The commission varies according to the product and as an affiliate, you get access to all offers. This gives you a wide variety of options to offer your readers and optimize your results for better profits.

You also get access to some proprietary tracking technology, marketing materials, and a support team to help you identify the best products for your audience.

16. Bankrate Network

• Commission Rate: $30-$40
• Cookie Length: ~30 days
• Join here

Bankrate is one of the main credit card affiliate networks globally but it also manages credit card affiliate programs for some of its major competitors like AMEX, Chase, Capital One, and Discover.

They offer over 300 products with different payout structures including cost per mille or a thousand impressions (CPM), cost per lead (CPL), cost per click (CPC), and cost per action (CPA).

While the commissions vary for each product, a lot of the credit cards they offer have a high commission rate so you can earn around $50-$200 per referred sale

According to Bankrate, their affiliates “get more technology solutions than in any other network” including user-friendly in-site tools, co-brand solutions, and data feeds.

Some of these programs will also run their individual programs through other networks but with Bankrate, you don’t need to apply to each one separately. It also helps you organize all your commissions in the same place and reach the payout threshold faster.

However, being a sub-affiliate might mean you won’t earn as much as if you worked directly with the card issuer so make sure to compare the rates of the programs you are interested in.

17. BankAffiliates

• Commission Rate: Varies
• Cookie Length: Vaires
• Join here

BankAffiliates.com is an affiliate network specialized in businesses and financial institutions including products like lending, deposit acquisition, insurance, investments, and credit.

They also host some of the most lucrative credit card affiliate programs, including the Lexington Law and the Personal Capital affiliate programs.

Since they are focused only on the financial space, they are able to understand better the needs of affiliates in the niche including compliance issues unique to the industry.

They also work as an ad network so if you have a blog or website, you could monetize your traffic with ads relevant to your audience.

A great perk of this network is that they also work on a pay-per-call method so affiliates can earn extra money if their audiences call the companies to ask any questions.

Additionally, sales representatives are able to better help people over the phone and offer the services that they need to it also increases your conversion rates while letting you earn extra commission.

The commissions and cookies vary depending on the program so check the ones that you are interested in, to make sure the payouts are worth your time.

18. ShareASale

• Commission Rate: Varies
• Cookie Length: Varies
• Join here

Shareasale is a well-known and reputable affiliate network with two decades of experience and more than 4,800 merchants across multiple industries, including plenty of financial products and credit card programs.

They receive mostly positive reviews for the speed, accuracy, and efficiency it provides to its affiliate marketers. They also offer detailed reporting tools and one of my favorite features shows if is a merchant has founds in their account to allow for automatic payments or, otherwise, how long have they been without them.

Getting accepted as an affiliate is the first step to promote all the programs they manage but you still need to apply individually to each one of the offers you are interested in and have at least one website listed in your affiliate profile.

Like with other affiliate networks, the commissions and cookies vary depending on the merchant but having a trustable network is a great benefit to guarantee your fair and timely payments.

How To Promote Credit Card Affiliate Programs?

Choosing the right credit card affiliate programs to promote is only the first step to start making money and growing your income as an affiliate marketer in this niche.

While ultimately, your work as an affiliate lies in crafting and optimizing your own strategies, here are some of the platforms and methods you can consider to start making money with these programs.

1. With a blog or website.

Since most credit card affiliate programs require you to have a blog or website, it is a given that most affiliates in this niche already have one or are planning on creating it.

If this is your case, you have infinite opportunities to promote these programs to your readers. From credit card reviews, to “best of lists” and comparisons, all you need to do is guide your readers to choose the best card for their needs and they’ll be ready to click your affiliate links without thinking about it twice.

You can also create a static section in your blog for your recommended credit cards, or if you want to go one step further, consider creating a tool to help people find the best card for their needs. This Credit Card Finder in the NerdWallet blog (shown below) is one of the most visited pages on the whole site.

Make sure to check out this article later to learn my proven strategy to promote affiliate offers with a blog.

2. With A Youtube Channel

Youtube is another great platform to promote credit card affiliate programs. It is no secret that video content is king and will continue to be so starting a Youtube Channel in the financial niche can help you build trust with your viewers and make great commissions.

And if you don’t want to appear on camera, this is a great industry to use resources like animation and whiteboards for your videos.

Youtube allows you to place affiliate links directly on the description of your videos and as clickable buttons inside your videos so you have plenty of opportunities to promote your credit card affiliate offers.

Make sure to check out this article later if you want to learn how to get better results promoting affiliate offers on Youtube.

3. With Social Media

While blogging and Youtube-ing are great ways to get consistent and passive traffic to your affiliate offers, they both work through search engines (Google and Youtube) which means that it can take 8-12 months to start seeing some significant commissions.

If you are looking to see results faster, you can also consider using social media platforms like Instagram and Tiktok, which is where people spend most of their time online.

With the massive growth of Tiktok, Instagram has been forced to create its own version of short videos called “reels” inside its app. Both platforms give you the opportunity to grow a big audience in a matter of months (weeks for some) by posting simple 15-second videos.

If you want to take advantage of this opportunity, make sure to check this article on how to use TikTok to make money fast with Affiliate Marketing

These are some of the main methods that you can use to promote your credit card affiliate programs but you can find more about my 10 Favorite FREE Traffic Sources for Affiliate Marketing here.

Takeaway

No matter who your audience is, there are some great affiliate programs for credit cards you can promote as an affiliate marketer in the financial niche.

The best part is that people tend to actively look for credit cards that help them build their credit score and win rewards so you don’t need to be pushy or “salesy”. All you need to do is help them fund the best card for their needs )even if it’s not the one that pays the biggest commission).

If you are still wondering where to get started with Affiliate Marketing, make sure to check out this step-by-step training that is giving beginners great results and is only $7.

Tiktok is not only the fastest growing social media platform with over 130 million active users in the U.S alone but it has also overtaken YouTube’s average watch time with over 24 hours of content per month, compared with 22 hours and 40 minutes on Google’s video platform.

Put simply, Tiktok is probably one of the best opportunities to grow and monetize an audience there has been in the last 10 years.

It can be compared to what Youtube and Instagram were at their beginnings when you could grow your account to 10, 20, or 100k in months. This is now impossible on established platforms with more competition but not on Tiktok where creators have reached millions of followers in months.

So let’s get started with how you can take advantage of this platform to grow your affiliate profits.

Why should you use Tiktok for Affiliate Marketing?

Those who are not yet using TikTok, might still think of it as an app for teenagers and dances but studies show that the user base of TikTok is expanding beyond teens and the number of TikTok users aged 26-34 years is vastly higher as compared to 16-24-year-olds.

This is not a new phenomenon when it comes to social media apps. The younger generation is often the first one to adopt new technologies and other age groups eventually start pouring in as it happened with Facebook and Instagram.

According to this study by Statista, only 37% of TikTok users are between the ages of 10-18 which means that 63% of users are older than 18.

Additionally, the largest share (37%) – of unique visitors comes from households with a total income of $100K or more which means that there is no lack of purchase power and you’ll have no issues monetizing a TikTok audience with affiliate marketing.

While TikTok is the fastest growing social media app, it is still in its early stages and there is not as much competition as in other platforms. This along with its unique algorithm that keeps people engaged for hours making it possible to get exposure and grow a following faster.

To make my point clearer, let’s take a look at these two examples. The first one above is Tori Dunlap, a creator on the personal finance niche who started a Tiktok and an Instagram account at the same time and with similar content. While her Tiktok has reached 1.7 M followers, her Instagram only has gotten 390K.

Another example is Rachel Pedersen, a social media strategist who has been on Instagram for more than 4 years and has reached only 175k followers, while her TikTok account has reached almost 3 times that in less than a year.

That’s more than enough to show why you must be using TikTok for Affiliate Marketing so let’s get started with how to do it!

Pros of TikTok Affiliate Marketing

• You can reach a lot of people without a new or a small account.
• You can grow a following faster than on other platforms
• It works for a lot of niches
• Videos can be 5-60 seconds long so it is easy to create content
• You don’t need any equipment other than your phone
• You can add a clickable link in your bio
• They allow affiliate links as your bio link

Cons of Tiktok Affiliate Marketing

• You need to post frequently and cosnsitnelty to get results
• Not a passive source of traffic
• Views are inconsistent
• The algorithm sometimes takes down videos that do not violate any guidelines
• You can get you account banned even if you haven’t violated any guidelines.

How To Use TikTok for Affiliate Marketing

1. Choose your Affiliate Niche And Offers

Before getting started with your Tik Tok Affiliate Marketing, one of the most important aspects you need to decide on is your niche and offers. This means, what topic you are going to focus on and what products/services you will promote.

Choose your TikTok Niche for Affiliate Marketing

If you have already chosen your niche and offers you can skip to the next step but if you don’t, here are some factors to consider when deciding what topic and products to focus on:

• Focusing on one niche is crucial to promote affiliate offers sucessfully in Tiktok. Users like to follow accounts that post specific niche content instead of general content so they can be certain they’lll like most of your videos.
  
  More importantly, this will also allow you to get more targeted followers that will actually buy what you promote in the future.

• It is also important to choose a niche that you enjoy and have some level of knowledge about. Consistency is key on Tiktok so you will need to publish at least once a day to get results and you choosing a niche you have no interest in will only make things unnecesarily harder.

• Some of the most popular niches on TikTok include dancing, comedy, fashion cooking, and fitness. However, that doesn’t mean you have to choose one of these to be successful. As I mentioned before, Tiktok has 130 millions users of all ages so it can work for most niches as long as you make your content valuable and/or entertaining.
  
  The best way to validate your niche is to do a quick search on TikTok for some of the main related keywords and see if there are some accounts that are already doing well.This is a great sign that there is an audience you can reach and monetize.
  
  Below are some examples of accounts in “smaller” niches to proof my point.

• If you want to work with two different niches, it is best that you create two separate accounts so people know what to expect and they are more likely to follow and stay engaged.
  
• Some niches to stay away from are anything related to drugs, alcohol or sex since TikTok has strict polices againt these and will probably results on getting you banned from the platform before you make any money.

Choose Your Affiliate Offers

A key factor for a profitable niche is making sure that there are good affiliate offers you can promote so this step will also help you validate your niche selection.

Here are some tips to consider when choosing your affiliate offers:

• Commissions: It takes the same amount of work to promote a low ticket or a high ticket offer so why would you choose a product that pays you cents when you can choose one that pays $1,000? While each niche is different I still recommend choosing an affiliate offer that pays at least $40 per purchase so you can see significant results faster.
  
  An exception to this principle would be if you plan to promote products that appeal to a massive audience like Amazon’s in which case the volume justifies the smaller commissions they pay. Below is an example of one TikTok account doing great with these types of products.

• Reputation and Quality: This applies for any platform but TikTok users feel specially empewered by the anonymity they can have on the app so before you start promoting an offer, make sure it is one you like, trust and would be happy to buy yourself.
  
  Your followers will be your biggest asset so you want them to have a good experience with the products you promote so they can continue to trust you and buy what you promote in the future.

2.Set up your TikTok Profile

Choose your account type

There are three different types of accounts you can have on TikTok:

• Personal Account: This is the account that you will get by default when first signing up for TikTok. As the name suggests, this account is merely for personal use so it doesn’t any features that you can take advantage of as an affiliate marketer.

• Creator Account: Thys type of account is geared towards influencers and content creators but you can also use it as an affiliate marketer. The main benefit of a creator account is that it gives you access to all the cool sounds that are what TikTok is all about, while also having access to statistics.
  
  The only drawback of a creator account is that you don’t get access to a clickable link in your bio until you reach 1,000 followers so it’ll hard to drive traffic to your affiliate offers before that point. But if you post consistently, it shouldn’t take you more than a couple of weeks to reach that point.

• Business Account: finally, a business accounts is the other option that you can go for since it gives you access to a clickable link in your bio without any other requirements. However, business accounts don’t have access to most of the sounds so you do miss out on all the trends and opportunities to create cool content.

Which account should you choose? I would recommend choosing a creator account since it won’t be hard to reach 1,000 followers and get a clickable link in your bio. Plus, it’ll help you focus more on creating valuable content and building trust since you won’t be promoting any offers at first.

Optimize your profile

After choosing what type of account you want to have, it’s time to optimize your bio so people know what your account is about when they visit your profile and can decide if you want to follow you. Here are some tips to consider when creating your Tiktok bio:

• Add relevant keywords related to your niche to your name and username so your profile can show up in search results. This gives you more opportunities to be discovered by people who are already interested in your topic.

• Tiktok space for your bio is short. Use it wisely by writing a concise description of yourself and how you can help you potential audience with their needs and problems so they feel inclined to follow you.

• If/ once you are able you are to add a clickable link in your bio, add also an attractive call to action inviting people to visit it.

• Add a picture of yourself that shows your face clearly. Remember that this is a social media app before anything and people want to connect with other people.

• Depending on the type of account you choose, you can also link your Youtube channel and Instagram account.

3. Set up your your affiliate marketing funnel

Before you start pumping out content, you need to know where you will direct all the potential customers you get for your affiliate offers.

While the “easiest” option would be to add your affiliate link as a clickable link in your bio, that could cause you to lose a lot of sales and to miss out on buildable a valuable asset for your business.

Instead, you can create a simple sales funnel that allows you to collect people’s emails and follow up with them to increase conversion rates (aka commissions). Here are a few reasons why I recommend using a sales funnel when using TikTok for affiliate marketing:

• When people are scrolling through TikTok, they are not actively looking to make a purchase so it is very unlikely that they are ready to buy the affiliate product right after clicking your link. A majority of them will not buy it the first time but if you collect their email first, you can follow up with them and increase the sales and therefore, commissions.

• A simple sales funnel like the one I will show you how to create includes a bridge page where you’ll be able to introduce yourself and pre-sell the offer to your audience. This will not only increase the chances of them buying the affilite product but it’ll also allow you to start building your authority and trust with your followers.

• While you can build a following easier on Tiktok than on other platforms, the truth is that you still don’t own that audience and it can also dissapear if one day your account gets banned so builidng your email list by promoting your affiliate offers is the best way to protect your business long-term and have an asset that is truly yours.

• As an affiliate marketer, building your email list is the best way to create consistent passive income. Depending on your niche you can make between $1 and $5 a month per email subscriber by promoting related offers that you can do on autopilot by using an email autoresponder.

Now that you know why you must use a sales funnel for Tiktok Affiliate Marketing let’s take a look at how to build one easily.

Opt-In Page

The Opt-In Page of your sales funnel is where your audience will first land after clicking on the link in your TikTok profile.

The main objective of this page is to capture visitors’ emails so you can then follow up with them. This is usually done by offering a free item also known as “freebie” or “lead-magnet” or by simply offering an attractive promise or benefit that they will be to discover in exchange for their email.

Below is an example of a simple yet effective opt-in page. As you can see all you need is an attractive headline highlighting the benefits of the affiliate offer. (In this case, the email form pop-ups when you click the “Show Me How button”

Bridge Page

As the name suggests, the bridge page is a connector between the opt-in pages and the merchant’s sales page.

It usually consists of a simple video where you introduce the offer to your audience. Since they have clicked on your link after watching your TikTok videos, watching you present the offer gives it an extra layer of trust and credibility than if you simply send them to the sales page.

It also helps you start creating a relationship with them so they are more likely to read your emails and buy the future offers that you share with them.

Here, you will also add a Call To Action button and place your affiliate link in so people can be directed to the merchant’s website when clicking.

Email Campaign

After people click your affiliate link they will go to the company’s website where some of them will buy the product and some won’t.

But they have also been added to your email list since they entered their email on your opt-in page so you can follow up with them via email to help convert another group of them into buyers.

This is usually done through a 5-day email campaign that helps build more trust with by providing value and helping eliminate some of the potential obstacles for buying the product.

You can automate this whole process with an email autoresponder like ActiveCampaign so you only need to set it up once and then your funnel and email campaign will be working for you 24/7.

4.Grow Your TikTok Audience

Once you have your profile optimized, you are ready to start creating content so you can build your audience. Here are some tips to consider for your content strategy:

Have a clear niche

The TikTok algorithm is really good at finding people who might be interested in your content but it is important that you stay focused on your niche so it can help you find your audience. This will also help you gain followers since people will have a clear idea of what your account is about and know what they can expect from you.

Use hashtags

When you first start creating videos, Tiktok has no idea what your account is about so using as many relevant hashtags as possible in your description is the best way to “help” the algorithm to know who it should show your content to.

Note: It is important to mention that TikTok videos can not be edited after being posted – as it can be done on other apps – so double check your video and description before hitting that “Post” button.

Follow Trends

Trends are a huge part of what makes TikTok so fun and addictive for users. Put simply trends are either sounds or types of videos that users replicate with their own version and that TikTok groups together under their hashtags and songs tabs.

Trends are a great opportunity to get more views on your videos since the algorithm usually shows users videos that are similar to the ones they have engaged with and if a song or challenge is “trending” most users have probably interacted with it already.

Additionally, is an easy way to create content related to your niche that is fun and entertaining at the same time. Once you start noticing TikTok trends, you will never run out of ideas for your videos.

You can find the biggest current TikTok Trends within the app, by clicking the ‘Discover’ magnifying glass and choosing Trends at the top of the screen but, to be honest, once a trend appears in the discover tap it is probably too late to hop on it. You will have more luck simply scrolling through your “For You Page” and identifying the audios that appear repeatedly.

Duration

TikTok videos can be anything from 5 seconds to 3 minutes long but one of the main factors that the algorithm takes into account to determine if it keeps showing your video to more people is Watch Time, meaning what percentage of your video the users watched.

For this reason, and because people’s attention span is shorter every day, shorter videos tend to perform better. Try to keep your videos as concise as possible and use an attractive “hook” at the beginning to catch viewers’ attention and hopefully, make them stop scrolling to watch your video.

Respect Community Guidelines

Tiktok might seem like all fun and games but it actually has very strict policies on what is allowed on the platform and repeated violations can get you banned either for a few days or completely.

Prohibited content includes anything that promotes bullying, drugs, alcohol, nudity, or any form of sexual content.

Unfortunately, many times a video can get flagged without violating these guidelines simply because the algorithm made a mistake or because people reported the video.

Why would someone report your video? I have no idea but it happens so my advice is that if you get a hater in your comments simply block them and hopefully you’ll avoid getting more of them into your profile.

Add A Call To Action

A Call To Action is a final message that you can add at the end of your videos to tell people what to do next.

You can’t expect people to follow you or click the link in your bio if you don’t ask them to do it but I can’t tell you how many affiliates have told me they are struggling to grow and get commission while not having a clear call to actions on their videos.

When you are first growing your account, I recommend asking people to follow you so you can build your authority and credibility faster and once you have at least 1,000 followers, you can start asking people to visit the link in your bio as a call to action.

Replicate what works

Tiktok is a unique platform with its own language and codes so when you are first starting out it can be challenging to find what type of content works best for your niche.

The good news is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel since there are probably other creators in your industry (or a similar one) who are already getting good results and from who you can get inspiration.

And no, you don’t need to copy their videos but —as you will notice— Tiktok is a lot about creating your own version of someone else’s videos so that is a great place to start exploring what sort of content works for your niche.

TikTok Affiliate Marketing FAQ

Can you do affiliate marketing on TikTok?

Yes! Tiktok is a huge opportunity for affiliate marketers. The app is still in its early stage so growing a following and getting traffic is easier than on other platforms.

Additionally, you can add a clickable link in your bio and they don’t have any restrictions when it comes to affiliate links. So, while this might not the best practice, some beginners will be glad they can add their link directly without having to own a domain or use a landing page.

How do I use Amazon affiliate on TikTok?

Tiktok is a great place to promote Amazon affiliate products since you can reach a wide audience easily but the key is to choose products with a novelty or surprise element so people are more likely to engage with your videos and share them.

Accounts like @amazonbadger and @teresalauracaruso are two accounts to look out for great results promoting amazon affiliate products on Tiktok.

You can also use a tool like Linktree or Beacons so you can add multiple products to your bio and not be limited to just one link

Takeaway

Using TikTok can help you kick start your affiliate journey and get you results faster than other platforms.

The app is still in its early days but it is definitely harder to grow on it now than it was 1 year or even 6 months ago so if you want to take advantage of this opportunity the best time to get started is now.

Keep in mind that you don’t own your audience so it is best to grow your email list while promoting your affiliate offers so you can protect your business and income long-term.

Affiliate Marketing is one of the cheapest businesses you can start since you don’t need to invest in inventory, pay for shipping, create a new product, nor hire customer service agents.

That being said, you do need some basic tools like a funnel builder and email autoresponder but there are some tips and tricks that you can implement in order to get around these and avoid the costs.

It might not be the best way to begin and will require you to invest more if your time invest but in this article, I will explain exactly how you can start affiliate marketing for free and don’t let it stop you from creating a successful business.

What are the costs associated with Affiliate Marketing?

While Affiliate Marketing doesn’t have as many overhead costs, it is still a business and as such, requires some investment.

So, before you understand how you can get started for free, let’s take a quick look at how affiliate marketing works and what are the costs that it usually requires.

As an affiliate marketer, your main “job” is to direct people to the products you. are promoting and, hopefully, increase the chances of them buying the product so both the merchant and you can make more money.

To achieve this, there are two main factors that come into play: your traffic source and your sales funnel

Traffic Source:

Your traffic source is the method that you will use to reach potential clients and direct them to your affiliate offers. It can be of two different types: organic and paid.

• The organic methods refer to creating valuable content in order to build an audience of potential clients and can be done in platform like social media, blogs, Youtube, forums, etc.

• On the other hand, paid traffic is the one that is generated throguh paid means when a user clicks on an ad placed on a search engine, social media platforms, or media networks.

As you can imagine, paid traffic requires more money but the organic methods also have some costs involved. I’ll show you later what can you do to avoid them.

Your sales funnel:

Your sales funnel is a series of steps that you will use to promote your affiliate offer and convert your audience into buyers.

It can be as simple or elaborated as you want but, in its basic form it is comprised of an opt-in page to capture people’s emails, a bridge page to pre-sell the affiliate offer and an email campaign to convert more subscribers into customers.

Unless you know how to code, you will need a funnel builder and email autoresponder in order to create these easily. You’d also need a domain which is the name or address you will use for your funnel.

Normally, you could expect to spend between $90 and $300 a month on these tools. This might not seem like much for a successful affiliate marketer already making six figures a year but if you are wanting to start it, these costs can stack up and create an extra layer of pressure and frustration every month it takes you to get results.

Education

While there is a lot of free affiliate marketing training on blogs and Youtube, the truth is that content on the internet is scattered, and sometimes it is not easy for beginners to put the pieces together and know what step to follow next.

Since getting the proper training is one of the key factors that will determine your results as an affiliate marketer, beginners usually invest in a course or coaching program to increase their chances of success.

This can mean anything from $50 to $2000+ depending on the course and how much support you are looking for.

But if you are looking to get started with no money, In this guide I will show you what are some of the free and cheapest alternatives you can use to get some proper training and results.

Note: These are some of the main costs associated with getting started as an affiliate marketer but you can check out this article later if you want to know in detail how much exactly it costs to start a profitable Affiliate Marketing business

Start Affiliate Marketing for Free

Now that you are familiar with the usual costs of starting Affiliate Marketing, let’s see how you can get started with no money!

1. Choose the right affiliate programs

Getting started for free means that you won’t have your own domain or website which will limit the affiliate programs that you can get accepted into.

Most affiliate programs will want to know how are you planning to promote them and what platform you will be using.

Even if you are using methods like social media and Youtube, having your own domain is required by some affiliate programs and gives you access to more opportunities.

But don’t worry, I still suggest applying to all the affiliate programs you are interested in because some of them will accept a social media profile URL instead of your own domain so it is best to give it a try.

I am just telling you so you are don’t get surprised when applying and know in advance to keep your options open and be flexible with the offers you want to promote.

Alternatively, if you are very certain about the affiliate programs you want to promote and want to make sure you’ll get accepted, you can consider getting your own domain for around $20.

You can also get it for free when signing up for hosting for $2.95/month and that way you’d be getting all you need to have your own website for less than 3 dollars a month.

2. Choose your promotional method / traffic source

Once you have selected your affiliate offers, it’s time to choose what platform or traffic source you will use to promote them.

As I mentioned before, traffic sources can be of two different types: organic and paid.

Naturally, since we are learning how to start affiliate marketing for free, paid methods are off the tables.

But you still have plenty of alternatives for free organic traffic. Here are some of the best ones I recommend considering:

TikTok:

Contrary to what you might think, TikTok is not just an app for kids and trendy dances. With more than 30 million active users in the U.S. alone, it has become the fastest-growing social media network of all time, which also makes it one of the biggest opportunities for brands and marketers.

Nowadays more brands and influencers have already hoped on the Tiktok train increasing the competition but the app is still in its early stage. This means that it is easier to grow an audience and get thousands of views when compared with more established platforms.

Using Tiktok to start affiliate marketing for free

• Create a Tiktok account focused on the niche you want to promote and make sure all your content is related to that topic and to your affiliate offers so Tiktok can help you find your audience.

• Create videos that provide value to your potential audience whether that is by educating or entertaininging them. Shorter videos 7-15 seconds long tend to work the best so creating content and trying different thing is really easy.

• Use as many hashtags as you can in your description so the algorithm knows to whom it should show your content.

• Tiktok is very trend-focused so spend some time consuming videos on your feed (for you page) to understand what is trending and create your own version.

• Tiktok lets you have on clickbale link in your bio so if you are promoting several products at one you can use something like Beacons to create a simple page with all your links.

• Always add a message or “call to action” in your videos inviting people to check the link in your bio.

• You can create content as a personal brand or use methods like stock videos, user generated content, animations, etc.

• Below are two examples of TikTok accounts that are getting great results promoting affiliate products.

Instagram

Instagram might have lost some of its coolness after copying Snapchat stories feature and adding reels to compete with Tiktok. However, if history teaches us something is that Instagram always wins and that means that the app is here to stay.

And not only that but since Instagram is trying to keep up with Tiktok they are pushing the reels feature pretty intensely which gives new creators and marketers the opportunity to reach a big audience and grow a following quicker than before.

Using Instagram to start affiliate marketing for free

• Create an Instagram account for your affiliate niche. You can choose between creator or business account since both offer the option to add a link to your profile and gives you access to analytics.

• Instagram has different formats that you can use including images, videos, igtv, etc. but the best way to take advantage of Instagram at the moment is to go heavy with reels since they will help you reach more people and grow your account faster.

• Similarly to Tiktok, you can create content as a personal brand or use stock footage, animations, whiteboard or user generated content.

• Once you reach 10,000 followers Instagram gives you the option to add a link to your stories so tha’s a great way to drive extra traffic to your affiliate offers.

Youtube

Youtube works as a search engine (like Google), which means that you can get in front of people who are already actively looking for an answer or solution.

This makes Youtube a great platform to start your Affiliate marketing journey since the buying intent is higher than in social media, where people are mostly scrolling to be entertained.

Additionally, Youtube videos continue to get views for years after being published so they can help you build a passive source of traffic and income. They also can be monetized with ads so you will get an extra source of revenue.

Using Youtube to start affiliate marketing for free

• One of the most important factors to actually make money with Youtube and affiliate marketing is targetting keywords (phrases) with a high buying intent like reviews, comparisons, and unboxings. People searching for this type of videos are already interested in buying a product and are just looking for a final push.

• Use Seach Engine Optimization (SEO) so can rank your videos on search results, get more views, and hence, more affiliate commissions. Makes sure to check out this artcile later for a step-by-step guide on how to use succeed using Youtube for Affiliate Makreitng

• Do not worry about fancy equipment. While It might seem like all Youtubers have professional cameras and software, you can actually get started for free using only your cellphone and a free editor like Canva.

• Add your affiliate links in the description of your video and make sure to mention it and invite viewers to visit them.

Facebook

The rise in popularity of new social media platforms might make it seem like Facebook has been left behind but the truth is that it remains the biggest social network with 2.85 billion monthly active users.

While the organic reach of Facebook Pages is pretty much dead, there are still other free ways to use Facebook for Affiliate Marketing like using your personal profile and Facebook groups.

Using Facebook to start affiliate marketing for free

• For this method, you are going to use for personal profile as your platform to drive people to your affiliate offers.

• To do this, you’ll take advantage of the natural curiosity that people feel when interacting with someone new on Facebook, which often leads to them checking out the other person’s profile.

• You’ll need to optimize your profile to invite people to check your affiliate offers by changing your cover picture, featured picture, your bio, and your posts.

• Once you have done this, the next step is joining Facebook Groups related to your niche and provide value in the comments. The idea is to spark curiosity so people visit your profile and from there, your affiliate offers.

• In this case, your Facebook profile is working as a personal billboard and all the elements should invite people to check your links or funnel (more on this next).

• If you want a step by step to apply this method, make sure to check out this article on how to use Facebook for Affiliate Marketing.

Pinterest

Pinterest is often an overlooked platform but it is actually a great way to promote affiliate offers for free.

It is technically a search engine like Google and Youtube which means that you can appear on search results even if you don’t have many followers at first and get consistent traffic long-term.

Additionally, it has an important social component to it since people are able to share your pins, help you get more views and they can even go viral bringing you huge amounts of traffic.

Pinterest demographics also make it great for affiliate marketers since half of Pinterest users earn $50K or greater per year, and 10 percent make greater than $125K (1) giving them a higher purchase power than other audiences.

Using Pinterst to start affiliate marketing for free

• Create a Pinteret Business profile dedicated to your affiliate niche. Since Pinterest works as a search engine it is really important that you optimize your profile, boards and pins with the right keyword so your content can appear on search results.

• Pinterest allows for affiliate links so you can technically use your affiliate link as the destination URL for your pins. However, affiliate links can sometimes be flagged as spam so it is best to use a landing page instead.

• Pinterest is all about frequency so in order to get significant traffic you want to post at least once- twice a day. The caveat is that you should not post the same URL too frequently or your accpunt can get flagges, For this reason is best to promote different offers and use different landing pages so you can alternate the URLs.

• Stay patient and consistent, it can take 3-4 months to start getting significant visit but once you do, it can become a great source of organic traffic.

• Make sure to check out this article later for a complete guide on how to use Pinterest for Affiliate Marketing

3. Build your sales funnels for free

As I mentioned before, your sales funnel is a series of steps that have the purposes of capturing your audience emails, pre-sell them on the affiliate offer and follow up with them via email to increase the chances of them buying the product.

If money were not a problem, you could expect to spend between $90 and $300 a month on a reputable funnel builder and email autoresponder.

While the paid alternatives are naturally better and offer more features, today I will show you how you can do it without money by using some of the following free tools:

• Groove Funnels: Groove is a new CRM platform that offers a free plan that gives you access to some of its most basic features like a funnel builder. The caveat is that it doesn’t include access to capture email leads or send email campaigns so I would not recommend it as your first choice.

• ConvertKit: This is an email autoresponder that offers a free plan for up to 500 contacts. While you can not create complete sales funnel with it, you can create simple landing pages and start making money until you can affort a paid software.

• Systeme.io: This CRM platform is probably the best you can get for free. It offers a free plan that includes both funnel builder and email autoresponder for up tp 1,000 contacts and when you pass that number you should already be making money and be able to pay for an upgrade.

Note: The caveat is with using these free alternatives is that they are not the best in the market and if you want to switch to a better one once can afford it, you’ll have to create your sales funnel again from scratch.

4. Get the education you need to start affiliate marketing for free

One key aspect of succeeding as an affiliate is getting the right education and, most times, that comes with a price.

While there is a lot of free information out there, most of it is incomplete and scattered since free content often has the goal of attracting potential buyers for courses or coaching.

So, how can you learn the skills and methods you need to succeed for free?

You’ll simply need to put more time into it to be able to connect the pieces and be your own guide. Here is how you can get started:

• Following the advice in this article, choose your affiliate offers and platform. Each platform has its own strategies so, for example, it won’t be useful to learn about blogging when you want to use Tiktok to promote your offers.

• Once you have choosen your platform start from the beginning and google “how to promote affiliate offers using _________”. Spend some time watching videos and reading article to get an overall idea of what people are doing and what startegies are working for them.

• Check out what other affiliates and content creators are doing in your niche, what offers they are promoting and what is working well for them. Check out their content and ther sales funnels for referece.
  
  Conside that anyone creating content online is also promoting affiliate offers but besides from the blogging and making-money-online niche, creators of other niches are not openly talking about it so you just need to check out what they are doing.

• Search for tutorials on how to build your sales funnel and email campaign. Most content that you will find is often focuses on paid tools since creators are also promoting those sofwtares as affiliates but you can still apply the same principles to the free tools that you are using. Here is a complete guide on how to build an affiliate marketing funnel that you can start with.

• Watch webinars. Most of them will try to offer you paid courses at the end but you cans till get a lot of free valubale information from them. This one from 8-figure earner, Spencer Mecham has tons of free value if you want to check it out.

• Join Facebook groups so you can ask questions and get advice from experience affiliate marketers for free. A lot of them are full of spam but these ones are some of my favorite where you can actually learn and help others as well: Automation Nation and Affiliate Profits.

Alternatively, if you are want to give yourself more chances to succeed and save you time and mistakes, this 15-day challenge is giving beginners great results and it costs only $7.

Start Affiliate Marketing for Free FAQ

How much does it cost to start affiliate marketing?

It depends, starting a blog or social media profile has a completely different cost than starting with paid ads. If we take the ad cost out of the equation, you can spend around $90-$200 a month for basic tools like funnel builder and email autoresponder.

Check out this article to find out exactly how much you can expect to invest to start affiliate marketing.

Can I learn affiliate marketing for free?

The short answer is yes, there are lots of free content online that you can learn from. Will it be the easiest and most effective way to do it? Probably not. Will you need to learn as you go and make your own mistakes? Probably yes. But if you are willing to put in the time and work required to teach yourself, you can achieve it.

You can start with my complete guide on How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing here.

Alternatively, if you have $7 to spare you can start with this step-by-step training for beginners.

Final Thoughts

Affiliate Marketing is one of the cheapest businesses you can start if you have no money. However, all businesses require some sort of investment so if you want to start Affiliate Marketing for free you are going to need to put more time and work into it.

Devote yourself to learning from the huge amount of free resources available online and grow an audience from scratch with valuable content. Once you are making a steady income, make sure to invest in tools and education that can help you scale your business to the next level.

Golf might have a reputation of being a niche sport, but the fact that 75% of the courses are open to the public challenges that notion a bit. Golf ranks 8th among the most popular sports in the US, right after tennis and auto racing.

Even if its fans don’t actively play the game, they still follow the tournaments and watch the sport whenever they can. A large number of them take up golfing lessons or buy home simulated games.

As for the folks who actually play golf, they’re known to be big spenders. There are so many items to buy in the golfing world and plenty of gear to try. Additionally, as the players’ skills develop, they find that they have to get more advanced equipment. It’s not surprising then that the golf industry is worth billions of dollars.

Golf affiliate programs are thus a lucrative niche for affiliate marketers. There’s a sizable amount of potential leads, and they’re most willing to invest in various commodities related to the game. Selecting from the myriad of available programs could be tricky, and that’s why we carefully curated the following list of the best possible deals.

The Most Profitable Golf Affiliate Programs

As you pick one, or more, golf affiliate programs, you should keep in mind a few considerations to maximize your profits:

• Your own interests
• Your readers’ interests
• The conversion rate of a platform
• The commission rate
• How long do the cookies last
• The availability of an affiliate network

Naturally, you’d look for the programs that provide the best deals, and that’s wise of course, but it’s not enough. The main predictor of your profitability is how well your content can drive traffic to a certain platform.

Matching your work with a suitable affiliate program should be a top priority for your business. Your interests naturally draw in your readership. And their needs should find a ready outlet in marketable products and affiliate programs.

Luckily there are tons of golf affiliate programs covering every conceivable aspect of the industry. And the following is a varied list of prime quality options to choose from.

1.   Amazon’s Affiliate Marketing Program

Since its launch, the Amazon Associates program was an instant hit. Additionally, it inspired millions of sellers worldwide to focus on affiliate marketing as much as generic advertising.

Even when the commission rate was slashed in the past few years, this platform remains one of the favorite affiliate programs for many bloggers. That’s mainly because it’s the go-to destination for buying anything at all, so it’s easy to convince a lead to proceed with a transaction.

Moreover, Amazon has a strict vetting policy when it comes to accepting partners. So becoming an Amazon Associate might facilitate your future partnerships with other platforms, brands, or networks.    

Amazon has thousands of golf apparel classified under tens of categories that buyers can navigate easily. There’s a wide assortment of brands, ranging from the posh to the budget-friendly.

Thus, there’s a huge amount of gear you can review and promote. Additionally, you can steer your readers to good products that they can get in a jiffy from a trusted source. While the commission isn’t huge, the high conversion rate makes up for it.

• Url: Amazon Affiliate Program
• Commission rate: 4.5%-10%
• Cookie duration: 1 day

2.   Swingman Golf Affiliate Program

This is a training program tailored for beginners and pros alike, with the sole aim of improving the golfer’s skills in a month.

The promise Swingman Golf makes is for the players to gain 12-16 mph, or up to 30-40 yards, of driver swing speed. And to achieve that impressive feat in just 30 days. In 3-4 months these figures go all the way up to 30 mph and more than 75 yards.

The training material is mainly a video library that covers various aspects of gaining distance and swing speed. In addition to mental imagery that optimizes the golfer’s focus to unprecedented levels. 

The 50% commission might catch your eye, but you should read the conditions fully. It’s limited to only $49 per month. This is still not bad, but keep your attention on the 10% as well, which could generate more revenue.

• Url: Swingman Golf Affiliate Program
• Commission rate:  varies as follows:
  Swing Man Golf All-Access – 50% of $49/month
  Swing Man Golf Swinxg Speed Trainer Certification Program – 10% of $588
• Cookie duration: 30 days

3.   American Golf Affiliate program

Despite what the brand name says, American Golf is the largest golf retailer in Europe. It has more than 99 brick and mortar stores in the UK and Ireland, in addition to a whole lot more in progress.

Their online store serves a global audience of golfers, as it offers a fine assortment of gear that’s hard to find in one place. They also constantly offer prime quality deals at a sale price. And their friendly staff is always there to offer recommendations and help customers in getting what they really need.

Joining this program doesn’t sound too lucrative in terms of commission rate, and some might wonder about the overseas HQ. However, it’s a world-famous store with a wonderful presence both online and around its many shops.

The incessant traffic should make the profits worthwhile, and there are so many products to talk about. I can imagine that the huge variety would make for a nice blogging subject. Comparisons, reviews, specialized gear, you name it! 

• Url: American Golf Affiliate Program
• Commission rate: 6%
• Cookie duration: 30 days

4.   Callaway Golf Affiliate Program

Golf is a precision game, and things like airspeed or club balance can make or break a swing. As such, pros are always looking for premium gear that helps in optimizing their swings.

Callaway Golf is among the major suppliers of that high-caliber gear. You can find anything from golf balls and golf clubs, to lifestyle items like comfortable footwear, backpacks, and golfing accessories.

In addition to the Callaway Golf products, the online store displays brands like TravisMathew, Odyssey, Jack Wolfskin, and OGIO. These niche items might be hard to find at stores that offer generic equipment.  

There are numerous ways to blog about premium gear. For starters, it’s what the pro players often use. So if you’re covering tournaments, that would be a good context. Additionally, the specs and performance of that type of gear are so unique and amazing. You’d never run out of words describing these special features. 

• Url: Callaway Golf Affiliate Program
• Commission rate: Starts from 6%
• Cookie duration: 45 days

5.   Austad’s Golf Affiliate Program

This business started in 1963 when Oscar and Dorothy Austad decided to run an online mail-order venture selling golf equipment. In a fascinating turn of events, the business boomed, and by the mid-1980, Austad became the largest golf retailer in the US.

The business is still family-owned, and they carry on with the tradition of club fitting, customization, and repair. In the world of golf, these activities are as rare as they get! But it’s among the pillars of Austad.

It’s not hard to see why this outlet has such a huge following of loyal customers. The availability of premium quality products helps a lot as well. Their shelves are stacked ceiling-high with glittery items from Adidas Golf, Bridgestone, Bushnell, ECCO, Under Armour, Wilson Staff, and tens of other big names.   

There’s also a ‘family’ rewards system, which allows members to get a 3% earnings and perks package. Additionally, Austad has a value guide that lets customers trade their old gear for new top tech apparel. These are definitely unique selling points that you can use to your great advantage.

Becoming an affiliate to Austad isn’t that hard, and once you join the club, you’d be eligible for a generous 7.5% commission. With their high traffic and conversion rates, you can expect to get a 9% commission in a short while. 

• Url: Austad Affiliate Program
• Commission rate: 7.5% flat commission. But with incentive, it goes up to 9% for sales exceeding $5,000
• Cookie duration: 60 days

6.   TeeOff Golf Affiliate Program

TeeOff is a service that books golf courses worldwide, with as little hassle as possible. You can choose the time and place to play your favorite game in practically any location. And the best part is, there’s no rush to leave a down payment, and booking fees aren’t necessary at all.

The platform is a neat lineup of some of the best golf courses you can think of. You can see a thumbnail of the course, an estimate of the price range, the available times, and a star rating that gives you an idea of what to expect.

The locations are in places like California, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, and pretty much all the States you can count. In addition to international spots such as Australia, Ontario, Ireland, Costa Rica, UAE, Malaysia, and tons of other amazing places.

Travel bloggers would have a field day with this affiliate program! But any content creator can do wonders with that service as well. It would be a nice reprieve to write about golf courses in exotic countries, as opposed to all the equipment reviews and buyer’s guides!   

• Url: Teoff Affiliate Program
• Commission rate: 6%
• Cookie duration: Undefined

7.   Golf Outlets Affiliate Program

While several of the retailers mentioned above specialized in costly premium gear, Golf Outlets deals mainly in budget-friendly products. Many of the brands they offer are actually their own. And they distribute all the items through two depots to minimize any added costs.

To keep the prices down, this store partners with a sister company on the other side of the pond, in Europe. This way, it’s much easier to negotiate winning deals and import great products that can still be offered to a wider base of customers. 

Besides the hoards of moderately-priced items, buyers can also find some big-name brands at affordable prices. Big clearances happen all the time, and they’re amazing opportunities to get more for less. This is also among the many unique points that you can market.

Golf outlets have been in the business for 35 years, and they confidently say that they know what works and what doesn’t, so they don’t waste any time with fads or contraptions. It’s nice to work with such folks!

This program is highly organized, and as you start the partnership you’d feel that all the administrative work is well taken care of. Two third-party tracker networks; Affiliate Future and Commission Junction, oversee the commissions and leads activities. And you can get full access to the whole process reports to be sure your earnings are fair and secure. 

• Url: Goal Outlets Affiliate Program
• Commission rate: 5%
• Cookie duration: 30 days

8.   MyScorecard Golf Affiliate Program

This program is a bit left-field when it comes to golf affiliates, as it doesn’t offer the typical merchandise and sports gear. It’s not even a golf course promotional business. To clear up the mystery, what you’d be marketing here is information!

Having said that, it’s fair to say that information is a valuable commodity in sports. And as the saying goes, “the more you learn the more you earn!” MyScorecard is an accurate method to track golf handicap. It uses USGA Handicap Indexes to optimize the playing styles of beginners as well as pros.

There’s a free trial version of MyScorecard, so you can get a full idea of the product before signing any agreements. The commission is a dazzling 16% which is pretty alluring. And with all the features packed in the app, including this link in any type of blog shouldn’t be difficult at all.

MyScorecard offers three types of affiliate programs that you can select from. These are the Basic Affiliate Program, Advanced Affiliate Program, and Golf Course Partners Program. We suggest that you read through each option, and then make a final decision. Several bloggers find that it’s best to start with the Basic program though.      

• Url: MyScorecard Affiliate Program
• Commission rate: 16%
• Cookie duration: 30 days

9.   Rain or Sunshine Golf Affiliate Program

This is one of the nicest affiliate programs a golf blogger could promote. It’s the ultimate dream of any golf player to have full access to the game any time of the day. The pros polish their styles, and the beginners learn the necessary skills. This is quite possible with golf simulators.

Rain or Sunshine Golf at-home setups aren’t just for practice. They are great ways to spend time with family and friends. The relaxed pace of golf gives everyone a chance to talk and share the good times. Golf simulators are also a wonderful solution for indoor entertainment if the weather isn’t too good.

There are a hundred and one good reasons why a person should get a simulated green at home or at the office. And of these is the affordable price. It’s not hard at all to get the game going under any budget and in any space.

The products are mainly golf simulators, and these are offered in a wide range of setups and budgets. There are also launch monitors, hitting bays, golf mats, and various other accessories. It’s like the folks at Rain or Sunshine say: “Tee it up Anytime!”.

This translates to an easy sale, and potentially high traffic into the affiliate site. It’s worth noting that ‘golf simulators’ is among the most searched for keywords. Admittedly, the commission isn’t huge here, but the prospect is easy to market and the outlook is definitely positive.

• Url: Rain or Sunshine Gola Affiliate Program
• Commission rate: 5%
• Cookie duration: 30 days 

10.         TaylorMade Golf Affiliate Program

I can barely hide how starstruck I am by this brand! There’s something incredibly appealing about the posh personalized products that address the tastes of true connoisseurs. La creme de la creme items aren’t a means to show off, but rather a way to experience beauty and distinction.

TaylorMade Golf is a subsidiary of Adidas, and they rank among the top manufacturers of golf equipment. You can get personalized golf clubs, balls, and other game items. As for the apparel, the polos, outwear, T-shirts, hats, and visors are out of this world.

The accessories like golf bags, gloves, head cover, and travel gear are just as carefully made as the other prime quality golf gear on display. All the items are constantly updated, and often sold as limited edition products.

TaylorMade is an amazing brand, no doubt about that. However, it might need some skillful marketing to reach the right kind of crowds who would go for such niche products. The commission rate is also not terribly encouraging, then again, taken from the total amount of the sale, this could add up to satisfactory outcomes. 

• Url: TaylorMade Golf Affiliate Program
• Commission rate: Approx. 3.99%
• Cookie duration: 30 days 

11.         TRENDYGOLF Affiliate Program

TRENDYGOLF works along the same lines that TaylorMade does, as it also addresses elegance first and foremost. The products vary a little though, as TRENDYGOLF focuses more on fashionable clothes than custom-made gear and golfing accessories.

The story behind TRENDYGOLF is all about a style that golfers spotted and were dying to emulate. That was in 2004 when the fashion icon and world-famous Swedish Jesper Parnevik appeared in the European Tour wearing outfits no one else could find.

Two fashion-wise golfers, Ian and Ben, were well aware of the waves these outfits created within the golfers’ society. They still couldn’t find the original outfits Parnevik sported, but they created a company that catered to that style.

Even though the brand name and general inclination is clearly high-end, several products are moderately priced and accessible to a wide audience. There are frequent sales and clearances too, so this seller isn’t as exclusive as some might think.

The headquarters were first in the UK, then that was followed by a big branch in the US. They ship worldwide and pretty much never run out of demand.

Marketing high-end products might seem challenging, but it’s actually fun. The products are often packed with great features in addition to their exceptional styling and aesthetics. The commission is not bad at all, and so is the hype around the brand. 

• Url: TrendyGolf Affiliate Program
• Commission rate: 6%
• Cookie duration: 30 days 

12.         The Golf Warehouse (TGW) Affiliate Program

The Golf Warehouse started as a family-owned business in 1998. There was only a team of four people responding to mail orders, and diligently growing their online customer base. Today the company is run by 250 people, occupying 230,000 square feet, and selling more than 30,000 products. The brand name has also changed to TGW to go with the times!

Despite what the name implies, the Golf Warehouse isn’t into budget buys. It promises premium gear, apparel, and accessories at the best possible prices. You can find brands like Nike, Callaway, TaylorMade, Adidas, Puma, and many other big names on display.

They do offer plenty of items on sale though, plus various deals and discounts. Thus, golfers can often find more for less. TGW always has an exceptional customer support team, a 90-day guarantee on most products, and free shipping for custom clubs.

Being such a popular destination for online sports gear shopping made TGW well aware of the customers’ need for items outside the golfing world. TGW obliged, and you can find also electronics, baseball gear, and softball requirements as well. 

The huge traffic, stellar reputation, together with the generous commission that TGW offers, makes this affiliate program one of the absolute best on the list. Luckily, it’s not hard at all to join this program and make significant profits right off the bat. 

• Url: The Golf Warehouse Affiliate Program
• Commission rate: 6.5%
• Cookie duration: 30 days

13.         Proozy Golf Affiliate Program

Almost everyone who has ever played sports appreciates the perks of wearing and using premium quality products. But not everyone has enough cash to buy these items, so they settle for affordable products that are a little less glam.

Proozy claims that this choice is not necessary, and people can get excellent products at good prices. In fact, they don’t just say that, they clearly put their money where their mouth is, and their online store says it all!

The Proozy platform hosts a huge amount of products that aren’t limited to golf or to sports alone. It includes electronics, kitchen & dining, bedroom, bath & beauty, bags & backpacks, in addition to sports & outdoors.

This extensive lineup makes a shopper’s life easy. And it would automatically mean that marketing this brand is a breeze. Along with promoting golf apparel and gear, you could also mention the products of any of their other categories. All in the right context, of course. Which in turn, increases your potential for closing deals.

Proozy is one of the affiliate programs that take the partnership with blogging sites very seriously. They count on serious bloggers to increase their sales, and in return, they run a generous business with these affiliate marketers.

You can depend on their full support in every detail related to promoting their brand, and they consistently give away banners, special deals, and other commercial material to boost your marketing efforts.

The conditions of Poozy’s affiliate program are among the nicest that we ever came across. It’s nice to have a win-win, and especially when the commission is well over the 10% range.

• Url: Proozy Affiliate Program
• Commission rate: Up to 12%. And there are various other perks 
• Cookie duration: 30 days

14.         Golf Shoes Plus Affiliate Program

In a world that always wants to taste a bit of every flavor, specialization is good. Golf Shoes Plus is well aware of that, and they built their brand around selling the best golf shoes in the market. Their first shop was opened in Florida back in 1984, and it soon garnered fame and status.

In 1996, Golf Shoes Plus decided to venture into the world of e-commerce, and they launched an online store. They have an impressive collection of men, women, and junior golf shoes from some of the biggest brands in the market. You can easily find labels like New Balance, Puma, Ecco, Under Armour, and Sandbagger golf shoes.

Their inventory is upwards of 12,000 footwear products. And if an item isn’t on their catalog, they make arrangements with the manufacturer to drop ship it directly to the customer. This huge retailer ranks pretty high in the category of Golf shoes, thanks to its excellent customer support and impressive sales volume.

The scale and reach of Golf Shoes Plus allow it to offer its customers the best prices on most models. Additionally, there are frequent clearances and sales where golfers can buy real gems at incredible prices.

The evident traffic and popularity of this online store are quite promising. Additionally, this category, with all of its keywords, doesn’t have the savage competition that other golf products might have. Even with a commission of 5%, good marketing, and creative promotion could easily add up to nice profits.  

• Url: Golf Shoes Plus Affiliate Program
• Commission rate: 5%
• Cookie duration: Undefined 

15.         Buggies Unlimited Affiliate Program

According to e-commerce reports, the golf cart market in the US was valued at $1.34 billion. The 15,000 golf courses, and the ever-increasing number of golfers, naturally require reliable transportation on the green. Golf carts are expected to boom even more in the next decade.

Buggies Unlimited is among the top destinations for recreating golf carts. This online store is a huge supplier of parts, wheels, and accessories that serious golfers constantly need. Their inventory can easily revamp a golf cart and convert it into a dream vehicle.

This includes adding a hot audio system, cell phone, holders, coolers, and a club canopy. Their inventory has products made by reliable manufacturers like GTW, Jake’s, and Red Dot.

Reaching the largest possible amount of customers is tempting, and it usually translates to high earnings. But there’s a flip side to that coin that also has real merit. And that is reaching a niche customer that’s also a big spender.

Golf carts and golf cart accessories are as specialized as they get. Thus, if you focus on that area for a little while, chances are that you’ll quickly rank high in searches.

• Url: Buggies Unlimited Affiliate Program
• Commission rate: 10%
• Cookie duration: 30

How to Promote Golf Affiliate Programs

Blogs are among the best ways to promote golf affiliate programs. Some of my personal favorites are Top 100 Golf, which is an ongoing journey of a golfer aiming to play in the best 100 golf courses around the world. Also, Golf Blogger, which is a commentary on everything that matters in the green field.

Besides blogs, there are other ways to carry the same message. The best, and easiest, examples are Youtube and Instagram. But any existing social media presence can be utilized as a marketing tool.

In 2017, CNBC wrote a feature about how the golf industry realized the huge potential of including a younger generation in the game. According to the National Golf Foundation, the age segment between 18-34 makes up approximately 25% of all golf players. With annual spendings of around $5 billion.

This massive market can only be approached through its favorite hangouts, in other words, social media platforms.

Check out this article. if you want to learn how to make money with an affiliate blog.

How to Use Youtube for Promoting a Golf Affiliate Program

Youtube gets about 4 billion eyeballs each day, so there’s definitely some merit in placing your content on that humongous platform. With the amount of sprouting and thriving golf channels, we’d say that this sport is doing great on youtube.

You might be wondering now, so what do the top content creators do exactly? A good example is of course Rick Shields, with his 1.76 million subscribers, and upwards of $3 million net worth. His channel goes into the beating heart of golf, with tutorials, games with peers, and assessing various kinds of gear.

Vlogging about golf comes in so many ways. For example, there’s touring the best golf courses in the world, giving witty commentary on tournaments, providing practical tips on how to play, reviewing apparel, or doing hundred-and-one other golf-related activities.

In each case, there’s an opportunity to promote an affiliate program, in addition to monetizing the Youtube content. 

Check out this article. if you want to learn how to make money as an affiliate with Youtube.

How to Use Instagram for Promoting a Golf Affiliate program

Instagram might have fewer eyeballs than Youtube, but it generates far more business. That’s because the millions of active users on Instagram follow various types of brands on that platform. And they routinely buy tons of stuff from their favorite pages.

Moreover, the engagement rate on Instagram is phenomenal. Users regularly return again and again to read a comment or check out a notification. Additionally, there’s a sizable presence of golf influencers on Instagram, so you can use their pages for leveraging your own.

That’s why using Instagram to promote an affiliate program is actually quite clever.

Are the Other Social Media Platforms Worth a Shot?

Facebook, Tik Tok, Club House, as well as many other old and new platforms engage heavily in marketing activities. If you’re already established on any one of them, then go ahead and promote your affiliates there. More power to you!

There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to social media and e-commerce. Most people play by ear, and then let the world know how their experiences turned out. The moral of the story is that there’s plenty of room for experimentation, so if you’re big on any social media, get creative, get serious, and promote your business with everything you’ve got.   

Check out this article. if you want to learn how to make money as an affiliate with Facebook.

In Conclusion

The golf business is currently worth more than $15 billion. This includes gear, apparel, accessories, books, travel, training, and green fees. Interestingly, this rich market isn’t as rife with cutthroat competitions as the other industries.

This spells out a huge opportunity for bloggers and e-marketers, but there’s a catch. Golf is a niche sport that requires plenty of technical information, extensive training, and close observation to really understand. Once that level of expertise is reached, the rest is easy.

Golf affiliate marketing is a great way to capitalize on the popularity of your website or social media presence. And there’s a wide variety of golf affiliate programs to choose from. Regardless of which platform you decide to use for promoting a brand, remember that content is always king.

First and foremost, write, vlog, or post photos of what you really like. And keep your eyes on your current audience. There are tons of analytics that let you know who they are and what they want. You can gradually expand your following and attract new types of golf enthusiasts by adding new types of content.  

There are many ways to enjoy golf, and just as many products that golfers are constantly looking for. Some bloggers prefer working with a single brand, as they find that easier to do. However, you can have partnerships with more than one affiliate program, as long as you can promote their products well in your blogs. 

If you are still unsure of what step to take next, learn more about how to start making money as an affiliate here

In this article, we did the homework to save you the hassle and found several legit offers that’ll make you real money.

It’s no secret that the financial services market is one of the biggest industries in the world. In 2021, it reached a worth of more than $22 trillion with no intention of stopping any time soon. In fact, the financial services market is expected to reach $28.5 trillion by the year 2025.

Through financial affiliate programs, you have the chance to tap into this enormous market with thousands of services and products that millions of people worldwide need and use. This includes credit cards, bank accounts, loans, and investments. credit cards, and loans.

The key to running a successful financial affiliate program is figuring out which ones are worth promoting. This is where we come in.

Best Financial Affiliate Programs

We’re not here to waste your time. In the list below, all the offers are legit and can make you money if you manage to hold your end of the bargain.

Also, we made sure to include a variety of programs in terms of requirements and specialty, so you’re bound to find something that works for you. Enjoy!

1. CIT Bank Affiliate Program

Established in 1908, the CIT Bank first aimed to provide financing services to businesses located in St. Louis, Missouri. The bank has only got stronger over the following decades, surviving two recessions and several other global conflicts.

The folks at CIT bank also made sure to diversify the financial products they can offer their customers to meet a wide range of their financial needs including mortgages, multiple certificates of deposit products, as well as personal savings products characterized by being long-term and paying out high interest with a no-penalty policy.

So, what’s in it for you if you’re an affiliate of the CIT bank? You earn $100 for every new customer you bring in via your affiliate link as long as they’re qualified. Compared to other banks and most financial affiliate programs out there, this one is rather generous.

Granted, it may take you more effort to successfully promote such financial offers like those from CIT, but the profit is very much worth it. Let’s say you’re working twice as hard as you have to when promoting something for a $10 commission, you still receive ten times the revenue for it.

That scale is hard to beat by any employer.

• Commission rate – $100 per lead
• Cookie duration – 30 days
• URL – CIT Bank Affiliate Program

2. BBVA Bank Affiliate Program

Diving into the financial area of pay-per-lead affiliate programs, we’re looking at an appealing offer from BBVA Bank. we understand if the name doesn’t sound familiar; not everyone keeps track of bank names outside their country.

Established in 1857, BBVA is one of the biggest Spanish banks. Their first branch in the United States was founded back in 1964 and it’s been growing steadily ever since. In 2020, Euromoney named this bank the best investment bank in Spain.

Aside from its impressive corporate history and achievements, this bank is known to provide a long list of financial products to cover just about every corner of your visitor’s financial needs from credit cards to mortgages, all of which you can promote.

That being said, according to the company’s affiliate agreement, you’re eligible for a commission for sales of the following items only:

• Money market account
• Free checking account
• Online checking account

Make sure that these types of services are what your audience requires. Otherwise, you won’t benefit from the program.

This goes to show you the importance of reading the fine print whenever you’re signing up for any kind of deal.

Speaking of which, keep in mind that the cookie duration of the BBVA affiliate program is session-based. This means that it ends with the expiration of the session or when you close the web browser.

Despite all of those limitations, you’ll earn a fixed commission rate of $85 per new customer you bring in via your affiliate link. Try to focus your efforts on directing pre-qualified traffic to the bank’s website to guarantee your profit.

• Commission rate – $85 per lead
• Cookie duration – ends when the session expires or the web browser is closed
• URL – BBVA Bank Affiliate Program

3. Acorns Affiliate Program

Another financial affiliate program that you can sign up for today is the Acorns pay-per-lead affiliate program. This company was first established by a 2-person team -a father and son- to help make investing available for anyone, even if the money they’re looking to put in isn’t a lot.

They used something known as “micro-investments” to deem this idea possible. Now, through their platform, you can invest as little as $5, $3, or even $1.

Every month, you’ll add the amount of money you want to invest to your portfolio on Acorns. Don’t worry though, you don’t have to set up that portfolio yourself. Instead, a group of finance experts will do it for you!

That’s not all, Acorns also helps you better manage your finances and adopt improved money habits. For example, their signature metal debit card (fun fact, it’s made from tungsten!) can invest change on your behalf.

So, what’s in it for you? As an affiliate, you can earn a maximum of $80 for every new member that signs up for an investment account.

Keep in mind that the Acorns affiliate program requires you to create an account on FlexOffers first.

• Commission rate – $80 per lead
• Cookie Duration – 30 days
• URL – Acorn Affiliate Program

4. SOFI Affiliate Program

For this next financial affiliate program, we need you to keep a bit of an open mind. Let’s say there’s a type of bank that offers you all the typical financial products you can get from a regular financial organization, but without the hassle of a conventional bank.

Instead, it relies on private investments that are channeled towards supporting social and environmental missions. Think of it as a savings club with the necessary resources to help people secure home loans, student loans, and even personal loans.

This is called providing Social Finance, and that’s what SoFi does. It makes all this possible via an entirely digital platform, so you don’t have to deal with the usual overheads.

By the end of 2020, SoFi had 1.85 million members, allowing the platform to fund billions of dollars in loans. Additionally, you can have your money working to bring in profit through SoFi investment, all the while learning ways to better manage your finances.

As for the amount of money you can earn through the SoFi affiliate program, here’s how it goes down: for each funded standard loan you make $100, and for each funded student loan you earn up to $150.

• Commission rate – a maximum of $150 per lead
• Cookie duration – 30 days
• URL – SoFi Affiliate Program

5. Ally Invest Affiliate Program

Ally is a platform that includes many financial affiliate program ranging from home and automobile loans to online savings. However, its affiliate program focuses on the investment of the industry, particularly stock trading.

As investors, your visitors can either trade on their own if they already have experience in trading, or they can opt for a managed portfolio to benefit from a more guided approach to maximizing profit from trades.

With a commission rate of $50 per new investor, promoting such a program can be well worth the effort. Especially since you’d need to target a more specific type of audience — one with a knack for day trading.

• Commission rate – $ 25 to $50 per lead
• Cookie duration – 45 days
• URL – Ally Invest Affiliate Program

6. American Express Canada Affiliate Program

If a good chunk of your audience is Canadian or lives in Canada, then you should consider signing up for the American Express Canada affiliate program.

Along with Mastercard and Visa, American Express (also known as Amex) is one of the giants in the credit card industry across the world. If you’re from the US, you probably already know this, but if you’re from any other country, chances are the introduction was due.

Now, if you think that the 2008 financial meltdown has gotten people to stop using credit cards, you couldn’t be more wrong.

As such, promoting them to your audience is a winning market, even more so with a company like Amex offering plenty of perks and 18 different types of cards, enabling your audience to choose whatever best matches their lifestyle.

A lot of people are interested in the facilitation that comes with owning a credit card. Anyone familiar with this market knows how much money it can generate you.

Via this affiliate offer, your commission can reach as high as CA$200 for each application upon approval. This is one of the best paying lead-based financial affiliate programs on our list.

• Commission rate – a maximum of $200 per lead
• Cookie duration – 7 days
• URL – American Express Canada Affiliate Program

7. Credit Karma Affiliate Program

One thing that stirs many affiliate marketers away from the financial department of the business is the amount of effort that goes into convincing visitors with an offer that “plays” with their money.

Luckily, you don’t have to worry about that with the Credit Karma affiliate program. Promoting their service should be way less of a hassle since it’s free of charge. This means you don’t need to persuade people to purchase anything — just show them all the ways they can benefit from the free credit score of Credit Karma.

That being said, since you don’t need to work as much to get visitors to sign up, the commission you can earn is set accordingly. It’s $2.00 for every new lead that creates an account on the platform.

This is a lot simpler to achieve compared to traditional financial affiliate programs that demand a deposit or a purchase from your lead for you to become eligible for a payout. What’s more, Credit Krama is fairly easy to recommend along with other financial affiliate products such as credit cards or loans.

This makes for a terrific opportunity for cross-selling so you can earn more in one go.

• Commission rate – $2 per account
• Cookie duration – 30 days
• URL – Credit Karma Affiliate Program

8. Credit Sesame Affiliate Program

Adopting a similar approach as Credit Karma, Credit Sesame is another low-hassle financial affiliate program that you can opt for. The unique thing about Credit Sesame, however, is that the company offers identity theft insurance worth $50,000 along with free credit reports under its free membership.

Because both services offer free products but with varying value propositions, they present marketers with a great chance of promoting both platforms as a complement to one another.

Once again, since you don’t need to work as much to get visitors to sign up, the commission you can earn is set accordingly. It falls anywhere between $3.00 and $6.00 (can increase) for every new lead that creates an account on the platform.

This is a lot simpler to achieve compared to traditional financial affiliate programs that demand a deposit or a purchase from your lead for you to become eligible for a payout.

• Commission rate – $3.00 to $6.00 per lead, open to an increase
• Cookie duration – 30 days
• URL – Credit Sesame Affiliate Program

9. USAA Credit Cards Affiliate Program

The first thing you should know about USAA Credit Cards if you’re considering taking on their affiliate program is that the company offers its financial products to a highly specific niche of users — members of the military, both active or retired.

That being said, the platform provides a wide range of financial products for its customers including the following:

• Home insurance
• Automobile insurance
• Health insurance
• Credit cards
• Automobile loans
• Checking accounts
• Mortgages
• Retirement plans
• Investment plans

We do need to mention that the USAA Credit Cards platform has several partnerships established with other providers to make some of their products readily available. However, this goes to show the company’s dedication to having all the financial requirements of a military family accessible in one place.

How much does this program pay though? As an affiliate, you stand to earn a commission of $25 for every new lead you direct their way. While this isn’t the highest rate you can score through a financial affiliate program, USAA does produce impressive revenue affiliates.

After all, you’re working with a huge potential market of 1.4 million active personnel in the United States, and about 2.19 million military retirees as of 2021.

• Commission rate – $25 per lead
• Cookie duration – 30 days
• URL – USAA Affiliate Program

10. Experian Affiliate Program

Three major credit reporting agencies cater to the financial industry in the United States, Experian is one of them. This bureau has been in the business for more than 125 years, supporting clients in over 100 countries worldwide.

Besides providing credit reports, this agency keeps track of suspicious activities that may be signs of identity theft. It also offers a range of services to help you improve your FICO score and remove wrong data from your credit report.

If you’re thinking of reasons why you should join the Experian affiliate program, it’s really a no-brainer. You’d be working with a big name, tapping into a huge market, and promoting a product that’s high in demand.

Money-wise, Experian will pay you up to $20 for every new customer you send its way through your affiliate link.

• Commission rate – a maximum of $20 per lead
• Cookie duration – 10 days
• URL – Experian Affiliate Program

11. Trim Affiliate Program

Typically, budgeting apps will have you keep track of all your spendings, but this particular little app does so much more. Trim offers a range of handy services including:

• Renegotiating existing bills to find you the best possible deals.
• Pinpointing and canceling ill-advised subscriptions that you may not be aware of, sticking their hands into your pocket each month.
• Additionally, the app sets up its customers with a savings account feature to help them put money aside if they want.

As such, Trim makes for a solid promotion opportunity if you’re looking into the personal finance department. Even more so when you know that Trim is free for the most part.

Your visitors will have access to the majority of Trim’s features at no charge. Also, if a customer enrolls in Bill Negotiation, the app will charge them only 15% of the total savings of the first year. This means that if Trim doesn’t save you money, it won’t make money.

Once the free trial ends, you can subscribe to a yearly plan only as there are no monthly options.

So, how much can you earn from this financial affiliate program? Well, you stand to earn 15$ for every new member you bring in.

• Commission rate – $15 per lead
• Cookie duration – 10 days
• URL – Trim Affiliate Program

12. IdentityIQ Affiliate Program

Identity Thief may be a hilarious movie, but identity theft is no joke. Although it seems like something that wouldn’t happen in real life, identity theft is surprisingly common in the US.

In 2020, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), there were 4.8 million reports of identity theft and fraud cases. This is 45% more than the 3.3 million in the year before, with 113% more identity theft reports compared to 2019.

Using your stolen personal information, identity thieves can open credit cards, change your billing address, and make fraudulent purchases — all in your name.

Luckily, identity protection services such as IdentityIQ can save you from falling victim to such a nightmare. They keep a constant track of any change in your personal information to prevent you from suffering the consequences of vulnerable data.

This particular service takes things to the next level. It references data breach results and monitors data markets on the Dark Web — credit cards and social security numbers are actually sold there.

How is all this relevant to a list of financial affiliate programs? Well, the presence of anomalies on your credit reports is a blatant indication that your personal information has been compromised.

Not only will IdentityQ detect any suspicious activity related to customers’ credit reports, but it’ll also deliver them a credit report every month sourced from each of the three credit reporting bureaus without hurting your score.

So how much will you make for each new customer you can generate? The answer is $35, which isn’t too bad for this sort of affiliate program.

• Commission rate – $35 per lead
• Cookie duration – 30 days
• URL – IDIQ Affiliate Program

13. LendingTree Affiliate Program

When it comes to the debt reduction and settlement department of financial services, LendingTree has one of the best affiliate programs you can sign up for. If this is a niche you’re covering, then this program can be a fantastic opportunity for you.

What exactly is LendingTree? This website is a platform for comparing prices that features personal loans, home loans, insurance products, and credit cards.

A lot of people prefer using these platforms although they can directly contact the lender on their own. As such, LendingTree managed to tap into a broad market that you too can benefit from.

Promote their products on your blog and you could make up $70 for every new customer you send their way. This rate deserves a spot in your affiliate marketing portfolio.

• Commission rate – as high as $70 per lead
• Cookie duration – 14 days
• URL – LendingTree Affiliate Program

14. Peer Street Affiliate Program

If you’re interested in promoting products in the real estate investment niche, then how about working with a company that excels in this department and was established by ex-Googlers? We’re talking about Peer Street.

This isn’t your average real estate investment company — it comes with an edge over all others, which is the fact that your visitors can create an investment portfolio using only $1,000 as a start.

As a crowd-funded platform specializing in real estate investment, Peer Street does a remarkable job combining old-school techniques with modern machine learning advancements.

While leaving your money in a savings account can potentially earn you about 3% each year, and a sock portfolio can up this number to reach a maximum of 10% yearly, Peer Street frequently achieves returns in the double-digit territory. This is because you’re investing in a niche that never loses its appeal — real estate.

In other words, this affiliate program is different, and different is something you can sell better. Not to mention, the company will pay you $30 per new customer you direct their way, which is nice money given their relatively low entry-level investment.

• Commission rate – $30 per lead
• Cookie duration – 45 days
• URL – Peer Street Affiliate Program

15. National Debt Relief Affiliate Program

Another reliable option for a financial affiliate program is the National Debt Relief affiliate program, which is in the debt reduction niche as you can tell from its name.

Through this platform, customers struggling with unsecured debts (debts that lack an underlying asset) receive consolidation loans. This includes medical bills, personal loans, credit cards, and business debts.

In addition to its consolidation services, this company also offers to negotiate on your behalf with creditors to make your overall debt less burdening.

Promoting this program as an affiliate should be fairly easy because you’re tapping into a huge market. After all, the total consumer debt in the United States reached an all-time high in 2020 at a little less than $14.9 trillion.

That’s millions of people in debt and millions of chances for you to help them while earning $27.50 per new member.

• Commission rate – $27.50 per lead
• Cookie duration – 60 days
• URL – National Debt Relief Affiliate Program

16. Douugh Affiliate Program

Douugh is a strictly online bank that gives you all the features of a conventional checking account. Think of it as a hybrid app for financial services that also provides customers with a range of neat tools to save money, improve how they manage their finances, and worry less about bills.

Douugh is a pretty ambitious platform with plans to include more banking features soon such as allowing members to deposit money in their Douugh savings account directly.

By promoting Douugh on your site, you’re helping people establish a better relationship with money meanwhile earning $50 for every new lead you bring in to complete setting up an account via your affiliate link.

• Commission rate – $50 per lead
• Cookie duration – 10 days
• URL – Douugh Affiliate Program

17. Tiller Affiliate Program

When you think of budgeting, what would you say the most tiresome part is? A lot of people would answer with something along the lines of “having to fill in my financial information into Excel or Google spreadsheets every day”.

Enter Tiller, a handy service that automates the whole process for you! All you need to do is create a Tiller account and connect it to your bank accounts. This also eliminates the “forgetting” factor when it comes to adding certain outgoings to your budget spreadsheet.

What’s more, Tiller will send your visitors a daily email summarizing their current financial situation. As far as profit goes, you earn $25 for each new customer you bring in.

• Commission rate – $25 per lead
• Cookie duration – 30 days
• URL – Tiller Affiliate Program

How to Promote Financial Affiliate Programs

The points below are some ways to help you effectively  promote your financial affiliate programs:

• Social media — online social platforms such as Tiktok, and Instagram allow you to reach billions of people in a short time making them good alternatives to promote your financial affiliate offers and get fast results.
  
  Accounts like @herfirst100k and @millenial_coach educate younger audiences on an uncomplicated and unpretencious way. The huge following they have gotten on a short time is proof of how much interest and demad there is in the topic.

Check out this article on How to use Tiktok to promote affiliate offers effectively.

• Blogging — creating a relevant blog in the financial niche is a highly effective method for promoting financial affiliate programs because it establishes you as an expert in the respective field and a reliable source of information. This makes the offers that you mention more trustworthy.
  
  For example, Making Sense Of Cents is a blog on personal lifestyle that educated readers on how to budget, save, invest and more while promote financial affiliate programs.
  
  By applying search engine optimization (SEO) to your content, you increase the chances of your articles ranking high in search results, and consequently, being easily found by interested visitors.

Check out this article f you want to make money with affiliate marketing as a blogger.

• Online videos — consider making videos and posting them on Youtube where you can share financial advice, review related products and answer questions regarding the offers you’re promoting.
  
  You can learn from NerdWallet, which started as a small blog in 2009 and has now expanded significantly since that time, and currently makes more than $150 million annually in revenue, a signifcant part being from financial affiliate offers.

If you want to learn more about this method, make sure to check out this article on how to make money with Youtube as an affiliate marketer.

Wrap Up

The beauty of financial affiliates programs is that everyone needs them at some point in their lives. Not to mention, the products and services are quite diverse to meet the financial requirements for just about every person.

Most of these financial affiliate programs are quick and easy to sign up which means that you can start promoting them and earning money ASAP. 

The financial niche is one of the most profitable ones but also very competitive so you don’t want to waste any time since the sooner you begin, the easier it’ll be to make commissions.

If you are still unsure of what step to take next, learn more about how to start making money as an affiliate here

To help make the process easier for you, we’ve put together a step-by-step guide on how to create a website for affiliate marketing so you can earn thousands of dollars in affiliate commissions each month.

Here’s what we’ll cover in this post:

1. Picking the topic of your website – niche selection
2. Setting up your website (host, domain, theme, name)
3. Content creation
4. Getting traffic to your website
5. How to find and choose affiliate offers
6. Setting up sales funnels and coming up with an affiliate sales strategy

These are some of the main topics that we’ll cover in our detailed guide on how to make an affiliate website, so stick around to learn everything there is on the subject and start earning money through affiliate marketing.

Make An Affiliate Website: Step By Step Guide

1. Niche Selection

The first thing you need to do when you get started on the process of making an affiliate website is to decide on a niche for your website.

A niche is a targeted and focused area/subject that you know and understand particularly well, or that you have a particularly keen interest in. It is a specific area that you will focus more exclusively on, and it can come from any industry, from accounting to dentistry, nutrition, weight loss, and so on.

While you can have more than one niche that you build your website around, we suggest that you focus on one or two at the most, so you can put your efforts and energy towards a particular group of people within your niche and be able to connect with them and deliver something they’re already searching for or are keen on learning.

This way you will be targeting a group of individuals with the same or similar interests so you can speak to them in a way that resonates with them, instead of putting all your effort towards delivering something to a diverse group of people with different interests and hoping to get a small percentage of them interested in what you’re offering.

Look for a Niche within a Niche

In today’s world, the hardest thing to achieve is to manage to stand out and get people interested in your site and eager to read your content.

One of the ways to achieve that is to target a smaller audience within a wider niche. This is both cheaper and easier since you’ll have less competition.

For example, if you were looking to target the health & wellness niche, it would be easier for you if you were to break it down into smaller targeted segments, such as:

• Sleep
• Meditation
• Yoga and mindfulness
• Vegan lifestyle
• Health supplements, and more

These niches can further be broken down into even more specific topics such as vegan health supplements or so on, which targets an even smaller audience and gives you a better chance of ranking and getting people to read and engage with your content.

However, be careful not to narrow down your niche too much and select something that has a really small target audience, such as vegan health supplements for mothers to be in Sweden.

Once you have an idea of what you want your niche to be, see if it has affiliate opportunities and if there are products within the niche that you can promote and sell. If you can’t think of existing or future affiliate opportunities for your niche, it would be best to select another, more profitable topic.

Now that you’ve selected your niche or have at least narrowed it down to a few possible options, it’s time to learn the next step of the process and that’s setting up your website.

How to Make an Affiliate Website – The Technical Part of the Process

Once you’ve decided on your niche, it’s time to set up your domain and find a web host as well as decide on the name of your website/blog.

While this process may seem more technical, and it definitely is, today’s hosting companies tend to take care of most of the moving parts, making everything easier for you. This is an added benefit, especially for those of you out there who find this whole process a bit overwhelming.

Select Your Domain Name

What you want to do when selecting your domain name is to pick something that works now and will hopefully work in the future because it takes a really long time to get your domain name to rank well, since Search Engines don’t trust brand new domains, as anyone can set them up as easy as you’ll be setting up your domain name right now.

There are a ton of domain registrars you can use to buy your domain name from. Some of the most preferred ones include Domain.com, Bluehost, HostGator, GoDaddy, and more.

Select Your Hosting Provider

Most like to describe hosting providers as the land on which your house (website) sits, whereas your domain is the physical address of your website. It’s the web host that provides that space for your website (physical server space).

Web hosting providers specialize in serving and storing websites and typically offer several different plans you can choose depending on your needs and budget.

Some of the main ones people choose include Bluehost, DreamHost, HostGator, Domain.com, GoDaddy, A2Hosting, and more.

Bluehost is one of the most popular ones since it features a one-click install of WordPress (which saves you a lot of time and trouble). It’s also affordable. You can pick up hosting for less than $3 a month.

Sign up for Bluehost here →

Although you can separate your domain registration from your hosting provider, you can also stick with the same provider for both services, so you can manage everything under one account. Still, there are some benefits to keeping things separately.

For example, if you’ve already registered your domain name and have found a better hosting provider with a better offer then you can definitely choose to keep your hosting and domain separate so you can get the best deal.

Both the process of setting up your domain and hosting is easy and doesn’t require any knowledge in tech stuff, since they are simplified by the hosting companies to make the process accessible to everyone who wants to create a website or a blog.

Choose a Website Builder

Today, creating a website doesn’t require knowledge in HTML or other languages used for creating web pages. Today, you can use a content management software (CMS) that will do all the coding stuff for you, so you can create a website or a blog without having any coding skills or experience.

This way you can easily make an affiliate website without having to learn how to code.

The most popular and most commonly used CMS is WordPress. Around 40% of the entire internet runs on WordPress, therefore finding someone to help modify or edit your WordPress site will be much easier than it would be if you were to go with a lesser-known and obscure CMS that might require specialist knowledge not many folks have.

Other platforms you can use include Wix, Weebly, Medium, Blogger, and more, although the last two require you to host your website on their server, which will make you dependent on the performance of their platform, although you won’t have to worry about looking for hosting in that case.

With Wix, you can be more creative and will have more space and freedom to design the website you’ve envisioned, using their simple drag-and-drop kind of editor.

However, while there are a lot of CMSs to choose from, WordPress is the only one that stands out from the bunch and is what we recommend you go with.

WordPress is fast, optimized, and secure, it is very versatile and free to use. It’s also SEO-ready, making this process a lot easier, by simply following the steps provided by the YOAST SEO plugin.

Install WordPress

While you can install WordPress manually, you can also have your hosting provider do it for you. You can use your hosting provider’s easy-to-use wizard that will take you through the steps of installing WordPress on your site. Once you complete the Wizard, your site will be ready and you can go onto picking a theme from the selection of free themes WordPress offers, create pages, posts, install useful plugins, and so on.

This is where you’ll do most of your work on your website, and once you set all of this up you can simply maintain everything and post on a regular basis.

Here’s a quick guide on how to install and operate WordPress that’s suitable for beginners, so you can set up the whole process with ease.

Once you’ve completed your WordPress setup, you can go ahead and start customizing your website and adding content to it.

Let’s check out the next step of the process!

Select a WordPress Theme

Your WordPress theme is what controls the visual appearance of your site. These are professionally designed templates that you can install onto your site to alter its appearance.

While you will have a basic theme installed by default once you finish your WordPress setup, you can also go into their extensive library of thousands of free themes and install any one of those on your site.

Visit Appearance » Themes on your WordPress dashboard to see all the available themes in their directory and select the one you find the most suitable for your website.

Once you select the theme you prefer, simply click on the install button and once it’s installed you can customize it by clicking on the Customize link under the Appearance menu.

You don’t need to do all the customizations right away. You can continue the customization process once you add some content to your site.

Now that we’ve covered the basics of setting up an affiliate website, it’s time to go onto one of the most important parts of the process that will get visitors actually interested in your products or services and get them to engage, and that’s creating great content!

Let’s see how you can do that.

2. Content Creation

Once the technical part of the process is complete it’s time to start creating content related to your niche, so you can attract traffic to your website and make money through affiliate marketing.

By following a few simple steps when creating your content, you will be able to build a profitable website and grow your business through content creation.

Add Content (Pages and Posts)

If you’ve chosen to go with WordPress as your CMS, there are two default content types it allows you to add to your website and those include posts and pages.

Pages are one-off types of content and typically include your about page, contact page, custom landing page, privacy policy, and more.

Posts on the other hand are a part of the blogging functionality and are the main types of content you’ll focus on when making an affiliate website so you can grow your site and increase your traffic.

Once you’ve set everything up and are ready to add content to your website, you can start off with your main pages, such as the home page, contact page, about page and more. Don’t worry if you don’t have enough content to fill up these pages just yet. Simply focus on adding the basic information since you can edit and update them at any time.

To add new pages, go to Pages » Add New page in WordPress and from there you can simply add content using the page editor.

Write Niche-Specific Content

Once you’ve set up your website and you’ve created your main pages, it’s time to start uploading some content.

The main rule to creating a successful affiliate marketing campaign is to create original and niche-specific content that will provide your readers with useful information on the subject.

You can either write your own content or if you don’t feel like that’s your strong suit, you can use a freelance platform or an agency to find a reliable and experienced freelance writer who can do the job for you.

Upwork and Fiverr are just some of the many available platforms where you can hire writers on an hourly or fixed-rate basis so they can provide content for your website.

No matter if you choose to hire a writer or do the writing yourself, one key thing to have in mind is to always write niche-specific content as there’s no point in wasting your time producing content that your main customer base will have no use for.

Some of the main guidelines you should follow when creating content include:

• Publishing on a regular basis and sticking to a set schedule, so you can always have fresh content for your readers
• Being patient, and keep publishing even if you don’t see results, as establishing authority takes a lot of time
• Optimizing your content for specific keywords – you can find more about SEO below

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

To get your site to rank well on the search engines, so you can get more traffic, you will need to optimize your posts. Install the Yoast SEO plugin so you can improve the SEO of your website and rank better.

The plugin will let you know what needs improving both in terms of SEO and readability, so you can simply follow its guidance and make the necessary changes that will improve the overall score of your post.

Some of the main things you need to focus on to optimize your posts better for the search engines include:

• Use relevant keywords throughout the posts (title, headings, meta descriptions, tags, and so on)
• Provide relevant internal and external links (make sure to add links to high-authority domains)
• Write high-quality content that provides useful information to your readers
• Add great visual content to make your posts look more appealing (this includes graphs, charts, infographics, videos and more)
• Add social media buttons
• Add subscription forms and build your email list (we’ll cover this part later in the guide)

Get Backlinks

A crucial part of the optimization of your site includes getting backlinks from trusted, reliable websites, which can greatly improve your ranking, as Google regards backlinks as a sort of “vote” for a specific page and tends to give pages with high-quality backlinks a higher search ranking. 

Backlinks are inbound links that come from one website to another. They connect your website to other websites on the internet and are considered as a key ranking factor by Google.

However, not all backlinks are equally valuable. Backlinks that come from high-authority, trusted websites have more power than low-quality ones. 

That’s why you should focus on getting backlinks from authoritative domains so you can boost your organic search engine traffic.

The best ways to get high-quality backlinks include:

• Creating amazing pieces of content that provide useful information that people want to read about
• Reaching out to potential websites that you regularly outlink to and potentially send traffic to and asking them for a partnership
• Checking out your competitor’s websites (check out their top-performing posts and content) to find sources for backlinks and contact those sources. For a complete backlink profile of each website, you can use SEO tools like SEMrush.
• Finding broken links on high-authority websites and offering to write that piece of content for them so they can link to it and replace their broken link.

There are a lot of methods you can use to get more backlinks from trustworthy and high-authority websites, but these will be enough to get you started for now.

3. Getting Traffic to Your Affiliate Website

There are a ton of different tried and tested methods of driving traffic to your website that you can use to grow your affiliate business. And while you don’t have to try every strategy under the sun, there are a few that have been proven to help businesses grow exponentially and those are the ones we’ll be discussing in this guide.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a way of increasing traffic through social media platforms. You can do this by creating various different forms of content (images, videos, text, infographics and more) for social media platforms.

Here are the main steps you need to follow to increase your traffic through social media:

1. Use visuals when advertising on social media, as posts with visuals have been proven to create more engagement than text time and time again.
2. Make sure your content is easily sharable and interesting enough for your audience to want to share it.
3. Build your follower count by being consistent and posting on a regular basis. The more consistent you are the more likely you are to be seen. Stick to a daily publishing schedule and schedule your posts for when your audience is most active and engaging.

Here’s a rough estimate of how much you should post on your social media accounts:

• On Facebook – 3-10 times a week
• On Tweeter – 5 to 30 times a day
• On Instagram – 1-2 times a day
• On LinkedIn – 2-5 times a week
• Figure out which platform to focus primarily on. We’re not saying that you shouldn’t give all of these platforms a try as each of these platforms are unique in their way and have benefits and downsides that differ from the other platforms. However, figuring out where your target audience “hangs out” or which platforms they prefer to use will save you a lot of time that you might have invested on a platform your audience doesn’t use.
• Analyze which type of content gets the most engagement and shares to find out how to better engage with your audience.
• What you post says a lot about your brand, so make sure you stay consistent with your brand’s message.

Google Ads

Using Google Ads is a great way to increase traffic to your site no matter where you are in your search engine optimization journey. Google Ads is great both for new and established businesses and can do wonders for your traffic, no matter what you’re promoting.

You’ll only be paying for the clicks you get, which means that you’ll get traffic from people who are searching for a specific product or service you’re advertising, making them more likely to purchase that product or service.

Google Ads allows you to set your own advertising budget, so you never spend more than what you planned. The metrics provided by Google Ads provide useful details on how effective and engaging your ads are so that you can make any necessary tweaks and changes as you go.

Pinterest

Pinterest is an amazing tool for growing traffic and it can be a huge asset to your business as long as you know how to use it right.

Here’s what makes Pinterest a great tool for driving traffic to your blog:

• People using the platform are ready to make a purchase. 47% of Pinterest users make purchase decisions on Pinterest, vs 15% on Facebook and 11% on Instagram.
• It’s a search engine, meaning that people can find your content years after you’ve uploaded it and it won’t disappear in a few hours as it does on platforms like Facebook.
• It’s easier to rank since its algorithm isn’t as advanced as Google’s is.

Here are a few steps you can take to rank better on Pinterest and use them to drive more traffic to your affiliate website:

• Use appropriate keywords in your Pin and Board titles and descriptions
• Apply for rich pins using a plugin so you can have pins that offer extra information pulled from your website, which helps you stand out and get more clicks
• Pin consistently – at least 10 different pins a day (not all of them need to lead to your website, just make sure they offer useful resources to your audience)
• Stick with it for at least a year and be patient. It takes time to see results via Pinterest, but when that traffic comes, you’ll be glad you stuck it out

4. Choose Affiliate Offers For Your Website

Once you figure out your niche and your target audience, it’s time to look for affiliate offers within that niche, so you can provide your readers with offers that match their needs and their buying intentions.

Today, you can find affiliate opportunities in almost any niche. However, if you’re not sure whether your niche has any existing or future affiliate opportunities, or you can’t think of at least a few products or services your readers might be interested in buying, you should maybe reconsider your niche in the first place, before you go into a field that doesn’t have a lot of affiliate opportunities.

Now, let’s say you’ve chosen a niche that has a lot of affiliate opportunities, but you still have no idea where to start and how to find the right affiliate program that will work for you. Luckily, we’ve got that part covered as well.

Since selecting an affiliate program can be quite challenging, here are a few simple tips you can use to make the right choice and select a program that will work best for your website.

a. Choose a program that fits your niche

Relevance is the main key to good affiliate marketing. Choose to promote products or services that your main audience base will have use of, so you can have more room for profit.

b. Check the credibility of the company you’re promoting

Do a quick background check of the company, business or product you’re looking to promote to see if they are credible and go through a few of their customers’ reviews to get a better understanding of their work and not end up promoting a suspicious product or service.

c. Check commission rates

See what commission rates the business offers to determine how lucrative the job will be and whether it’s worth your promotion effort.

Read their terms and conditions to see how much commission they pay, how much their products and services cost, and get a rough estimate of what your earnings could be if you were to promote their stuff. Make sure you’re satisfied with what they offer, so you don’t end up wasting your time and effort promoting something that will not bring you enough profits.

d. See if the affiliate program offers useful tools and resources

Some, well-established affiliate programs offer an extensive library of promotional materials, data, banners and ads you can use to promote their products and service so you can create a better marketing campaign that can bring you in more money. Choosing such programs can offer you an advantage and make the process much smoother for you.

e. Check to see if they offer favorable cookie life

Cookie life is the period of time in which you as an affiliate can earn commissions for a sale from a referred customer. The longer the cookie life is, the greater potential you have of earning money on a specific sale since it gives the customer more time to make the purchase. If the cookie life is set to 24h, any purchases made after that will not earn you any commissions, which is why you should look for a favorable cookie life.

f. Read their terms and conditions carefully

All affiliate programs have a certain set of terms and conditions that apply. Some are more general and less restraining, while other programs might have specific conditions put in place that might be a deal-breaker for you and end up costing you your commissions. Such restrictions might include prohibiting the use of certain traffic channels, which might greatly reduce your income, especially if you rely on that specific channel for views and visits.

While these are some of the main tips you can use when deciding which affiliate program to choose, remember that choosing something you’re knowledgeable and passionate about and that your readers will benefit from is in many cases more important than choosing what’s most profitable. If you’re able to find a program with a good commission rate and one that you’re genuinely passionate about promoting, you’re set to make some cash in no time.

5. Setting Up a Sales Funnel and an Email List

A sales funnel is the process an individual takes towards becoming your customer.

Sales funnels are set up to attract and convert visitors to your website into customers. Whether they’ve just found out about your brand or they are a repeat customer, the buying journey they take is a sales funnel.

Sales funnels have three parts:

• The marketing that attracts potential customers – that’s the landing page of your website
• The sales process the customers go through before they buy (reading the description of your products, the benefits they offer), and
• The completion of their purchase

Sales funnels are important in capturing the traffic on your website, by offering products or services your visitors are going to love.

All you need to do to capture that traffic is to create a lead capture page and a thank you page, and that’s exactly what we’re going to show you today.

Remember that funnels work best when you know your visitors well and you’re aware of their needs, likes, and wants.

Here are the main steps you need to take to create successful sales funnels:

a. Get People to Your Website

By creating visitor funnels you can motivate your visitors to become customers by placing the right offer in front of them, at the right time. But first, you have to get them to visit your website.

There is no one proven technique that gets you more visitors. Instead, there are a ton of different methods you can try to get more traffic which you can convert to potential customers.

Use the methods we mentioned above in the content creation section. Make sure to provide useful, trustworthy, and above all interesting content that will engage your readers. Everything you create should be driven by your visitor intent. It should be able to attract people to your website, where you’ve put sales funnels in place and can take them on a journey to buy a product or service you’re recommending.

b. Create a Landing Page

Your landing page will be the first thing visitors and prospective buyers see when they visit your website. Use your landing page as an opportunity to give visitors a chance to learn about your business, including the products and services you offer. Your landing page should clearly describe what your company or business is about and the benefits your services or products offer. It is your opportunity to impress prospective buyers by providing a compelling and interesting copy.

c. Offer Your Visitors Something of Value

To turn your visitors into leads and get them to provide their email addresses, you need to provide them with something valuable, such as a free e-book, informative and useful content of any kind or anything else you have to offer that can be useful to them.

d. Stay in Touch with Your Prospective Customers

Once you get potential leads to sign up and give you their email address, stay in touch with them and nurture the relationship on a regular basis. Be careful not to turn them off by spamming them with emails or content that’s not useful to them.

During this part of the process, you should consider setting up an autoresponder, also known as a campaign that can send out emails to your subscribers on a regular basis over a period of time (more on this below).

First off, you want to send 3-7 emails after they’ve downloaded the resource you provided for them (such as an e-book or something similar) so you can eventually give them an offer for a product or service they might be interested in purchasing.

The emails you send out should be related to the resource you provided in the beginning and most importantly they should provide useful information on the subject.

Repeat this process with different products and services, and you can put a lot of funnels in place that will attract more potential customers and continue to make you money on a regular basis.

How to Set Up an Email List

An important part of the process of staying in touch with your potential and existing customers is to set up an autoresponder so you can send them emails with promotions, useful resources and more.

There are several email marketing providers that you can use to set up this process, including Mailchimp,  Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign , ConvertKit, and more.

These services are easy to use, they give you full control and allow you to establish direct contact with your customers. Using these email marketing providers, you can easily send bulk emails that are targeted and personalized, manage your contact list, segment users into groups, easily create highly engaging newsletters using their user-friendly interface and make sure your emails don’t end up in the spam folder. These are just some of the benefits you can expect to receive when using these email marketing providers, making sure your business runs smoothly and continues to grow.

The main steps to setting up an email list include:

• Pick your email marketing provider and following the steps they provide so you can set everything up
• Use their available forms to create an opt-in form where readers can leave their email address and personal information
• Create a welcome message your readers will receive when they subscribe to your mailing list
• Write your first newsletter!

Final Thoughts

Starting an affiliate website nowadays is easier than ever before and is one of the best ways to make a steady and reliable income online.

It will also allow you to learn about your niche, build your authority, and help your audience.

If you still need more reasons to start your own affiliate website make sure to check this article to learn about all its benefits and this one to see how much money people are currently making with their affiliate sites.

Despite popular belief, writing well-optimized blog posts is not a complicated process. All it requires is that you follow a few simple steps and you can easily write an SEO-friendly post or optimize your older posts so they can rank better on the search engines and attract more visitors to your site.

While there are a few rules you need to follow to optimize your posts for the search engines, you mustn’t neglect your readers, as they are the ones you should have in mind when creating your copy.

Let’s go over some of the main steps you need to focus on to make sure your blog post is SEO-friendly.

How to Do Proper Prep to write a SEO Friendly Blog Post

Before you even start writing, you need to prep first so you can have all the info you need to write a blog post that’s rich in content, provides the readers with useful, reliable information, and is optimized for ranking on the search engines.

Here’s what you need to do in this stage:

1. Determine the Purpose of Your Blog Post

Take the time to think about the topic you want to cover, what you want to include and what your readers will be looking for when searching for that particular topic. Try to look at the topic through the readers’ eyes so you can get a better idea of what information will be useful to them.

Look at other blog posts that cover that exact subject to see what type of information they provide, what they’ve missed, and what they’ve gotten right. This will help you get a better idea of what points you need to cover in your blog post.

While you may go over a few of the blog posts that rank best on the search engines, make sure your content is original and not copied from other websites and blogs alike.

2. Write for Your Target Audience

Define your target audience and tailor your content to meet their needs best. Consider who your target audience is first and what type of information they are looking for when searching for the particular topic you’re writing on so you can address them properly, and provide them with the right type of content they need.

3. Provide Value-Packed Content

Before you stand in front of your readers and promise to provide them with all the necessary information they’re looking for on a particular subject, you need to make sure you’re well versed on the topic yourself.

You don’t necessarily have to be an expert in the particular niche to be able to give your readers well-written, value-packed content.

But how do you make your content value-packed and what do you have to do to make sure your readers leave your site satisfied?

Research the Topic Well

As long as you’re passionate about the subject and conduct thorough research, you’ll be able to provide your readers with the knowledge and information they’re looking for.

Take the time to do your research before you start writing. During your research, take notes of what you want to include in your blog post as well as what your readers might expect to find when reading your text.

Create the outline of your blog post making sure that throughout your post you provide your readers with both conceptual and practical knowledge on the subject you’re covering so they know which steps they need to take to achieve a specific goal or purpose.

Illustrate Real-Life Examples

While you’re doing your research and prepping for the topic, look for ways that you can provide your readers with real-life examples of how they can achieve a particular goal, which can greatly increase the usefulness of your piece of content.

Look for Useful Data and Stats

Find useful data and stats on the subject you’re covering so you can validate and illustrate your points better.

Make sure the statistics you’re sharing are reliable because you want your readers to perceive you as trustworthy.

4. Identify and Select Your Keywords

For this part of the process, you will need to use a keyword research tool so you can see what users are searching for and which keywords you’ll need to use in your copy. Such sites include Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner, Keywords Everywhere, and more.

Explore multiple related keywords to compare their search volume and see which keywords get the most traffic. Determine your primary keyword by considering what your target audience will be likely to search for. Select a few longtail keywords as well and try to naturally incorporate them in your article as single-term keywords can sometimes be too ambiguous.

Make sure your primary keyword represents the theme and main concept of the blog post well. Use synonyms of your primary keyword throughout the post and make sure they reflect the topic well and are quite descriptive. Make sure that your secondary keywords are closely related to your primary keyword. Use at least 2-4 secondary keywords in your post and distribute them throughout the text to get the right keyword density.

The best practice is to have a 1-3% keyword density and to spread out your keywords evenly throughout the copy. This way you can avoid keyword stuffing and get penalized by the search engines. The ultimate goal when writing any piece of content is to create something that people want to read, and if you stuff it with keywords and write with the search engines in mind only, you will risk losing your audience.

Look at your main competitors to see which specific keywords they’re using so you can compete with them and gain an advantage over them by optimizing your blog posts better, leaving everyone else behind.

There are several tools you can use for this purpose, including BuzzSumo, Ahrefs, SEM Rush, and SpyFu.

How to Write Good Content for an SEO Friendly Blog Post

Once you’ve done your research it’s time to start writing!

Here are the main steps you need to follow when writing an SEO-friendly blog post:

1. Devise a Clear Structure for Your SEO Friendly Blog Post

Having a clear structure for your blog post before you start writing will help you create a well-written, readable post that your audience can easily go through and be able to find the right information they need without getting lost in all the content you have provided for them.

What this means is that your post should have:

• An introduction part in which you set up the topic and introduce your audience to it
• A body in which you convey your main message (this should be carefully split up into headings and broken down into readable and well-structured blocks of text)

A conclusion in which you summarize your main ideas

2. Use Paragraphs and Headings Properly

Separate your content into concise and readable paragraphs. Use headings to introduce new topics and split the content into smaller, readable chunks of text so your audience doesn’t get overwhelmed and lost in all the text.

As we all know, our attention span is the lowest it’s ever been and it’s constantly decreasing each year. That means that in order to get your readers to engage with your content you need to make it easily scannable. The two main ways you can achieve that are by breaking down each key section into subheadings and concentrating on one idea per paragraph.

3. Make Your Content Readable and Accessible

If you want to keep your readers engaged and keep their attention throughout your whole blog post, other than the two main methods we mentioned above, there are a few other things you can do to make your content easy to read and digest.

Those methods include:

• Using bullet points to make your ideas stand out
• Highlighting certain keywords and phrases
• Breaking up your content with visuals (use images, graphics and videos)
• Using shorter sentences
• Keeping all reading levels in mind (make your content accessible to all of your readers so it can be distributed to a wide audience)

4. Make Your Content More Engaging

No matter if your writing niche is popular or not, in today’s world you can expect to find fierce competition for audience attention almost everywhere you look. By figuring out how to engage with your readers best you can be a step ahead of your competitors and be able to get your point across to a larger audience.

If you’re trying to rank in a highly competitive field, you will need more than just great content to be able to reach audiences and get them to stick around.

Since every second they spend reading your content counts, here are a few methods you can use to extend that time as much as possible and keep your readers interested and interacting with your content.

• Be clear and inform your audience on the subject without leaving any space for ambiguity and vagueness
• Stop trying to sell, as consumers are sick and tired of hearing boring sales pitches as well as aggressive and obvious marketing messages. Instead of trying to get your audience to buy a product or a service that you’re trying to promote, become someone they can trust and rely on so when you finally do pitch an idea or a service to your audience, they won’t be put off by it.
• Be relatable and personable so your readers don’t feel like they’re being preached to but rather that they are a part of the conversation. You can achieve this by using an informal tone, addressing your readers directly and using a less pedantic approach to writing.

5. Write Interesting Content

Whichever topic you’re discussing, you should always strive to make your post interesting. To make any topic interesting, all you need to do is provide new information to your readers, take a unique stance or let your personality peek through the text you’re writing.

Don’t just repeat the same information that can be found in any other blog post on the topic, but instead add more value by providing useful information to the readers so they can stick around and engage with your content.

6. Stick to Your Core Message

Provide your readers with useful content that’s on message and doesn’t stray away from the main topic. Your audience doesn’t want to get lost in the details and forget what they were reading about in the first place.

Therefore, if you feel like you’re going off-topic and making points that aren’t that closely related to the main topic, simply cut those parts off and go onto the next paragraph. Learn to compromise and be okay with saying “no” to yourself if you don’t feel like the content you’re providing serves the core message of your blog post.

No matter which stage of the writing process you’re in, always remember to stick to your core message and don’t stray too far off or you’ll risk losing readers on the way.

7. Provide a Solution

When searching for the answer to a problem they’re facing, your readers will want to feel like you can provide them with a solution that’s applicable to their situation.

The first thing most of us do when we’re faced with a problem is to search for the solution online. That’s why it’s important that whatever your title or the first paragraph of your post promises to provide, you need to make sure you stick to your promise and offer your readers the solution they’re searching for.

If your content manages to help your readers, they’ll be more inclined to share it with others and they’ll be more likely to become a loyal and dedicated reader of yours, and potentially even a customer.

8. Make Sure Your Content is Relevant

Write timely and relevant content and update your older blog posts or articles on a regular basis so they provide useful and relevant information.

This is especially true for certain topics and industries. While certain blog posts age well and can still remain relevant years after publishing, others may not.

Take this particular blog post that you’re reading at the moment as an example. While you can find tons of relevant information on how to write an SEO-friendly blog post that you can apply to your writing right away if you were to stumble upon this post 10 years from now some of the information provided may no longer be relevant or even useful.

That’s why when you’re writing you need to focus on what’s newsworthy and relevant in that particular field at the moment so you can provide your readers with information that’s useful and current.

9. Add Quality Links

Add both internal and external links that can provide more value to the readers and help them get all the information they need on the subject and more.

Internal links are links to other pages/blog posts on your website, while external links take readers to outside websites. Internal links provide users a chance to read more related content of yours, while external links are used to give the readers more information that they can’t find on your blog posts, such as statistics, studies, and other types of content.

Adding quality links to reputable sources helps you gain more credibility. It also helps you gain your readers’ respect and trust, which makes them more likely to share your content, and recommend your blog or website to their friends and colleagues.

In addition to giving your content more value, internal and external are seen as a major element by the search engines and are a determining ranking factor.

10. Optimize the Meta Title and Description

The meta title and description provide the readers with a first impression of your blog post. They are the first thing they see on the search engines which is why they should quickly and concisely explain what your blog post is about. These are also the first two things the search engines will check. Therefore they should tell readers what your blog post is related to and what it is about.

The meta title should be 60-70 characters long, while the meta description should be between 155 and 160 characters and they should both contain the primary keyword that you’re trying to rank for.

11. Cut the Fluff to a Minimum

Avoid filler material and fluff during the writing process and then once you go over the editing process make sure to remove any unnecessary words, extra information that isn’t useful, repetitive sentences, and so on.

12. Write Longer Articles/Blog Posts

Longer articles are generally shared more often. They are often thought to be more trustworthy and reliable and therefore gain more respect.

However, to reduce the fluff or keep it to a minimum, you need to make sure your content is as long as it should be so it can convey the main message and provide all the useful information your readers need without going overboard.

Grabbing your readers’ attention is difficult enough on its own, but grabbing and holding their attention for the duration of the whole blog post can sometimes be an impossible mission.

Unless you’re providing your readers with information they find interesting, they’ll go onto the next thing and won’t waste their time on your post, no matter how much sweat and tears you’ve poured into it.

As a general rule of thumb, if you can cover a topic in 500-700 words, you shouldn’t drag it out and write 2,000+ words just so you can have a longer article/post.

13. Add a Call to Action

A part of writing content that’s engaging and sells well is using CTAs (call to action).

A CTA is a line of text or an image that prompts visitors to your site to take some sort of action.

CTAs tell your readers what to do and help convert them into leads.

There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to CTAs. What works for some may not work for others, so to make the most out of your CTAs you need to understand what your target audience needs first.

If you want your CTAs to convert readers to leads you need to make them as direct as possible.

To be successful in your attempt to engage with your audience, you need to make your CTAs eye-catching. They need to effectively communicate the value your readers will get from clicking on them, so your readers can know what to expect before they even click on your call to action.

The most common places to put CTAs in blog posts include:

• Right at the end of each post
• In the sidebar of a post
• As a floating banner
• As a pop-up message
• In the middle of a long blog post

Remember to keep things simple and direct when it comes to CTAs, and use the text before the CTA as a good lead-up to the actual call to action. This way you can keep the CTA short and simple, yet your readers will still have enough information about the product/service/tool or whatever it is you’re offering with the CTA.

14. Optimize The Images

Images and other visuals add a lot of value to your content and make it more appealing. While choosing the right images that are relevant to the subject is the first step of the process, there are several more steps you need to take for SEO purposes.

Those include:

• Naming the image properly (the name should be the subject of the photo and include descriptive keywords, not some generic name)
• Resize the images for faster loading times
• Compress the file size using image-editing tools, or select the safe for the web option when available (such as in Adobe Photoshop)
• Add captions to your images having your readers in mind, not just for SEO purposes
• Use alt tags to provide the Search Engines with context so they can index your image properly

15. Be Yourself

Last but not least, remember to stay true to yourself and trust your audience. They can tell when you’re being authentic vs. when you’re just trying to copy someone else’s style and adapt it as your own. Give your audience the chance to get to know the real you, so they can connect with you better.

Now that we’ve covered everything there is to know about writing high-quality, SEO-friendly content, it’s time to focus on one more crucial part of the process and that’s writing a strong title to go with your value-packed content.

How to Write Strong Titles for a SEO Friendly Blog Post

One of the most common mistakes new writers make when creating any type of content is that they put all of their effort towards creating an interesting and compelling copy that provides a lot of value to the readers, yet they don’t pay enough attention to the headline.

A strong and catchy headline can get people to engage with your content and even buy what you’re selling.

That’s why it’s important to spend more than a couple of minutes composing your headline before you submit or post your piece of copy.

Additionally, titles play a big role in any SEO strategy. That’s why they need to be written both with readers and Search Engines in mind. Titles tell the Search Engines whether your page is relevant to a search query, which is why they need to be optimized.

To optimize your titles for SEO purposes you need to:

• Place your main keywords at the beginning of the title
• Use key phrases rather than keywords
• Avoid keyword stuffing
• Avoid writing click-bait titles
• Be aware of the title length (should exceed 50-60 characters in length)

If you want to improve your skills and learn how to write strong headlines that will make people want to click on your post here are a few tips that can help you.

1. Spark Curiosity

Have you ever wondered how popular blogs, websites or magazines come up with intriguing titles that people can’t seem to scroll past? It may seem like they’ve cracked the code to writing a good headline, and that might not be that far from the truth. The truth is that they follow a really simple and straightforward principle that’s based on sparking their readers’ curiosity and provoking their interest.

If you can successfully tap into people’s need for surprise and intrigue you will manage to write a click-worthy title that will get people to engage.

The easiest way to spark curiosity in your readers and provoke a reaction from them is to use emotionally colored words also known as power words. These words can grab people’s attention and stop them in their tracks, so they stop scrolling and click on your piece of content.

Popular trigger words that have been proven to grab people’s attention include free, new, easy, proven, secret, guaranteed, scientific, trustworthy, jaw-dropping, and so on.

Emotions can often overpower reason, so using emotionally colored words that grab the readers’ attention right off the bet can be a simple and easy way to provoke a psychological reaction in readers and get more clicks and conversions.

2. Shock with Bold Statements

Shocker titles are intended to solicit a strong emotional reaction in the readers by providing a bold, shocking statement that grabs their interest straight away. These types of titles typically make bold statements that may often say something contrarian or something that goes against commonly held views and opinions.

Here’s an example: 10 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Buy a Home.

This is a pretty bold statement that might go against the norm, but provided that it is backed up by solid, trustworthy, and reliable information it can get people genuinely interested in the subject and have them go through your entire post from start to finish.

While these types of shocker posts can be tricky and might come off as “clickbait” articles, when used correctly, they can really grab the reader’s attention and get them to visit your site and check out your content.

3. Address Your Audience

Acknowledging and addressing readers directly through the title can be a great way to attract your target audience. For example, if your audience includes first-time home buyers or people who are just getting familiar with the housing market, they are going to be looking for guidance and expert advice on the subject.

Here’s an example of a title you can use in that case: The Beginner’s Guide to Buying Your First Home.

With this title, you are acknowledging your target audience and making your readers feel like the post was written specifically for them.

4. Rely on Statistics

Post titles with reliable statistics and quantifiable results can grab people’s attention and make them want to click faster. Reading about how someone achieves a personal or professional goal and a quantifiable result gets readers more interested and involved. They can then more easily place themselves in the writer’s shoes and start imagining themselves reaching that same exact goal too.

Here’s an example: How I Lost 20 Pounds in a Month – The Complete Guide.

Using monetary figures is another great way to grab people’s attention right from the get-go, so next time you write a bland title that you’re not satisfied with, try using statistics to your advantage and spice things up.

5. Be Clear and Concise

Stick to a title length of 60-65 characters and make sure you have as much information as you can so readers can know what your post is about straight away. 

Place your most important keywords at the beginning so they are visible even if your title is cut off by the search engine.

Be clear about the topic you’re covering. The title is your chance to get straight to the point, without revealing too much to your audience so they’ll want to read the whole text. The title of your copy is not the place to be vague so you can spark your readers’ curiosity, because if you’re not willing to reveal exactly what you’re offering, your audience may not be interested in checking out your piece of copy in the first place.

There are a ton of other methods you can use to write a title that stokes curiosity in your readers, grabs their attention, or provides a solution for their problem. Whichever method you choose, don’t forget that the title of your copy plays an important role in grabbing your reader’s attention, which is why it’s crucial that you get it right.

Wrapping Up

The most important thing to remember when writing an SEO-friendly blog post is to make sure it’s user-friendly. There’s no reason why a blog post that’s optimized for the search engines can’t be written with the readers in mind. In the end, you must remember that you’re writing for people and not for robots, so if want to keep your readers engaged, you’ll need to provide them with quality content that will keep their attention from beginning to end.

While some people start a blog for pleasure and others do it for business, there are many benefits of blogging that can support your career and life goals regardless of your background and industry.

In this article you will discover some of the most common and valid reasons for starting a blog including achieving financial freedom, growing your business and expanding your opportunities,

Here are 30+ reasons that will make you crave to start a blog:

Why Start A Blog: Top Reasons to Become A Blogger

1. You can earn money

If you are wondering if you can start a blog to make money, the answer is yes! While a percentage of bloggers do it as a hobby, the majority of bloggers use their blog as a platform to make money.

When you start a blog, you are ultimately building your own platform and audience from scratch which gives you many options for monetization. From placing ads to promoting affiliate offers and selling your own digital products, a blog can become a great source of revenue if you how to implement a viable business model.

2. You learn new things

When you start a blog, it is recommended and common that you do it on a topic that you are passionate about or interest in. You would be spending a lot of time reading and writing about that one topic so it only makes sense that is something you are already familiarised with or at least have a certain knowledge of.

But even if you already know a lot about your niche, starting a blog would require you to deepen your knowledge even further so you can share that with your readers.

This gives you the opportunity to learn about a subject that you already enjoy while using your knowledge to validate your expertise and grow an audience that trusts you.

3. It is almost free

Starting a blog is really cheap. If you stick to the basics, all you need is a hosting service which is what allows your blog to exists on the internet. This costs around $2.95 a month with Bluehost which is one of the most popular hosting providers.

Compared to other online business models where you need to invest in inventory, product development, and ads, the overhead costs of starting a blog are super low, which makes it an accessible business model to a broader population.

Other nonessential costs of starting and running a blog include things like an email autoresponder and landing page builder. You can check out this article to find out all the costs of starting a blog.

4. Anyone can do it

Starting a blog is something anyone can do. No requirements, no qualification, and no gatekeeping. You can grow a full-time revenue from scratch without any previous experience.

Nowadays, all the information you need to start a blog (or any other business) can be found online through a quick Google search so all you really need is some determination and consistency.

While some bloggers have a background in writing or digital marketing, lots of successful ones have started their blogs without any previous knowledge so there is no reason why you can’t do the same.

5. Improve your communication and argumentative skills

Communication and argumentative skills are not innate to everyone and not something that is necessarily taught in school, yet they are super important for your everyday life, networking, and professional career.

Through blogging, you will develop the ability to dissect a topic, explain it in the most efficient way and defend your opinion about any topic with strong arguments.

But these are very universal and necessary competencies that will have a positive impact in your day-to-day life, your relationships, and how you interact with different people.

6. Improve your Writing Skills

As you can expect, there is a lot of writing involved with starting and running a blog so you will inevitably improve your writing skills through all the practice you will be making.

You don’t need to have any previous writing experience or skills, but blogging will push you to work your writing muscles and you will get better by simply doing it often.

When I started my first blog, I used to spend more than 8 hours on a short 500 word post that now takes me less than an hour. Even with all the time they took me, looking back I can see that my first blog posts are not my best work but we all start somewhere.

7. Improve your confidence

Being completely honest, starting a blog is not easy nor for everyone. You need a lot of discipline and especially patience.

New content takes about 12 to 18 months to rank on search engines so during these time you won’t be getting any visits or results.

It takes a lot of determination and vision to be able to push through this stage and continue creating content without getting any feedback or external motivation.

BUT it is during this time that you will build your discipline, work ethic and learn to trust the process. When you are on the other side, you will have a new sense of confidence and pride that no one will be able to take from you.

8. You will be more confident about being known

If you are anything like me, you don’t particularly love the idea of being a public figure and it might even be one of the reasons why you are considering starting a blog.

Actually, before starting my first blog, I was debating whether to do that or to start a Youtube Channel. I chose the blogging path because I could remain anonymous and use a brand to position my blog. But as I started to create content I was proud of, the idea of being recognized as the author seem more appealing.

Whether you choose to create a brand for your blog or to do it under your own name, building something from the ground and creating content you are happy to share, will help you be more confident with being known.

9. Bring attention to a cause

If there is a topic that you are passionate about and want to draw attention to, starting a blog about it is a great way to spread the word and get more people interested in the cause.

This does not apply for every case since some topics are not related to social causes but if you are looking for a way to do activism online, then blogging can help you put your voice out there.

Ultimately, you don’t need to write about a social cause to make an impact. I, for example, am passionate about financial freedom and helping people live on their own terms so by writing about digital marketing and making money online, I can help my readers achieve that.

10. Build your Authority

If you want to start any type of business, find the job of your dreams, or sell your services online, building your authority and credibility in your niche is key to your success.

Nowadays, anyone can learn about yourself through a simple Google search, and having a blog with valuable information on your topic will help you gain the trust of your potential clients, employers, readers, or business partners.

Also, if you are trying to start a side hustle like dropshipping or affiliate marketing, using a blog is a great way to gain credibilty and let potential buyers come to you instead of going after them through ads or other types of marketing campaigns.

11. Get you a writing job

If your goal is to get a writing job, starting a blog is a great way to build your portfolio while increasing your chances of being discovered by someone in your industry.

Or if you don’t want to get a regular job but rather keeping your independence and being a freelance, blogging can also help. It is an excellent way to show off your skills, and can help you find new clients organically.

You can show people your blog when applying for jobs or you can add a section on your site where people can learn about your services and how to hire you.

12. No income limit

On regular jobs, you are basically exchanging your time for money so there is a limit to how much you can make. But when you build your own blog, there is always a possibility to increase your income.

You can grow your revenue by creating more content and hence getting more visitors, including more affiliate offers, creating new digital products or offering sponsored content.

There is no limit to how much money you can make with your blog if you treat it like a business and have a varied monetization strategy.

13. Help others with your knowledge

Regardless of your altruistic motives or lack thereof, a blog is a valuable resource that will help a lot of people in your niche and provide them with the solutions and answers they are looking for.

While there might be other similar blogs out there to the one you can create, you should always aspire to make better content to what already exists.

Whether you. do it by sharing your unique experience and perspective, doing more throughout research, or providing with an extra resource like an infographic or downloadable, creating content that helps others will help you become a better blogger and guarantee your blog’s success.

14. Build an audience

Nowadays, the most important currency any entrepreneur or business owner can have is people’s attention. Companies pay millions of dollars to get in fron of people and starting your own blog allows you to create an audience of people interested in what you have to say without having to pay for ads or stay on top of multiple social media apps.

Creating a blog with valuable content allows you to attract the right people to your website who might be interested in buying the products you offer, supporting your cause, or start a partnership with you.

Ultimately, having your own audience creates many possibilities to make money online and puts you in the driving seat.

15. Can help you land your dream job

If you don’t want to make blogging your full-time job because you have a different dream for your career, starting a blog can still help you land the job of your dreams by developing your expertise and credentials.

Additionally, starting your blog and deepening your knwoledge of you ncihe can help you discover new areas of interest that you hadn’t thought about and even connect with people in your industry that can offer you new opportunities.

Blogging can truly open doors for you and be the stepping stone that transforms your professional life.

16. Search engines love blogs

Small businesses that blog get 126% more lead growth than small businesses that do not blog.

ThinkCreative

If you have a website for your business it can be hard to get organic traffic since these type of sites are usually low in content.

Search engines like Google love blog content because it is heavy in information so it is seen as a valuable resource, especially when compared to eCommerce or business websites.

This is why starting a blog for your business website is one if the best way to drive organic and targeted traffic and improve your rankings on search results without having to spend thousands on ads.

17. Flexible schedule and location

In the internet era, one would think that most jobs that are performed with a computer can be done remotely. However, lots of companies still want their employees to spend 5 days a week and 8 hours a day —if not more— in the office.

If you are something like me and can’t imagine spending the majority of your adult life between 4 walls, then you will value the flexibility that blogging provides.

As long as you have your laptop and some decent wifi, you can run your blog from any corner of the word and at the hours that work best for you. Not sure about you but this one point would be enough to convince me.

18. Get you a book deal

Landing a book deal can take a lot of work and time and starting your own blog can be the first step towards your getting you that dream deal.

Having your own blog can not only help you to practice your writing but it will also help you build your authority in your niche and grow an audience of people interested in what you have to say. This can help you demonstrate to publishers that there is an audience for your book idea.

And if that book deal is taking longer than you expected, you already have a following which would make it easier to publish it yourself as I explain in the next point.

19. It’ll help you publish your work

If you are interested in becoming a self-published author, starting your own blog can help you make the process easier and more successful.

Writing a book, putting it out there, and getting people to read it is not as easy as some people make it sounds. There are hundreds of thousands of new books being launched every month so in order to succeed as a self-published author, you need a name for yourself which is what a blog can help you achieve.

By growing a blog, you’ll be building a base of readers and subscribers excited to read not only the content you write on your blog but your book as well. Especially if you get your audience excited with quotes and excerpts.

20. Helps you find clients for your services

If you offer any kind of service online, you know that one of the most challenging parts of being a freelancer is finding clients.

Blogging is one of the best ways to get clients not only because it brings potential customers to your site but because it helps you build trust with them at the same time by sharing and validating your knowledge.

Readers who have been consuming your content are much more likely to turn into customers than any stranger that runs into an ad since they already know about your products and services and your expertise.

21. Be Your Own Boss

If you are reading this article, you are probably not happy with working for someone else and following orders most of your life. If that rings a bell, then starting your blog can put you in the driver’s seat and become a full time job where you are the only one making the choices.

When I first started blogging after working as a copywriter for 10 years, I had the habit of thinking someone would come and correct me but when I realized I had the final call on all my content and work, it was super freeing and motivating.

while it can be overwhelming sometimes, if you have an entrepreneurial spirit you will appreciate creating something on your own and putting it out there for the world to see it!

22. Collect highly targeted leads

High-quality leads are the foundation of any successful business and blogging is one of the best ways to attract them with little to no money.

In this context, blogging is also known as content marketing and can help you attract people who are actively looking for the knowledge or solutions you can provide.

If you write with your target audience in mind, you can get highly targeted leads into your email list and turn your blog into a lead generation machine that nurtures your sales funnels on autopilot.

23. Helps you share your hobbies

Have you heard the saying “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life”? That can definitely be true if you choose to blog about something you are passionate about like a hobby or art interest.

If you love golf, baking, painting, playing games or traveling, you can choose to blog about them and build an audience that shares your interest and passion. That being said, you should always do your research to make sure that your topic has a big enough audience for it to be profitable and worth your time.

In a similar way, if you are an aspiring artist, blogging can help you build a following of loyal fans who will be happy to support your journey and who will make it easier to launch your work into the world.

24. You decide who you want to work with

One of my favorite aspects about blogging is that it puts you in the driver’s seat and you are not forced to follow anyone’s orders or work with any companies, influencers or sponsors you don’t like.

While in a regular job, you always need to follow someone else’s orders (even if you have certain decision power), with your own blog, you are 100% in charge of choosing what to write about, what brands to recommend and who to network with.

If you have an independent spirit like me, you probably struggle with authority and you will find great fulfillment and freedom in having full control of the direction of your blog.

25. Belong to a Supportive Community

Starting a blog does not only help you create an audience but it also allows you to meet people and getaccess to a huge community that shares your same interests and passions.

Regalrdless of your niche if choice, there;ll be a community to go with it and since there is no geographical limits to the online world, you can meet people from anywhere that you would not do otherwise.

Additionally, you will also be part of the blogging community which is a great way to feel supported and understood during your journey. Blogging can be a lonely job and all bloggers know it so they are always happy to meet fellow colleagues and exchange experiences and lessons.

26. Develop Tech Skills

During my time as a blogger, I have learned more tech skills than I did in my entire life or college education.

From setting up your hosting and domain to installing WordPress and your theme of choice and learning how to edit images, create landing pages and send email campaigns, blogging involves a lot more than just writing.

If you are someone who enjoys learning, then starting a blog is one of the best ways to challenge you to figure out something new every day and become and improve your tech skills. Moreover, you will develop hireable skills that people pay good money for so can even make some cash on the side.

27. It can get you speaking and consulting deals

Becoming an authority in your niche won’t only help you build trust with your readers but it can also help you get high-paying speaking and consulting gigs since you will become an expert in your industry and people will be willing to pay good money for your advice and time.

Additionally, besides your niche of expertise (e.g technology, fitness, etc.), you will also become and expert in the process of starting and running a blog and will be able to teach others how to do it.

28. Make Passive-ish Income

If the idea of making money while you sleep or take a vacation excites you, then starting a blog can help you build passive income from scratch.

While it is not completely passive like investing in real state or stocks, once you have built a good base of articles and have the traffic coming in organically, your blog will earn you money from ad revenue, affiliate sales and digital products on autopilot.

Eventually, you can also outsource most of your blog tasks so you can spend more time on the parts you enjoy the most or simply have free time to enjoy life!

29. It Is Great For Self-Development

While a lot of people don’t see blogging as an alternative for personal growth, it can definitely impact your character positively and help you build healthy habits and a resilient mindset.

The benefits of blogging are many, but the first 10-12 months can be really challenging since you won’t get any traffic or results. So you need to be disciplined and consistent with your work and trust the process that if you continue to show up, you will see the rewards in the future.

The main reason why a lot of blogs ‘fail’ is because bloggers quit before seeing any results but if you are patient and can work based on your intrinsic motivation, you can be one of the fortunate ones that enjoy a life of independence and financial freedom.

30. You can document your life

While lifestyle blogs are not as popular as they first were before social media replaced them, there are still lots of super popular lifestyle bloggers that make money by sharing and documenting different aspects of their lives.

A great example of a lifestyle blog is Cup of Jo which covers topics like relationships, design, food, style, travel, culture, and motherhood. Blogger Joanna Goddard started it in 2007, as a hobby and now does it full time and even has a dedicated team of writers.

Even if you are not interested in making a revenue or a career from your blog, you can simply use it as a way to document your life for your future self!

31. It is fun

Last but not least, blogging is fun! It can help you explore your passions, build something you are proud of from scratch and build a community of people with shared interests.

Blogging is much more than just writing and you will be able to discover many aspects that you enjoy and others that you can outsource so you can focus mostly on what you like.

While I do warn people that starting a blog is not a walk in the park, I am happy and grateful I get to it and enjoy it 99% of the time. If you have a creative spirit, you will enjoy starting your own blog and make something out of nothing!

Why Start A Blog? – FAQ

Is it worth starting a blog in 2021?

Blogging has changed A LOT in the last 10 years. While before it was really easy to start a blog with a dozen of articles and get good organic traffic, nowaday there is way more competition so you need high-quality articles and a good SEO strategy to get some traction.

That being said, blogs are not going anywhere and —in my opinion as someone who runs three of them—are still one of the most accessible and low-risk ways to build a significant online revenue.

Do people still read blogs?

The short answer is yes! According to the latest blogging statistics. 77% of Internet users report regularly reading blog posts and they are considered valuable resources worthy of being shared so people will almost certainly continue reading blogs for many years to come.

Bottom Line

From making money online and leaving your 9-5 to sharing your experience and getting amazing opportunities, starting a blog is one of the best ways to build your authority online and use it for multiple purposes.

If you are willing to put in the work and have realistic expectations, starting a blog can change your life and and help you achieve many of your goals.

To get started, check out this article on How To Start A Successful Blog

With lots of niches on the market, the weight loss niche stands out as one of the highest paying and most profitable ones that you can give a try.

Weight loss is a major interest for people of all ages, lifestyles, and walks of life. As a result, this niche represents a growing market that was worth about 192.2 billion dollars in 2019. This means that it represents a profitable option if you want to market weight loss affiliate programs.

There are many programs and products to choose from, and specializing in the right option will help you earn enough money to embark on your journey as a successful weight loss affiliate marketer.

So, which programs should you promote? How much money can you make? And what is the best way to increase your income through promoting these programs?

Keep on reading to learn the answers to all these questions.

Best Weight Loss Affiliate Programs

By examining the data of monthly search volumes, there’s a lot of research that involves weight loss-related keywords. This means that whether you’re a beginner or experienced content creator, or blogger, there’s a big opportunity to establish your name in the weight loss and fitness industry by making offers to promote the right products.

We researched the market to find the best weight loss affiliate programs that represent a lucrative opportunity to make money through sales commissions. These programs offer different aspects of healthy living, from eating habits and recipes to weight loss supplements, so the person buying them will be able to achieve their weight loss goals.

Here are our top picks.

1.   Diet Direct

• Commission Rate: 10% on initial purchases and 5% on recurring purchases
• Cookie Length: 30 days
• Link to Join: https://www.dietdirect.com/affiliate

Diet Direct is a popular weight loss affiliate program because it offers low-calorie snacks, protein bars, desserts, shakes, and drinks to help people monitor and control their calorie intake. It also offers meal plans and recipes in addition to supplements to help people lose extra weight while staying healthy and active.

Lots of obese people prefer to join this program because it offers various diet programs that suit different lifestyles and health conditions. In addition, it’s an easy-to-follow program with multiple food options and diet plans designed by nutritionists to offer the best weight loss benefits.

The diet plan offers multiple tasty meals that are delivered right to the customers’ doorsteps, in addition to supplements that can help keep their health in check. As a result, it can attract several people since it offers more versatility than other diet programs.

Why Is This a Good Offer to Promote?

This program results in high conversions because it’s quite popular. It offers a 10% commission on initial sales, and through the same link, you can earn 5% from returning customers.

The program focuses on improving the customers’ shopping experience by guaranteeing satisfaction through reliable delivery. It’s also free to join and easy to track, as once you join, all the sales through your link will have an identifiable tag to facilitate sales tracking.

How to Promote It?

This is an excellent program to promote if you create lifestyle content. Sharing before and after pictures and recipe ideas on your Instagram account will be an excellent way to explain the benefits of this program.

What Audience Would it Be Good For?

Since this program minimizes guesswork, it’s an excellent choice for busy professionals, overwhelmed parents, and anyone who has no time for meal planning and preparation. The meals are delivered, and most of them are almost ready. As a result, customers won’t have to struggle to stick to the diet plan.

2.   Vitauthority

• Commission Rate: Between 12% and 18% on initial sales and 5% on recurring sales
• Cookie Length: 30 days
• Link to Join: https://vitauthority.com/pages/ambassador

Vitauthority is an excellent wellness and weight loss program that offers various weight loss supplements for those who want to lose weight healthily. The program also offers a lot of natural products that promote fast and healthy weight loss.

People love this program because they can make customized bundles for more versatile options. These supplements help with detoxing, losing weight, maintaining weight loss, and increasing the rate of metabolism.

Most of the supplements have a high satisfaction rate, and the program offers a 60-day money-back guarantee which makes it more trustworthy. People who buy supplements can save up to 20% through their customized bundles.

Why Is This a Good Offer to Promote?

When you become a Vitambassador, your performance will qualify you to belong to one of the program’s three different tiers. For the first tier, you’ll receive a 12% commission, turnover over $200 In sales per month, 25% off coupon, 11% off coupon for your followers, and 5% commission on recurring sales.

Your initial commission will be 15% for the second tier, and it will increase to 18% when you qualify for the third tier. With an average order total of $63, it’s easy to make about $12 per sale.

How to Promote It?

Posting information about the benefits of the different supplements on your lifestyle blog or wellness YouTube channel will be a good way to promote this weight loss program.

What Audience Would it Be Good For?

This is an excellent program for men and women who are interested in losing weight and practicing different sports. The supplements are designed to suppress cravings and achieve weight loss goals while providing the body with the needed nutrients to boost energy and improve stamina.

3.   Weight Loss Evolved

• Commission Rate: 30%
• Cookie Length: Lifetime
• Link to Join: https://weightlossevolved.clickfunnels.com/affiliate-access/

Weight Loss Evolved is a trustworthy weight loss program that gained a lot of followers because it was designed and developed by real physicians. As a matter of fact, weight loss clinics have been using this program to help patients lose weight, thanks to its guaranteed results.

For someone who is trying to lose stubborn weight or maintain weight loss goals, this program represents an excellent opportunity as it offers healthy lifestyle hacks that can help change the way the body reacts to food over a period of 14 weeks.

In addition to the weight loss plans, customers will receive videos and other materials to help them achieve their weight loss goals during the duration of the program.

Why Is This a Good Offer to Promote?

The signup process is easy, and which makes this program appealing for beginner promoters. Since this program is backed up by science, making money by promoting it will be straightforward. The average sale is about $397, allowing you to gain an average commission of $119.

For all these reasons, this program represents an excellent chance for affiliate marketing, as it offers a whopping 30% commission with an average conversion rate of 16%.

The commission rate is more than what most affiliate programs offer, and you can expect to make 5 sales per month with zero effort. Moreover, by becoming a promoter, you’ll be a member of a small exclusive group, so you will have a better chance of earning money without competing with other affiliate marketers. The website is also planning to offer more diet plans and products, thus creating an opportunity for upsells.

How to Promote It?

You can promote this program by posting content about the modified exercise plans and diet recipes. If you have a blog, Instagram page, or YouTube channel, you can share tips from the website’s blog section to promote the program.

What Audience Would it Be Good For?

This program is designed for entrepreneurs and active people who need medical proof to choose the perfect diet plan. Weight loss goals are achieved over a long period, but the results are guaranteed, so it works for those who want to maintain their weight loss goals after finishing the program.

4.   Weight Watchers

• Commission Rate: $10
• Cookie Length: 14 days
• Link to Join: https://www.weightwatchers.com/us/affiliate

Weight Watchers is probably one of the most famous weight loss programs on the market. Since its release in 1963, Weight Watchers has gained a lot of fans through its tried and trustworthy methods.

The idea is simple, as the program allows people to watch their calorie intake to identify unhealthy eating patterns and make efficient yet straightforward adjustments to lose and maintain weight.

The program is backed up by a personalized app that tracks food, activity, sleep, and mindset to achieve the customized weight loss goal. Lots of people prefer to join this program because different pricing plans allow them to choose the most appropriate one.

Why Is This a Good Offer to Promote?

Weight Watchers is free to join, and the program will support you with the needed tools to help promote your link. The program teams up with Commission Junction for real-time reporting to allow you to test the performance of your links.

For someone who is still taking their first step in the weight loss market, this program represents a lucrative opportunity because it’s backed by the reviews and feedback of hundreds of celebrities and customers who enjoyed satisfactory results after following the program. However, it’s only available for affiliate promotion if you’re located in the US.

The program allows you to add your links to multiple websites and platforms. Although the program provides a flat commission rate of $10, it guarantees more return rate since it’s quite popular.

How to Promote It?

This program can be promoted by adding links to your blog, YouTube channel, or social media account. If you’re involved in lifestyle or wellness, this program will be one of the top choices as it focuses on lifestyle changes to help people lose weight.

What Audience Would it Be Good For?

This weight loss program is suitable for those on a tight budget because there are multiple pricing plans to choose from, and there’s an option to pay later for the subscription. It’s also suitable for those who are concerned about their overall wellness because it focuses on changing the overall lifestyle to achieve weight loss goals.

5.   BistroMD

• Commission Rate: $45 on the first sale and bonus incentives
• Cookie Length: 45 days
• Link to Join: https://www.bistromd.com/affiliate

BistroMD is a potent wellness and weight loss program that delivers tasty and healthy diet meals to help customers lose and maintain weight. There are different programs for men and women, with the ability to choose between a 7-day program, 5-day program, or a customized program to suit every customer’s lifestyle. All the meals are delivered right to the customer’s doorstep. 

The diet loss plan is developed by a real doctor to guarantee that customers will be receiving all their nutritional needs as they’re working towards attaining their weight loss goals. People love this program because they receive individualistic support to address their problems while following the plan. Moreover, there’s a social media community that customers can join to ask questions.

One of the reasons why this program is so popular is that it’s extremely convenient. There’s also a health library where participants can learn anything they need to know about weight loss and healthy living.

Why Is This a Good Offer to Promote?

This program is free to join, and as an affiliate promoter, you’ll receive support from a dedicated program manager. There’s no minimum limit for sales, and you will receive a flat rate of $45 per sale. Moreover, the program offers occasional bonus incentives and monthly promotional offers.

The program provides attention-grabbing banners and solid offers that keep it in high demand compared to other weight loss programs. This kind of support makes it an excellent choice for both beginner and experienced affiliate promoters.

How to Promote It?

This program can be promoted across different platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Thanks to the occasional promotions, you can design a successful email marketing campaign to promote this program to your blog subscribers.

What Audience Would it Be Good For?

This program is a suitable choice for those who believe that food is medicine and understand that a balanced diet is a key to healthy weight loss. If you have a big audience of working parents and busy professionals, this program will be the perfect choice for your audience because the meals are delivered to your subscribers’ doorsteps.

6.   Doctors Weight Loss

• Commission Rate: Up to 12%
• Cookie Length: 7 days
• Link to Join: https://doctorsweightloss.goaffpro.com/

Doctors Weight Loss is a comprehensive program that offers various diet plans for different health issues and lifestyles. When customers subscribe, they receive customized meal plans that are available in 3 different categories. Doctors design the plans to satisfy dietary needs, and customers receive supplements to aid with weight loss.

The online clinic provides exceptional guidance, so customers can keep track of their weight loss progress. Moreover, they can shop for different shakes, drinks, desserts, and snacks. 

It’s one of the easiest programs to follow because it’s fully customizable. There’s a chance to talk directly to an expert in a zoom meeting to provide one-to-one consultation. Receiving tailored and personalized advice will guarantee better results when customers follow this weight loss program.

Why Is This a Good Offer to Promote?

The affiliate program is free to join and pays up to 12% in commission for referred sales. The system is easy to use, even if you’re a first-time promoter.

With an average sale value of $139, you can earn up to $20 per sale. Once you join, you can download the links and banners to promote them on your platform. Following up with your affiliate program is easy because the program incorporates a third-party application that keeps track of links that are no longer working.

How to Promote It?

The links can be posted to your website or social media account, especially that the program provides various discount offers. You can also share some of the real-life testimonials on your Instagram account to help people explore the potential of this program.

If you have a YouTube channel, you can schedule a Zoom meeting for a Live Questions and Answers session. You can also post a Live video to your Facebook page.

What Audience Would it Be Good For?

This program is suitable for those who want to make lifestyle changes. Since subscribers receive medical guidance from a nutritionist, this can be an excellent choice for men and women with different health issues or special dietary needs.

7.   Diet To Go

• Commission Rate: $40
• Cookie Length: 45 days
• Link to Join: https://diettogo.com/affiliate-program

Diet To Go is a complete weight loss program with meals delivered right to the subscribers’ doorsteps. It’s a versatile program that allows customers to customize their diet menus and switch options based on their preferences and dietary needs.

Food is appropriately selected and prepared by experienced chefs to be delivered fresh. All the meals are ready to be eaten within a couple of minutes. Customers can either pick up their meals at selected locations or have the ingredients delivered so they can prepare their meals at home.

With 4 different diet plans to choose from, this program is suitable for people of all ages and health concerns. Customers also have access to registered nutritionists and health coaches to help them keep track of their weight loss goals.

Why Is This a Good Offer to Promote?

The flat commission rate of $40 per sale is a good choice for beginner promoters. Moreover, the program offers larger occasional bonuses, with a chance of earning up to $1000. It’s a suitable choice for any social media influencer or someone who owns a blog that shares personal stories.

It can also be a good chance for an offline promoter, like someone who owns a wellness-related business or a nutrition clinic. The program tracks all your activity, and there’s a dedicated team to handle any issues as they arise.

How to Promote It?

Since it’s so versatile, links to this program and its occasional promotions can be posted to your social media accounts or blog. You can also advertise this program at your wellness store or website.

What Audience Would it Be Good For?

This weight loss program would be a good choice for someone who is confused about committing to a potent yet fun weight loss plan that they can easily follow. It’s suitable for busy people who have unique dietary concerns as they can pick up the ingredients or have the plans delivered to their doorsteps.

8.   Jet Fuel Meals

• Commission Rate: An average of $45
• Cookie Length: 30 days
• Link to Join: https://jetfuelmeals.com/become-an-affiliate/

Jet Fuel Meals is a popular weight loss program because it caters to the needs of busy people. The program offers multiple meal plans based on individual dietary needs. Meal macros and components are listed, so people can choose the most suitable diet option.

There are various pricing plans available and customers can also check the blog for information about food and maintaining a healthy weight. Customers can also complement their diet with health shots that help boost metabolism or improve immunity. 

Food and drinks are delivered in insulated bags and packed with ice to guarantee safety and freshness. Moreover, subscriptions can be charged weekly or monthly.

Why Is This a Good Offer to Promote?

The average pricing plan is between $43 and $170, which means that as a promoter, you can expect to make an average of $45 per sale. As a beginner promoter, this will be a suitable option.

Compared to other weight loss programs, this one stands out because it offers some special meal plans that suit kids and people with special diet needs. If you have a family-related platform or blog, you can definitely promote this program.

How to Promote It?

The health blog offers useful content that you can share on your YouTube channel or social media account. Showing pictures from the amazing meal plans will definitely attract interested customers.

What Audience Would it Be Good For?

This is an excellent weight loss program for a family that is trying to maintain or lose weight. The meal plans cover special diet needs for people who might be interested in pescetarian meals or someone who is trying to get in shape for a competition.

How to Make Money with Weight Loss Affiliate Programs

Affiliate marketing is a great chance to make money while promoting your business and increasing its exposure. Choosing the right program and promoting it properly represents a good opportunity to earn a steady income.

However, there’s a common misconception about affiliate program marketing. It’s true that you can make money while you’re sleeping or spending your vacation, but you can’t make money unless you put in the needed effort.

Affiliate marketing refers to the process of earning money from an online retailer for promoting their product or service. The retailer pays you a commission for sales generated from your referrals. This means that instead of promoting your own products or services, you use your platform to promote another website’s products and services.

So how is this done?

1. You recommend the product or service to your followers through your platform, website, or email campaign.
2. Your followers trust your recommendation, so they head to the website and purchase the product through your affiliate link.
3. The retailer tracks the sales made using your links and pays you a commission.

But to achieve success, there are a few things that you need to do to guarantee that your affiliate marketing efforts are generating the desired outcome. Here are the right steps to make money with weight loss affiliate programs.

• Your website, blog, vlog, YouTube channel, or social media platform should provide authentic and new content that the audience finds useful. Spending time building your website and creating its content will help you establish your name in the niche.
• Research the market to pick a suitable weight loss program. For example, if your website is focusing on mindfulness and wellness, you can promote a weight loss program that focuses on switching to healthy weight options by substituting meals and snacks.
• Do the required research and understand all the details of the weight loss program you’re promoting. Links should be inserted strategically, with real-life proof to show that the program actually works.
• You can earn more affiliate income without actually increasing your website’s traffic by increasing your conversion rate. A conversion optimization software that creates popup campaigns that encourage your audience to visit the affiliate product’s website can increase your affiliate income.

Best Platforms to Promote Weight Loss Affiliate Programs

Choosing the right platform to promote your weight loss affiliate program will have a huge impact on your sales. The idea is to pick the most suitable and attractive platform to attract the target audience and use the right techniques to advertise your links.

Blog

By creating useful and original content, your audience will trust the links you promote and accordingly press the link to buy your products or services. It’s recommended to insert the affiliate links strategically, preferably at the beginning of the article. This way, you can guarantee that your audience will learn about your affiliate offer even if they don’t read the whole article.

Instagram

If you have an Instagram page devoted to your wellness or healthy living business or vlog, you can add a permanent affiliate link in your Bio, so your audience can press it to learn more about your offers. Instagram also allows users to create promoted posts to reach more users.

You can also insert a link as a swipe-up option in your story, but this option works only if you have a business account with more than 10,000 followers. Including videos in your posts or before and after images is a good way to promote your affiliate programs.

Facebook

Whether you have a Facebook Page or Facebook Group, you can promote your affiliate links by promoting posts or posting videos to talk about the product. You can also post links to your website, where you share real-life reviews about the weight loss program you’re promoting.

Twitter

It’s a good idea to create a sponsored post to promote your program as part of your Twitter campaign. Posting links to videos with reviews or how-to tips will encourage your audience to press the link and check out your promoted content.

YouTube

As a promoter, you can promote your affiliate links in your YouTube videos using multiple approaches. First, you can include your affiliate link in the description of a video that talks specifically about the problem this product is trying to solve. Links should be followed by CTAs to encourage people to press the link and make a purchase.

Cards can also be used to promote links, but YouTube will only allow links from reputable sources to be posted on end cards. You can also post the link in the comments section or use the community tab to share images and updates.

Final Thoughts

The weight loss niche is promising and growing, so it represents an excellent opportunity to increase your income by promoting the right weight loss affiliate program.

With lots of options available, you need to do the required research to choose an appropriate program that suits your platform and provides value to your target audience.

Once you pick the program, you need to work on optimizing your content to build a trustworthy image of the program you’re promoting and your overall content. 

Maybe you are a busy woman with a full-time job or you are trying to save some money to pursue a passion of yours? The truth is that regardless of your motivation, the wage gap is real and women are in need of better ways to increase their incomes.

While some side hustles involve things like grocery shopping and uber driving, most women would prefer a side hustle they can do from the comfort and safety of their home. That is why all the side hustles you will find on this list can be done online and on your own schedule.

Ready? Here are the 17 best side hustle ideas for women to start in 2021.

Best Sides Hustles For Women

1. Start a blog

As a full-time blogger, you can imagine this is one of my favorite ways to make money online and the best part is that you can keep it as a side hustle or grow it as much as you want and turn it into a full-time job that replaces and exceeds your current salary.

The beauty of this side hustle is that you can choose a topic you are already like so you can spend time learning more about your hobbies and interests while generating an income.

It can take anything from 6 to 18 months for a blog to grow and get a significant number of visitors but once it does, it can make you truly passive income via affiliate links, ads, sponsored content, or even by selling your own products or services.

If you are self-motivated and can work based on delayed gratification, then I highly recommend considering this side hustle.

How much can you make?

Bloggers’ income vary greatly based on the niche, how old the blog is, and their monetization strategies. That being said, most blogs don’t make anything during their first 6-8 month but can make up to $100,000/month.

Check out this article to learn more about how much bloggers make.

2. Become a Social Media Manager

Nowadays, every business needs to have a social media presence if they want to be stay relevant and achieving or maintaining success.

As a social media manager, you would manage the accounts of brands, influencers, and entrepreneurs. Some of the tasks involve creating and scheduling posts, engaging with followers in the comments and dm’s, interacting with other accounts in the niches, moderating Facebook groups, etc.

One of the best ways to get started in this side hustle is to create a social media profile and publish content that your ideal clients would be interested in. E.g. tips on how to get more followers, why entrepreneurs need to leverage social media, etc.

This will become your live portfolio and you can then reach out to influencers and small business owners to see if they would be willing to utilize your services having your account as proof that you know what you are doing.

It is also a good idea to focus on one specific niche or industry so you can build your authority as an expert. For example, “social media managing for wedding planners”.

You can target small businesses that don’t have social media presence yet or you can use sites like Upwork and Fiverr to get hired.

How much can you make?

Social media managers are paid hourly or by package. Hourly rates go from $15 for beginners up to $45 for experts. Packages cost $500-$2000+ based on tasks the package includes.

3. Become an Influencer

It is 2021 and yes, being an influencer can be a highly profitable side hustle and even a full-time job.

Influencers make money by promoting affiliate products, getting sponsorships with brands, creating paid content or even launching their own products. Some influencers have even launched their own line in partnership with big brands.

So how do you become an influencer? Before you can get paid for posting or having companies reach out to you, you need to grow an audience of people that are interested in you and what you have to say.

You can choose any niche or category that you like and start creating content around those topics. It can be anything from parenting, fashion, games, fitness, etc. The key is that you stay focused on that one niche so you people can know what your content is about and those who decide to follow you will be interested in everything you have to say and not just parts of it.

Instagram used to be THE social media for influencers started with Instagram and while it is still a good and reliable platform, it is harder to grow on it than it was 10 or even 5 years ago.

Tiktok is also a really good option and is giving creators great results because it is still relatively new. If you want to learn how to grow a following really fast, this $1 training will show you everything you need to know about it.

How much can you make?

Influencers’ income varies depending on a lot of factors but many digital marketers adhere to the one cent per follower (or $100 per 10K followers) rule as a starting point. (source)

From there, your earnings per post or campaign can change based on your engagement, campaign length, and other partnership specifics.

On top of paid content, influencers can also make money from affiliate links and ad placement in platforms like Tiktok and Youtube.

4. Try Graphic Design

Graphic design is one skill that is very high in demand and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. It is needed in every business and they are willing to pay a lucrative sum for this service.

In this side hustle, you can create graphics for websites, advertisements, logos, and a wide range of other types of media. But not all graphic designers do all types of projects, you can choose to start with what you are most comfortable with and build your portfolio and clientele around it.

If you have a creative side and an eye for design, you could really enjoy this side hustle. It is also perfect to do as a side gig since you can choose what projects to take based on your time availability.

While you can technically learn by looking at online tutorials, you’ll save time and be more prepared by taking an online course. You can then find your first gigs in sites like Fiverr and Upwork or through Facebook groups for entrepreneurs (These is where I used to get all my gigs when I used to write as a freelancer)

How much can you make?

At the low end, newbies charge from $25 to $50 per hour and most experienced freelance graphic designers charge between $65 and $150 per hour.

It is also common for freelancers to have set prices per service like $300-$500 for a logo or $1500-$3000 for a website depending on your experience and most importantly, your portfolio.

5. Start a Dropshipping Business

Dropshipping is a business model where you don’t need to buy inventory of the products. Instead, you create an e-commerce store for the products of your choice and once you receive an order, you pass it to a third-party supplier, who then ships the order to the customer.

This business model has existed for a long time but has gotten more popular and easier with all the online resources available. It is now really easy and cheap to create an online store, find suppliers from China and automate the fulfilling process so you don’t need to spend time on it.

Most dropshipping stores use Facebook or Google ads to get potential customers and this is what you would be investing most of your time learning and tweaking since the rest of the process can be automated.

If you have always wanted to create your own brand, this is a great way to test the market and get started. Once you have found a winning product, you can place a big order that will allow you to customize the products with your brand as well as have better profit margins.

How much can you make?

There is no limit to how much you can make with dropshipping once you find the right product but it does take some trial and error.

It is also estimated that the average drop shipping store makes 10%-15% profit so you need to get a lot of revenue in order to make significant earnings.

6. Start a Youtube channel

Starting a youtube channel is another type of content creation similar to starting a blog or becoming an influencer. It works by creating an audience that is interested in your content and advice so you can then monetize via ads, affiliate links or even selling your own products.

Youtube is a search engine like Google which means that your videos will be shown to people based on their searches and related videos they have watched.

This also means that the life span of a youtube video is way longer than that of other social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram. On Youtube, once you upload a video it can take a while for it to start showing in search results but once it does, it can make you money for months and even years so it is a great way to build truly passive income.

If you would like to try this side hustle but don’t feel like showing your face on camera, you can still create a video using stock images, whiteboards, animation videos, and anything you can think of. The only requirement is to create valuable content that helps a specific audience.

How much can you make?

Most YouTubers earn around $18 for every 1,000 ad views. That works out to around $3 to $5 per 1,000 video views. But that is only one of the ways Youtubers make money and not the most important.

Since YouTubers make money through affiliate links and sponsored content it is hard to estimate how much exactly they earn. What we do know is that the highest-paid Youtuber is a 9-year old that makes $29.5 million/year so that’s for inspiration.

Make sure to check out this article if you want to learn more about how much YouTubers make and how to monetize a Youtube channel.

7. Become a Copywriter

Copywriting is probably the most profitable service you can do as a side hustle or freelance gig. To be a good copywriter, you need to combine writing skills with marketing techniques and an understanding of behavioral psychology which is why it is a well-paid skill.

Copywriters are more than simply writers. They are responsible for writing sales materials that can make or break a campaign where companies then invest thousands, if not millions of dollars. Brands know the impact that a good (or bad) can have on their success so they are willing to pay good money to ensure they have the best copy available.

The great part about copywriting is that you can learn it on your own by practice alone. I actually went to college and took copywriting as part of my courses but I still feel like it was the practice that gave me most of my skills. In fact, some of the most sought after and highest-paid copywriters in the world never took a writing class in their life and clear six figures a year.

As a copywriter, you can choose what projects to work on based on your preference, experience, and time availability. This includes things like:

• Sales pages
• Email funnels
• Landing pages/ websites
• Blog posts/articles
• Social media posts
• White papers
• Case studies
• Press releases

Additionally, developing this skill will not only help you with your extra income but it will help with all your creative and entrepreneurial endeavors in the future.

If you want to learn more about copywriting this $1 book is one of the best resources that can help you get started in a matter of days.

How much can you make?

A new (trained) copywriter could make anywhere in the $25 to $35 per hour range, so your earnings as a copywriter will depend on how much you choose to put into it.

That being said, a relatively new part-time copywriter can make $300 from just ONE blog post and it’s completely possible for an experienced copywriter to make over six figures a year.

 The best part is that the more you do it, the more you’ll be able to make for the same services. Check out the table below to learn more about how much copywriters are making.

8. Sell Digital products

Selling digital products like printables, ebooks, courses o memberships is a very profitable side hustle since you only need to create them once and then you can sell them forever which results in high profits.

Digital products also present many benefits versus physical products since you don’t have to deal with inventory, don’t need a place to hold stock, don’t need to worry about shipping fees and logistics, and can also be scaled infinitely without worrying about cash flow.

If you’re new to selling things online, jumping into the digital product world might be a little intimidating but you can always start with small products like printables to get comfortable with the model, and then you can expand to more valuable products such as courses or memberships.

The possibilities are endless when it comes to the types of products you can sell but make sure to check out this article to learn about the 14 Best Digital Products To Sell As A Beginner & How To Succeed

Being successful at selling digital products doesn’t come down to just creating the right product but more to knowing how to sell it and automating the process so it generates truly passive income. If you want to learn about this from people doing multiple 9 figures, then you want to check out this challenge.

How much can you make?

There’s no limit to how much you can make selling digital products and your earning will also depend on whether you choose to list your products in marketplaces such as Etsy or Udemy or sell them on your own website which might take some extra work but is way more profitable.

People selling low-ticket items such as ebooks or journals can easily make an extra $1,000-$10,000/month and those selling high-value products such as courses and membership can make millions/years once they have optimized their product and sales funnel.

9. Start an marketing agency

I know this sounds more like a full-time job than a side hustle but bear with me. Thanks to technology, social media, and all the tools available nowadays, you can start your own marketing agency in your free time.

All you need to do is set up a social media account and a simple landing page with the services you want to offer. Then you can reach out to potential clients and once you get a contract you can outsource the job with a freelancer.

Some of the most common services you can offer include website development, social media management, email marketing, content creation, etc. If you have experience in another type of industry, this strategy also works for any niche where services are needed.

This can also be seen as the evolution of freelancing or what some freelancers do when they have much work that they can manage so end up hiring people to work for them.

Your main job, in this case, is to set up the online presence of the agency and deal with your clients. Eventually, you can hire people to work with you on a more permanent basis as you get more clients on a retainer contract and can guarantee a constant workflow.

How much can you make?

Since your income is not limited by your time, there is also no limit to how much you can make with this side hustle.

10. Flip Digital Real State

Similar to real-world real estate, digital assets like websites, domains, and social media accounts can be bought, sold, flipped, and rented. It’s also easy to compare and access digital real estate since everything is public on the internet and there are entire sites dedicated to mediating these transactions.

Compared to flipping or renting a physical real state, this side hustle has a very low entry barrier and you can even get started for free by creating and growing social media pages.

Keep in mind that only ‘theme’ accounts can be bought and sold since the content on Personal Instagram pages cannot be replicated by a new owner.

Theme pages, on the other hand, repost other users’ content so it doesn’t really matter who the owner is since people are following the page for content relating to the theme of the account.

You can check out pages like Swapd and FameSwap for trading social media accounts or Empire Flippers for websites. While you can also buy and sell digital real estate without any intermediary, this type of sites guarantees that no one gets scammed.

How much can you make?

As with other online businesses, there is no set amount of money you can make flipping and renting digital real estate.

If you rather don’t sell your accounts, you can also monetize them by doing promoted posts. in that case, Instagram accounts charge around $100 per post for every 100k followers so you can easily make $100/day by just posting an ad.

Halloun is a 23-year-old that runs the website TooFame. which sells accounts. He’s sold more than 1,200 pages and said he makes over $30,000 annually from the business. Thus far, he’s made a total of $120,000.

11. Be A Freelancing Virtual Assistant

Nowadays many small businesses and entrepreneurs work from their own homes or even from coffee shops so it doesn’t make sense for them to hire an in-person assistant. Yet they still need help with tasks like returning calls, scheduling their day, responding to emails, etc. so they prefer to hire a virtual assistant that works remotely on an hourly basis.

This is one of the easiest side hustle to get started with since there is a lot of demand for virtual assistants. It is also an easier one to learn when compared to graphic design or copywriting since most of the tasks are administrative. Here are some of the tasks you could do as a virtual assistant:

• Email and calendar management
• Social media strategy and account management
• Customer support
• Data entry and reporting
• Other based on your client’s niche

If you are very organized and enjoy interacting with other people, this can be a good way to make an extra income. You can also choose to work as many hours as you want and find clients that have a similar time requirement due to the varied nature of online businesses.

How much can you make?

Virtual assistants can earn $15-50+ per hour based on their experience and skills. It is not the most profitable gig but it can help you make some extra income especially if you have lots of free time and you’re very organized.

Abbey Ashley started her virtual assistant service as a way to stay home with her baby after her maternity leave was up. Within just a couple of months, she’d booked enough work to replace her old income and now teaches others how to do the same.

To learn more about becoming a VA, check out the free video training Abbey put together.

12. Teach English online

If you speak English, you already have a highly hireable money-making skill that can make you an extra income or even become your full-time job if you wish so.

Since 1 out of every 5 people on the planet speak or understand English, there’s a high demand for both children and adults to learn English in countries like China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Russia.

Some of the reasons why people want to learn English include applying to universities, improving their chances of getting a job or doing business, or simply upgrading their communication while traveling abroad.

All online English teaching companies have different requirements you must meet before accepting you as a remote teacher. The main one is being a native or near-native English speaker and Most of these jobs require you to be from USA, Canada since other English-speaking countries have different accents.

You must also possess a reliable internet connection, microphone, webcam, and quiet space for lessons. Some companies (not all) will also require you to have either have a bachelor’s degree or have a TEFL certificate. 

If you enjoy working with kids, this can be a fun and rewarding side hustle you can do from wherever you want.

How much can you make?

Your earning as an English teacher online will depend on how much time you are willing to dedicate to your students, which company you work for, and your previous experience.

Most companies pay between $15 – $25 USD per hour. Most companies have a lower base hourly rate and offer incentives like picking up classes at the last minute or over the weekend to bolster your hourly wage. 

Halloun is a 23-year-old that runs the website TooFame. which sells accounts. He’s sold more than 1,200 pages and said he makes over $30,000 annually from the business. Thus far, he’s made a total of $120,000.

13. Start An Amazon FBA Side Hustle

Amazon FBA stands for (fulfillment by Amazon) which means you get to sell your own products on Amazon’s platform while they take care of the fulfillment. This side hustle gives you access to Amazon’s massive audience of millions of active daily buyers and AND their world-class logistics and customer service.

A great advantage of this model is that you don’t need to hold the inventory or even live in the US. Most sellers order their products from wholesales in China, have them customized with their logo, and ship them straight to Amazon warehouses (after a proper remote inspection).

Like any other business, selling on Amazon will involve some expenses and fees on the seller’s part, but what makes Amazon FBA so appealing is that it simplifies that for sellers. 

You do need to have a starting budget in order to buy your first stock and enough cash flow to restock before you run out of inventory.

Also, your success as an Amazon seller depends on ranking your listing on the first page of results. This, at the same time, depends on getting sales and reviews so sellers do giveaways to improve their rankings and get reviews faster.

If you have the budget to invest comfortably, this can be a great side hustle that turns into a 6 or 7 figure income.

How much can you make?

According to JungleScout, most Amazon sellers make at least $1,000 per month in sales, and some super-sellers make upwards of $250,000 each month in sales.

Keep in mind that those are the revenue number but when it comes to profits, Amazon sellers also see relatively high-profit margins:

• More than two-thirds of sellers (68%) see profit margins higher than 10%.
• Better still, 36% see profit margins above 20%.
• On the other hand, 8% said their businesses are not yet profitable, and 8% did not know.

14. Be a Call Center Representative

This side hustle consists mostly of talking to customers over the phone or via online chat but you don’t need to sell them anything which is something that a lot of people avoid. Instead, you get to help clients with the doubts or questions they have related to a product or service.

Since companies have clients all over the world, you can easily find an agency that allows for a flexible schedule where you can set up your own hours as it best suits you. This is great if you have another job and are looking to make some extra money or if you have kids at home and rather work really early or really late.

This is also a great entry job if you are looking to get inside a new industry and it’ll allow you to learn essential abilities that you can transfer over to other positions like empathy, problem-solving skills, and time management.

If you consider yourself a “people person”, enjoy chatting (and have the patience to deal with unruly customers) this side hustle would be perfect for you.

How much can you make?

On average, call center workers make between $10 and $15 an hour depending on geography. If you are interested in making a career in this industry you can expect to make around $30 an hour as a Director Call Center Representative or $44 as a Call Center Director but those require full-time and in-house presence.

15. Be an Online Travel Agent

If you daydream about your next vacation and love planning your trips months in advance, then with this side hustle you can become a travel agent and do that for someone else while making money.

Travel agents make their income from commissions on any of the products or services they book. Additionally, consultation fees are becoming more common and people are happy to pay for the convenience of getting all their trips planned and booked for them.

You don’t need a specific employment background or qualifications to become a travel agent. All you need is to start building growing your client base and join referrals programs for travel services so you can make commissions from the bookings.

Once have a couple of happy clients, you can continue to grow through word of mouth and your customers will be happy to return to you every time they want to book a travel experience.

If you want to have a formal education you can also take classes with a company like The Travel Institute to earn your certification and learn about the basics of planning itineraries, new cultures, world geography, and experiences you can offer all over the world.

This is also a great side hustle if you’re hoping to get experience in a related industry like marketing or hospitality.

Since this is a commission-based side hustle, you can do it from home and at whatever time works best for you but you do need to be able to answer emails and be available during office hours since clients might want to reach out and need a prompt reply.

How much can you make?

Your earnings as a travel agent will depend greatly on how many clients you have and how much you dedicate to it.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) currently lists the average travel agent salary in 2019 as $44,690 with a range of $23,360 and $69,420 dividing the lower to upper 10% of travel agents.

Similarly, Host Agency review found that average income of $44,312 for hosted travel agents with 3+ years experience. 

17. Do Transcriptions

If you are a fast typer (around 120 words per minute) and have a computer with a good internet connection, you can start a side hustle transcribing audios and make money in your free time.

The work consists of listening to audio files and turning them into text documents. It doesn’t require a lot of money or training and you can do it during your free time.

Most common types of transcriptionists specialize in legal, medical, or general jobs. The latter includes anything that isn’t considered covered in legal or medical like podcasts, videos, interviews, etc.

While you don’t need any professional training, you can check out this free mini-course for general transcription training offered by TranscribeAnywhere that will teach you all the basics and answer any doubts you might have,

If this is a side hustle that you are interested in, you can consider investing in a foot pedal to easily rewind, fast forward, or pause an audio file.

Some popular sites where you can find transcriptions gigs as a freelancer are Scribie, TranscribeMe, Rev, and GoTranscript.

How much can you make?

Trasncriptionis are usually paid per hour of transcribed audio so your earning will depend on how fast you are. If a job pays you $45 per audio hour and it takes you 4 hours to transcribe, you make $11.25/hour. But, if it takes you 2 hours, you make $22.50/hour.

You will get faster with experience and have jobs that will be easier to complete than others.

Additionally, as you become more experienced and move on to private clients, you’ll be able to set your own rates.

18. Become a Translator

If you speak more than one language, becoming a translator is a great side hustle to make extra money with your language skills and can potentially turn into a career or business.

The only requirement, while obvious, is that you need to be fluent in two languages. Not kinda-get-it, but actually be, native-level fluent.

Translations services are on-demand in many sectors including, medical, legal, financial, and IT industries, among others.

While you can do translations for multiple industries, focusing on one specific area is potentially more lucrative than being a general translator. Additionally. if you have a background in any of these industries, you can get specialized projects that pay more

For the most part, you can get started as a freelance translator with no education or certification but if you want to pursue this side hustle ling-term, you might want to consider some certification that will give you more credibility and allow you to increase your rates like an American Translators Association certification.

Certain sectors like the legal or medical ones might also require special certifications so if you are looking to explore this side hustle as a potential career you can also take that into account.

How much can you make?

According to Payscale, the average hourly pay for a Translator is $20.48 with rates as high as $39 an hour for specialized translation and localization work.

Pay rates for translation jobs also vary based on the language pair, type of translation needed, and competition but this is an accurate average of what you can expect to make doing translations as a side hustle.

Want more Side Hustle Ideas? Check out the following video

Side Hustle for Women FAQ

How can I make $1000 a month from home?

All the side hustles mentioned on the list above can help you make an extra $1,000 a month but the best suited for you will depend on your unique situation and needs.

If you are in need of some extra money fast, the best side hustles would be those that pay per hour like teaching English, becoming a virtual assistant since they are easier to get and you can start making money soon.

On the other hand, if you are not in such a hurry and rather build a side hustle that can eventually make you some passive income, I’d advise choosing something like affiliate marketing or starting a blog that has no limits on how much you can make.

Which side hustle pays the most?

The best paying side huslte are those that you can scale and automate without being limited by an hourly pay.

Things like starting a blog, becoming a content creator, or selling digital products can offer you unlimited earnings and the possibility of delegating tasks so you can continue to earn more while working less.

Final Thoughts

Nowadays, there are dozens of side hustles that can be done 100% online from home or wherever you want.

The advantage of these side hustles is that you don’t need to spend time commuting and can do them on your own schedule so if you have a couple of free hours in the morning and a couple more at night, you can still make some extra cash and increase your income.

Whether you are looking to supplement your salary or want to build your financial freedom, there is a side hustle for you. Go get it!

According to Statista, the total amount spent on affiliate marketing in the U.S alone is expected to reach $8.2 billion by 2022. And some of the top affiliate marketers are making up to $2.1 million in passive income a year.

But don’t worry, the industry’s growth shows no sign of stopping and you can still get a piece of the money pie.

As a beginner, one of the best steps you can take is to learn from those who have already “made it” and try to follow their strategies.

So here’s a list of the top affiliate marketers you should learn from to succeed with affiliate marketing in 2021 (and beyond).

Top Affiliate Marketers

1. Pat Flynn

Pat Flynn is seen as one of the top affiliate marketers online. He’s an author, blogger, podcaster, YouTuber, and an all-around online business guy. He runs the popular Smart Passive Income blog and podcast.

In 2008, Pat created his first site and launched his online business after he was fired from his work.

As soon as his site took off, he got offered to sell an ebook on his site as an affiliate and made some commissions off it.

After working on his site for one and a half years, he earned his first big income through affiliate marketing (and other channels) in November 2008 which was up to $8,000.

In 2013, he grew his online income from $8,000 to more than $50,000.

Pat Flynn is open about what he’s doing and even provides full detail of his monthly affiliate income from 2008 till date.

His prolific leadership and business ethic are also worth mentioning. If you’re an affiliate marketer, Pat Flynn’s advice is that you need to be focused to know how best you can serve your audience with real value.

I’ll highly recommend you to check out his website and read more about his journey and success in affiliate marketing.

He has a blog where he talks not only about affiliate marketing but other online business ventures. 

Also, you could check out his podcast about online business and passive income with over 400 episodes.

2. David Sharpe

David Sharpe is a self-confessed ex-drug addict, now multiple 8-figure earner and the founder of Legendary Marketer, a company that now helps beginners to start their own affiliate marketing business from scratch using the same strategies that helped David make more than 200 million dollars in revenue online.

Leveraging the internet, Legendary Marketer aims to help anyone learn how to become successful entrepreneurs and online business owners from anywhere in the world.

They do this by giving you robust training courses and personalized virtual coaching from top experts so you can succeed with your online business.

David Sharpe also hosts powerful masterminds where you can learn from top entrepreneurs.

His signature training, the 15-day challenge has helped as helped countless aspiring digital marketers become successful 7 and 8 figure earners.

The training was free at the beginning but due to the overwhelming demand, they increased the price to $7 just to cover the costs and make sure only people who are truly interested and ready, sign up. You can check it out here.

3. Neil Patel

You might not want to consider Neil Patel as a conventional affiliate marketer, but the truth is he is close to it and has succeeded in affiliate marketing.

Neil Patel is a successful online entrepreneur and has been recognized by top organizations including the New York Times, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur Magazine, United Nations, and even the ex-US President Obama. 

Neil started his first company, called Crazy Egg a long time ago and wanted to sell it for $10 million but couldn’t get anyone interested and ready to pay for it.

Then, he sought to make Crazy Egg profitable as a business venture and eventually succeeded.

Neil Patel went on to build a new company called KISSmetrics (a company similar to Google Analytics) and has invested a lot in making this new venture a 100 million dollar company.

On Neil Patel’s site, you’ll learn how to be successful in affiliate marketing and access useful tools and resources for your journey as an affiliate marketer.

4. Zac Johnson

Zac Johnson is a top affiliate marketer and has been on this journey for over 22 years, with the Amazon Affiliate Program.

He built his brand, launched his blog, promoted affiliate products, and made affiliate product sales in 2007.

Over the years, Zac has consistently earned $100,000 every year without lifting a finger to create a product of his own.

He has worked on various aspects of online marketing including PPC marketing, email marketing, building niche sites, and creating digital products in the past 18 years.

As a piece of advice for affiliate marketer beginners, Zac says you should not give up in the face of failure. You should have thick skin and be ready to put in endless hours of work for no immediate return yet.

You can learn more about Zac Johnson through his blog.

5. Spencer Mecham

Spencer Mecham is the founder of Buildapreneur and one of the top leading affiliate marketers. He built his affiliate empire using mostly Youtube organic strategies and now teaches others how to do the same through his Affiliate Secrets which is now on the third version (Affiliate Secrets 3.0)

Spencer became widely popular after he became the first ClickFunnels affiliate to hit $1 million in affiliate commissions. As a result of this stride, he also became the first affiliate to join the ClickFunnels 2 Comma Club.

According to an interview by Access Wire, Spencer revealed that he started as an affiliate marketer in 2017 and over the years, has found massive success to be able to live the life he desires.

He says he has been able to build multiple, profitable (passive) sources of income to help him to retire early enough at the young age of 31.

On Buildapreneur, Spencer focuses on creating content and teaching about affiliate marketing, passive income sources, and how you can achieve the true financial freedom that you desire.

With these massive success results and learning resources, Spencer is undoubtedly one of the top names in the affiliate marketing world. Despite this, he remains accessible and down to earth and is active almost every day on his Facebook Group.

To learn more about Spencer, you can check his webinar where he shares how he went from broke and failing at different online businesses, to finally finding success with affiliate marketing

6. Shawn Collins

Since 1997, Shawn Collins has been in the marketing scene as a successful affiliate marketer with several active affiliate projects under his belt.

Initially, Shawn Collins worked in the publishing industry but wasn’t quite satisfied with his salary before he leaped into affiliate marketing.

After discovering the Amazon affiliate program in 1997, Shawn built his first affiliate site. This site was about things to do in New York City and was well monetized with Amazon.

Soon after then, he landed a job with a medical book company that had plans of starting their affiliate program to grow their business.

In 2003, Shawn Collins, along with Missy Ward, started Affiliate Summit on a cruise ship as an affiliate event company. And today, they have grown to be one of the biggest affiliate marketing event brands in the world. 

With over a decade of affiliate management, Shawn is a thought leader in affiliate marketing, the Co-Editor-in-Chief of FeedFront Magazine, and a Co-founder of Affiliate Summit, the leading global affiliate marketing conference, and tradeshow.

He authored several books including “Affiliate Manager Boot Camp: Recruiting, Educating”, “Retaining Affiliates, Extra Money Answer” and “Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants”. 

Plus, Shawn has been quoted and featured as a top affiliate marketer in several publications, including Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, Internet Retailer, the New York Times, and Wall Street Journal.

To learn from Shawn, you can find his daily posts about affiliate marketing on Affiliate Tips. 

And if you’re a fan of audio, you can listen to the weekly 7 Minutes in Affiliate Heaven podcast on GeekCast.FM in which Shawn is a co-host.

For young and beginner affiliate marketers, Shawns encourages you to follow your passion, find your voice, build a blog and start doing affiliate marketing.

You can read more about Shawn Collins on his blog.

7. Missy Ward

Missy Ward is a top affiliate marketer, a stay-at-home mom, and a philanthropist. 

She started her career as an affiliate marketer while managing affiliate conferences for Affiliate Force.

Missy has spent over a decade in various companies not until she co-founded the Affiliate Summit, one of the leading global affiliate marketing conferences and trade shows in 2003.

Affiliate Summit is a company that helps solo entrepreneurs and large businesses to profit with affiliate marketing through conferences, trade shows, magazines, and more.

Missy Ward strongly believes that affiliate marketing is not a get-rich-quick scheme. 

She advises that there’s no fool-proof way of doing affiliate marketing and that you should start on your own (with your blog or newsletter) without waiting for companies or PR agencies to reach out.

You can learn more about Missy Ward on her site where she talks about herself, Affiliate Summit, and her business partner, Shawn Collins.

8. Finch Sells

Finch Sells (or Martin Osborn, as his parents called him) is a high school dropout and successful online business owner who made a fortune from the internet. He is one of the top affiliate marketers to follow today.

At the young age of 12, Finch started posting on various forums online. And at 16, he had learned to create and monetize his forum.

His journey into the affiliate marketing industry began with Clickbank, where he started selling learning kits.

Not quite long after then, Finch discovered CPA marketing, went into it, and skyrocketed his earnings.

Today, Finch runs his own company called Finch Media Ltd and he works with various clients and brands to build all kinds of affiliate campaigns and improve their conversion funnels.

He also runs his blog for over 8 years where he details his personal life, work, affiliate marketing and much more.

To be successful, Finch advises affiliate marketers to take risks, run affiliate campaigns, build sites, and just try enough things on their own.

To learn more about Finch Sells’s successes and follow his private and professional life, check out his blog.

9. Mark Ling

Mark Ling is a digital marketing expert, coach, affiliate marketer, and product developer.

He has been in the affiliate marketing game for over 20 years and made hundreds of millions in sales from affiliate marketing, becoming the best-selling ClickBank affiliate several times.

From his success with ClickBank, Mark Ling partnered with Simon Slade to start Affilorama.

Affilorama is an affiliate training program where you can learn how to earn income online through affiliate marketing (without having to set up a physical store).

In Affilorama, you get three offers to help you earn money online:

• Pathway to Passive (creating affiliate sites for passive income)

• AffiloTools (tools to track your affiliate site most important metrics and get reports)

• AffiloJetpack (resources you’ll need for marketing your affiliate offers)

And in 2019, Mark created an affiliate marketing course called Overnight Freedom.

He also released another one called Healthy Commissions in 2020. Healthy Commissions is focused on teaching you how to scale lucrative affiliate marketing businesses, leveraging the power of paid traffic.

The course will teach you how to promote and earn commissions on CPA, low ticket, recurring and high ticket affiliate products.

10. Doug Cunnington

Doug Cunnington is an online marketing consultant, project management professional, affiliate marketer and he loves building niche sites for profit.

He started his digital career by building Amazon Associate niche sites for himself and being successful at it.

Then, he went on to start the Niche Site Project to help others create profitable niche sites.

Before he attained success with niche sites, Doug has been a software engineer, a business consultant, software tester, and project manager.

He was working a 9 – 5 job in management consulting previously which he didn’t quite enjoy.

After being laid off in 2015, Doug built niche sites to earn a full-time income from affiliate marketing.

On his blog, Doug Cunnington writes on SEO, productivity, project management, and niche sites. He has been featured on various publications and blogs such as Niche Pursuits, Ahrefs, Empire Flippers, Side Hustle Nation, and more.

11. Darren Rowse

When it comes to blogging, Problogger is well-known in that space. Darren Rowse, who is the person behind Problogger, is an inspirational personality in the blogging and affiliate marketing industry.

He started his blogging career in 2002 and launched Problogger which was his main shot to fame in 2004.

Problogger is a widely popular site for bloggers and affiliate marketers to learn how to make profits online with various marketing strategies.

The blog is reported to have over 7,000 tutorials and articles with over 30,000 unique blog visitors per day.

Darren Rowse also runs the successful Digital Photography School site, which is his second blog.

He has been successful as an affiliate marketer for a long time and has earned a ton of money from promoting mainly Amazon products on his blogs.

Over the years, he has risen to become one of the few authority figures in the world of blogging and a top affiliate marketer worth following and learning from.

12. John Chow

Popularly regarded as the original Dot Com Mogul, John Chow is an author, blogger, affiliate marketer, speaker, and online entrepreneur.

He went into the blogging scene a long time ago and built his blog from zero to over $40,000 per month in just two years (while working only 2 hours a day). 

Today, John runs one of the biggest blogs in the world, raking in over 200,000 active daily blog readers.

That’s not all. He also achieved massive success as an affiliate marketer (with his blog) and was awarded “Best Marketing Affiliate Blog” at the 2012 Affiliate Marketing Awards.

John Chow is the author of several books including “Blogging Secrets and Make Money Online: Roadmap of a Dot Com Mogul”, which peaked to #1 on Amazon during the first week of its release.

He has been featured in a ton of media publications like the New York Times, BC Business Magazine, Vancouver Sun, Entrepreneur Magazine, the Globe and Mail, and much more.

Also, he is the subject of a social media and blogging documentary for CBC television and has appeared on various radio and television shows, including The Lab with Leo Laporte and Global Morning News.

John Chow’s site is ranked #16 on the AdAge Power 150 list and #1 in the list of the Top 50 Canadian Internet Marketing blogs.

He is the founder and CEO of TTZ Media, Inc. and you can learn more about him on his blog.

13. Robby Blanchard

Robby Blanchard is a top ClickBank affiliate marketer and the creator of Commission Hero.

He grew up in a small town in Massachusetts and after graduating from Fitchburg State College, Robby opened a gym as a fitness enthusiast.

For a while, he struggled to get customers for his gym while using the “build it and they will come” ideology. 

Later on, Robby took a serious interest in online marketing, started learning Facebook ads and using them to grow his gym business.

With that strategy, he got massive results that allowed him to grow his gym business into one of the most profitable in the country.

Owing to the success of his gym business with online marketing, Robby continued to learn more effective strategies and delved into affiliate marketing.

He then started promoting ClickBank products, made a ton of commissions, and even dominated affiliate contests with Facebook ads.

Now he runs Blanchard Media to help other online business owners in various industries execute innovative ad strategies to scale their traffic and sales.

To help others earn with affiliate marketing, he created the Commission Hero course. 

This course details a simple 3-Step system to generate thousands of dollars every day online in the comfort of your home.

Robby Blanchard has been featured in top media outlets such as Entrepreneur Magazine, FOX, and The Wall Street Journal.

And you can follow him and learn from him via his site.

14. Jacob Caris

Jacob started building his online business empire in 2017 and has grown to be a 7-figure affiliate marketer.

He specializes in three online marketing models which include: high ticket affiliate marketing, premium-priced information marketing and coaching (& consulting).

Jacob is a multi-award-winning super affiliate worth following. He has helped hundreds of other affiliates achieve massive success with his flagship program, The Super Affiliate Accelerator.

The Super Affiliate Accelerator is a private online mastermind & training program that essentially teaches you how to build a profitable 6-figure online business, leveraging high ticket affiliate marketing.

As someone who has successfully built a 7-figure business leveraging tried & true practices, Jacob works with clients in various industries to effectively execute proven marketing strategies and grow their online businesses.

And if you’re a coach or consultant, you could work with Jacob and learn little-known strategies to charge high prices. 

You can follow Jacob Caris and read more about him via his blog or join his Facebook group.

15. Andrew Payne 

Andrew Payne is an affiliate with great expertise in paid and mobile ads. He originally entered the affiliate industry in 2007 and got into Adwords and performance marketing.

After several years of being a full-time affiliate, he founded a digital agency that helped B2B companies with their to generate leads and sales.

Later,iIn mid-2016, Andrew founded MobRev Media as a performance affiliate company focused on mobile, and more specifically pop and push traffic,

Andrew Payne and his team focus on things like antivirus, gaming offers, sometimes adult and glamour kind of offers, and some Sweepstakes campaigns as well.

His traffic has gone from zero to 7 figures. Payne even presented his biggest profit producing insights onstage at Affiliate World Europe 2019. 

According to Andrew, the primary goal of an affiliate marketer should be to collect information that helps them determine how you can make your campaign profitable.

If you are interested in using ads, esoecially mobile and push notification you can find him more insights from Andrew on his affiliate blog, AffiliateSuccess.com.

Luke Kling

Luke Kling is the PeerFly Affiliate Manager & Director of Marketing, Developer, and blogger.

He has been in the affiliate marketing game for over 7 years now, and started with XY7 (an affiliate network) where he worked as an affiliate manager while still in high school. He worked until his freshmen year of college when he decided to quit in order to focus more on school activities.

However, during his sophomore year of college, Luke realized he wouldn’t be able to pay his rent and school unless he increased his student loan or get a job. As increasing his loan was quite an unpleasant choice, he decided to go back to working for XY7 as affiliate manager.

He later joined Peerfly, one of the most successful networks in the industry. Luke claims to be working with 35,000+ people on the Peerfly network and help them monetize their traffic and helping them to make money online.

Main Blog: LukeKling.com

Why You Should Do Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing has seen an increasing trend over the years.

And with each day passing, a lot more people are becoming interested In promoting other products as an affiliate on the internet.

It’s a win-win, for both advertisers and affiliates as well. You, as the affiliate, sell products and earn commissions as a reward for your work.

While the advertiser, on the other hand, makes sales for his products easily without doing much active work.

Here’s are some reasons why I think you should get involved in affiliate marketing:

1. Work from anywhere in the world

As an affiliate marketer, you get to work remotely, from anywhere in the world. And you also decide when and where to work, becoming a full-fledged “digital nomad”.

There’s utmost freedom of time and location when you’re doing affiliate marketing.

It’s up to you to choose how, when and where to work. Affiliate marketing is flexible.

You don’t have a boss whom you’re reporting to and you’re your employer.

You can work from the comfort of your house and at night. All you need to work is a proper workspace and wifi connection.

2. Low barrier to entry 

Getting started as an affiliate is easy. You only need to find the right affiliate programs, join the program and promote their products to make money.

It’s a much easier model to take part in as you are not involved in the product’s creation or delivery point.

3. It’s cheap to get started 

And you also don’t need a huge chunk of money to start an affiliate marketing business.

Most affiliate programs that you’ll want to join are free of charge to register.

The only cost you’ll probably incur will be on your advertising methods (if you’re going to focus on paid ads).

4. You don’t need to create a product (or service)

As an affiliate marketer, you don’t have to go through the hassle of creating a product or service. The product you’re promoting will be created by the affiliate program. 

So you have less active work to do on the product to make money.

5. Passive income opportunity 

You can turn affiliate marketing into a real business venture that generates passive income for you.

If you desire to earn money while you sleep, affiliate marketing is a route to achieve that.

There are recurring affiliate programs that continually pay you money every month, for as long as your referrals stick with them. 

So you need to be consistent to get substantial income from affiliate marketing without having to do a lot of active work.

6. Your earnings are unlimited 

As an affiliate marketer, your earning potential is unlimited. You can go from earning hundreds of dollars to earning millions in affiliate revenue.

It’s all up to you to determine the amount you want to earn. As long as you’re ready to put in the work that’s needed to get to the desired income summit.

Top Affiliate Marketers FAQ

How much does the average affiliate marketer make?

Calculating how much affiliate marketers make on average is like trying to figure out the same for business owners. The income potential is unlimited and there are lots of factors that influence it like experience, time in the industry, and individual skills.

According to PayScale, the average income for affiliate marketers is $51,217. The bottom 10% of affiliate marketers making $37,000, and the top 10% making $71,000.

Glassdoor‘s statistic for affiliate marketers income puts potential annual earnings at $65,800, with the range between $42,000 at the low end, and $83,000 at the top end.

Finally, ZipRecruiter offers the highest forecast for affiliate marketers revenue at $154,700 a year, with a monthly income of $12,892, and a weekly average income of $2,975.

Regardless of which stats you go with, the income for affiliate marketers is promising even at the low end.

Is affiliate marketing still profitable 2020?

Considering that Affiliate Marketing is part of the sales strategies of 85% of companies, asking this question is like asking if businesses are still working. So, as long as we live in a capitalist system yes, affiliate marketing is still profitable.

A lot of people like to say it is “saturated” and they were probably said it 10 years ago and will keep saying it 10 years from now. In the meantime, there are new affiliates getting started and making money every day. So in my experience, that is just an excuse lazy people use to not put in the work.