Why Every Student Should Have an Affiliate Blog
If you are a student who is currently studying for any sort of marketing-related degree, you’d do well to try and get ahead of your peers by taking part in extra-curricular activities.
There are many ways to do this, and one of those is to set up an affiliate marketing website and get real-life experience while you study for your degree.
In this post, I’ll be running through why I think every student should have an affiliate blog.
Low Investment
Now, we all know that we wouldn’t survive without that lucrative student loan of ours…but we’re not exactly rolling in it, are we? Sites like SavetheStudent wouldn’t exist if we were flush!
Low investment options are all we really have right now, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing? There’s not really a way for it to fail, but even if it does all you’ve lost is a night out — we all know there’ll be another one down the line.
All it takes is around £60.
That covers your hosting, your WordPress subscription for the year (which is generally cheaper than it’ll be for the second), and a domain name.
As soon as the student loan comes in, or when you’ve got a bit of money from a part-time job if you have one, put the takeaway or treats aside and take a chance on yourself. If you pick it all up quickly, you could soon make that back and then you’re in the realm of making a profit.
Since you won’t be selling products yourself and will instead be focused on curating content that serves the audience members of your niche, linking them to products by sellers, you haven’t got to pay for any inventory, shipping fees, and finding somewhere to store everything.
Don’t have a computer or a laptop? Not a problem.
There’s a free library for you to use provided by the university, and the computers there are nothing to turn your nose up at. For what you want to do — these workstations will work perfectly because that’s pretty much what they were designed to handle; browsing websites, word processing, and research.
Canva is a free tool that is very useful for making infographics, and visual content for any social media platform to supplement your posts with. There’s also a premium version that has paid-for stock images, hundreds of new elements to use, etc. But you may even have Photoshop on the library computers depending on the university you’re with, and if not you can download GIMP for free on Windows/ Mac. So even the visual content tools you’ll need are free.
Pre-Established Successful Industry
Affiliate marketing is already long established as a very successful industry, meaning that so long as you follow the tried-and-tested model that has been working for almost two decades, and have the determination to see it through until the model works for you, you’re bound to earn some money eventually.
It is worth mentioning that while the model in its foundations' works, the exact processes behind this model changes all the time — doing something that worked five or ten years ago likely won’t work today.
You need to stay on top of your game and ensure you keep up with the latest development for the model to work.
Above is the total amount spent in the last five years on affiliate marketing websites as a whole. I believe 2020 is just a projected amount, but even still — the numbers don’t lie. Affiliate marketing picks up year after year, and while minor aspects of the process may change; Google’s algorithms, the social medias that are prevalent at the time, etc, the fact that affiliate marketing is still the same business model it has always been means this is way more stable than most business ideas you’re likely to have at this current point in time.
Everyone has turned to shopping online even more so since the COVID pandemic due to the high street being closed for months, meaning affiliate marketers have benefitted. This demonstrates affiliate marketers' antifragility as a whole.
Transferable Skills
The age-old adage ‘practice makes perfect’ couldn’t be truer than for affiliate marketing. It’s unlikely you’ll see any benefit from it for at least six-twelve months, unless you’re super committed and churning out high-quality content like it’s no one’s business (pro tip: always use the Skyscraper Technique whenever writing a post).
Dropping lucky with backlinks or a social media shoutout from a big account helps too.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to succeed before then, but that shouldn’t be your focus — the audience, and developing your skills should be whilst building a coherent body of work. Nobody wants to browse a website or blog that only has five articles.
I’ll be completely honest with you, I haven’t earned a single penny from my niche blog yet. None, nada, zilch!
Do you know what I have earned?
Experience and transferable skills that have made me useful to just about any website or company that operates on providing content to its audience, whether that be simple content writing or SEO writing. And that HAS led to me earning money through clients I work with. Eventually, when my blog does earn money, that’s more than one stream of income, the blog work will already be done — making it passive income (but more on that in just a tick). And this is my first time through, so the second or third niche site I do will likely grow a lot quicker since I’ll be more knowledgeable off-the-bat on all the different elements that go into this than I was the first time around.
Through having your own website, you will learn how to do the following:
- Content/ SEO/ possibly even technical (depending on the niche) writing
- Editing
- Keyword research
- Competitive analysis
- Backlink building
- Social media marketing
- Social media management
- Graphic design
- Project management
- Time management
- Organizational skills
- Digital social/ networking skills
Not only that, but you will also have a concrete view of how the internet on the whole works and has worked ever since you first used it.
And those transferable skills will benefit you for your entire career — which is vastly more important than short-term monetary gain.
Passive Income
Focusing on the long-term is the key here — and eventually, all that work will pay off. When you’re working a part-time or even full-time job, you know your hours, and you know how much you’ll make within a day. There are benefits to that, but I don’t need to go into them as chances are if you have a job you know why you do it. But the benefits of passive income through affiliate marketing are higher in my opinion, because the potential ROI is uncapped, unlike the traditional job — where the only way to earn more money than you expect in a week is by doing overtime.
So picture this — you’ve published 100–200, maybe even 300 posts. It’s taken you maybe a year to a year and a half. You’ve either made money at that point or you’re just making consistent traffic. You can focus on social media promotion, using automated software such as HootSuite, Buffer, SproutSocial, etc. If you’re earning enough maybe you can even outsource to a freelance writer (I call dibs!) to take care of keeping up with regular, new content while you work on the second website.
Eventually, all of this is going to compound. All you have to handle is maintenance, keeping up to date with SEO and digital marketing, making sure the website is ticking over nicely and consistent but less regular new posts for that first site, while you build a second one up from scratch the same way. It will take less time on your second site because you’ve got all of those useful transferable skills ingrained into you already. When you’ve got a few sites all making passive income, even if it’s only £50–80 a month for each, that already covers what you would get from a part-time job, for work you’ve already done! Meanwhile, you can then learn new skills — such as writing courses, building websites, app development, whatever you want. And eventually — you’re going to have so many different income streams that you’re a full-fledged entrepreneur, making a large amount of money for stuff you’ve done in bed on a Saturday morning in your pajamas.
I’ve effectively just told you my 5-year plan — but that’s a lot, isn’t it? Imagine knowing you can do all of those things, and it only took you five or less years to get that all under your belt. You’ll be in your early 20s (unless you’re a mature student in which case your late 20s, no shame in that — I started uni at 22) and you’ll be vastly more employable than over half of the fellow marketing graduates in your age range because you will have experience and conviction in your ideas. It’ll even likely make much more confident when being interviewed. You may even be so successful already at that point that you don’t even need to be employable — you are instead the employer of your own business!
There are still decades after that to learn even more skills and diversify your income streams further. Remember — the two biggest rules of wealth are this: have more than one stream of income, and never increase your monthly expenditures simply because you’re starting to earn more money.
Purposeful Work
We are creatures driven by purpose and socializing. Having an affiliate blog combines both of those intrinsic, deep-seated needs. As I covered in What Made you Choose Marketing, this industry matters to me because of the connection with people that it encourages. An affiliate blog is really, at its core, a microcosm of what marketing is as a whole: serving people.
At the risk of going off on a tangent, before getting back to college and then university, I worked in factory jobs — clocking in at 7:30 am every morning being screamed at to turn on my machine and get packing fruit and nuts. All of that, just to hit some unrealistic count demanded that day by the boss no one ever saw come down to the production lines because he never ‘graced’ us with his presence. Unless of course, he had some shouting to do.
There’s nothing wrong with factory jobs to make ends meet, but if you’re in university I’ll bet my life you’re aiming for more. I can’t express well enough how happier I am with life doing rewarding work like this. Every morning I wake up and do what I love to do: write, solve problems, and help people. You can’t put a price on that. Most of the content I do at the moment is unpaid — and it’s still worth it.
Tips
These are tips that I have learned myself through trial and error of my own journey with affiliate marketing.
- Do not over-plan — don’t waste your time on a ‘list of blog posts’, and timelines, and all the rest of it. Just start doing! You want to build up the connections in your brain of going from ‘I will write this post’ to ‘This post is the best out there on the topic, it’s published, and it’s promoted’ for the first few months
- Research — Right at the start, research the niche, get a spreadsheet of competitors and keywords, find 2–3 successful affiliate marketers who specifically create content on helping people get started (for example, mine are Miles Beckler, Neil Patel, and Mazepress) & then work out how you’re going to make their advice work for you
- Ignore impostor syndrome — 95 % of your competitors are not experts on the niche, contrary to how it seems. They simply started this process years before you, and they’ve used the Skyscraper Technique to make it appear like they’re experts. Now it’s your turn.
- Don’t rely on motivation — You will lose motivation. This is when perseverance comes into play. Pick a niche that you can churn out posts for even when you have a week or two of not feeling it. Do not make my mistake of letting your website slip by for 2–3 months with zero content like I did, it WILL set you back
- Baby steps — Do not try to tackle every single aspect of this role at once. Tackle the keyword research & writing processes first, then the social media and backlink building, take it all slowly. Content is king, SEO is the Queen. But if your King isn’t there — it’s checkmate on your website.
Resources
This post was not designed to show you how to do it, just convince you that you need to. The following video and two articles are perfectly great resources for showing you how to become an affiliate marketer.
Miles Beckler — Affiliate Marketing in 2020
Mazepress — How to Start a Blog — Ultimate Blogging Guide for 2020
Neil Patel — Affiliate Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide
Conclusion
I sincerely hope you’ve taken something from this and will remain open-minded about beginning your own affiliate marketing journey soon. Just remember that your university course is the priority — you’re paying out your backside for it so treat the investment in yourself seriously.
Last little tidbit — when you write an essay for a module and have to keep linking it back to the question you’re answering? SEO writing is strikingly similar to that — chances are you’re more prepared to try this out than you think.
You can find me personally on Twitter as well as LinkedIn. I’m always open to discussions with fellow students.
