Say you’re someone who, because of the current pandemic, lost their job. You’re desperately looking for another full-time job–among so many others–while trying to come up with ways to earn money online as a possible alternate source of income in the meantime.

a woman jumping from mountain to mountain with "JOB" on top of the mountain she's jumping toward, with a deep chasm beneath her
Image by Igor Link from Pixabay
Or say you’re a married someone who stays at home and cares for kids, began blogging a few years ago, have developed somewhat of a following, and are now looking for a way to monetize your website traffic beyond little Google ads.

Or maybe you’ve got a passion for something–like books, say–and have been blogging and social-media posting about it for a few years or so, and built a small community of friends and followers around you, need a small source of income to cover the basic expenses of maintaining that blog and providing value to your readers, and maybe possibly enough income from it that you could make it a full-time job, if you wanted.

Affiliate marketing could help all of you.

What is Affiliate Marketing?
In its simplest form, it’s when a company pays someone not directly employed by them a small commission when that someone sends them someone else who buys their product. In the case of book blogging, the affiliate is the book blogger posting special links to books in their blog or social posts. Those links are set up so that if you, the potential buyer of said book, actually buys the book, the company–Amazon, Barnes & Noble, ThriftBooks, etc.–can tell that the book blogger sent them to their site, and rewards them with that commission.

In my case, I wouldn’t be able to find some of the book deals I find for you without the access I have to a couple of big affiliate marketing databases that book-related businesses and sites around the world help to populate with their deals. If I found a book deal for you through one of those databases, I’ll tell you, like I did here. It doesn’t affect the price you pay for the book at all; it just gives me a little bit of money. That money enables me to cover the basic expenses of running this blog–hosting, back-end technical maintenance, fees, etc.

I’ve spent a lot of time studying affiliate marketing (because that’s what I do, I research), and have put together a list of tips from various sources. While this list is far from complete, and there’s plenty of advice to be had from lots of free sources on the Internet, these tips are from two books by people who have successful experience affiliate marketing:

Affiliate Marketing: Learn How to Make $10,000 Each Month on Autopilot by Michael Ezeanaka, and
Book title: Affiliate Marketing by Michael Ezeanaka
The Power of Passive Income by Nightingale-Conant, a staff member of Entrepreneurship Media
Book title: The Power of Passive Income, by Nightingale-Conant
By way of review of those books, let me share with you, then, some of the tips those two books had in common:


Tip #1: Have a website
It may seem self-evident that that’s where you need to start, maybe with a free WordPress blog or something like that. These days, though, some people are questioning whether that’s necessary with the continued rise in popularity of various social media platforms. You might have heard, for instance, of someone who makes a pretty penny just vlogging on YouTube or posting pretty pictures on Instagram. Some special people don’t need their own site; most of us common people, however, do. It’s your hub, your own little corner of the internet, and you can run it how you like.

the hub of a bicycle wheel
Image by PixelAnarchy from Pixabay
Corporate marketers who help bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for their companies using blogs, websites, and various social media channels strategically and in concert with one another would argue that it’s not a one-or-the-other thing, even on the smaller scale of an individual. You should use them all for different things, with a central goal and website in mind.

Nightingale-Conant’s book advises getting a website and accounts that are easy, with the “lowest barrier to entry.” This fits with their model of earning as much income as possible with as little effort as possible. While I don’t agree with their assertion that affiliate marketing can ever be truly effortless–because it takes a lot of work to do it right, at least in my experience–I definitely agree that it’s pretty easy to get started in.

Tip #2: Choose the Right Niche
If you’re just starting out in affiliate marketing, Ezeanaka and Nightingale-Conant advise you to focus on a niche that aligns with something you’re passionate about, that has been done profitably by others, and that takes into account your strengths and weaknesses, skills and talents, and any lack thereof. That’s why I blog about books, as opposed to fashion. Much as I wish I was a model and fashion expert, I’m not, but I do know my way around books, having read them for decades, written a few of my own, gone to a zillion conferences to learn how to write and traditionally publish them, edited several published and unpublished books, and reviewed them for more than four years.

So if you haven’t had an honest talk with yourself about what you really like to do, how much time you have to devote to blogging and affiliate marketing and all that comes with it, do it now. If it’s not easy for you to define what you’re passionate about, make a list of things you like and maybe could really like. Start blogging from a place of those things, since you already have some expertise in and love for them. People can tell if you’re not passionate about what you blog about, and that will mean low numbers, which don’t appeal to companies looking for successful affiliates.

a young woman thinking
Image by Jacquelynne Kosmicki from Pixabay
Defining your niche also means you focus on one or two closely related things, like books and writing. Companies looking for affiliates are looking for people who have strong connections with a targeted audience, the kind they can’t connect with just by running a few ads on television.

Tip #3: Develop or Have Good Sources of Organic Traffic
“Organic traffic?” you say. “What’s that? Cars grown without pesticides?” Nope. In the online world, organic traffic is the visits you get to your website or views you get of your social media and other online posts. It’s traffic that came to you naturally, as opposed to “artificially,” or through paid postings. Companies like affiliates with a lot of natural traffic, at least when they’re starting out or small, because that’s really hard for them to get.

a model VW beetle car in a bed of grass
Image by Pexels from Pixabay
When someone recommends a product–like a book–authentically, having used it or read it and liked it, they’re more likely to be able to recommend it in the contexts of other people’s needs. So, if a friend posts about their high stress levels on Facebook, for instance, an affiliate blogger can suggest books that have helped them handle stress and provide an affiliate link. It’s a win-win-win because the friend gets a recommendation from someone they trust for something that can help them, the blogger friend gets a small percentage of the purchase price, and the seller gets the purchase. That’s organic traffic at its finest.

Organic traffic can also include traffic that comes from such conversations and postings in other online forums (e.g., Quora), niche online communities (e.g., Goodreads book clubs), and offline traffic sources.

Tip #4: Join a Good Affiliate Program
Becoming an affiliate–especially a successful one–means not waiting for opportunities to come to you, but actively looking for and applying to good affiliate programs. There’s a lot that can go into the quality of a good affiliate program, and neither Ezeanaka’s nor Nightingale and Conant’s book delve too deeply into that more advanced subject, but suffice it to say that you want an affiliate program that:

has multiple companies that carry products that your audience would be interested in
and you don’t want a program that:

charges you to join, or
asks you to sign up other affiliates
Both books provide good lists of established affiliate programs to check out. I recommend CJ Affiliate because it’s relatively easy to use, has a good amount of book-related companies offering good prices, and offers a decent return.

Tip #5: Produce Quality Content
The more you get into blogging, the more you realize that actually gaining any type of a good following and/or earning any amount of money means more than just writing good blog posts. It also means knowing your audience well and writing to their needs. There is so much I could say on that topic alone, but I’ll save that for another blog post. To know your audience well, you’ve got to have at least a basic understanding of Google Analytics so that you can see their demographics and where they’re coming from. Nightingale and Conant would call those “objective measures.”

a printout of a website's analytics (charts and graphs)
Image by Pexels from Pixabay
It also really helps to have a good understanding of more “subjective measures,” like what they’re searching for (i.e., the keywords they’re using), what hashtags they tend to use, etc. This type of knowledge can be gained from sites like HubSpot and UberSuggest, to name a few.

Writing good content, though, means not just providing value to your target audience; it also means providing the kind of content that other related, more well-known and trusted sites like and want to link to. In book blogging, for instance, if I can get a big book publisher or author to link to one of my reviews, that makes me look better in Google’s eyes. Showing up in your target audience’s search results is literally a virtual, systematic popularity contest because it’s driven, in part, by how many other sites link back to yours.

Tip #6: Produce Quality Content Regularly and Frequently
Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, you can’t do all of the above, just write one or two good, valuable blog posts, and expect the affiliate income to just start rolling in. You also need to post consistently and predictably so that you always have plenty of new content for Google to look at and online searchers to find. The more you post on your blog, the easier it is for Google to “see” you and then show you in people’s search results. The frequency and consistency with which you post is up to you and what, ultimately, works for your schedule, but I’ve found that you’ve got to do at least one blog post a week, and several social media posts.

Tip #7: Consider Using Paid Methods to Attract Traffic, Once You’re an Affiliate
Both affiliate marketing books mentioned above recommend using paid methods like Facebook ads, etc. to increase your traffic, especially once you’ve been accepted by a few affiliate programs and tapped most of your organic traffic sources. Like all of the other tips here, books could be written just on this subject alone (and there are, in fact, whole online courses), but suffice it to say here that you want to wait to do that until you’re fairly educated in the blogging, influencing, and affiliate marketing arenas.

Tip #8: Include Different Types of Media in Your Blog and Social Media Posts
I’ve definitely found that the more types of media–images, videos, audio clips, infographics, etc.–I can include in my posts, the better. This is for a variety of reasons:

People don’t like big blocks of text (surprise, surprise). They like information to be presented to them in nice little tidbits and visuals that they can scan easily to see if there’s anything of value in them.
You can add alt-text, or back-end text that describes the visuals to someone who is sight-impaired, that helps your posts be more SEO-friendly.
If you find a video relevant to what you’re posting about, for example, and you embed it in your blog post or share it, you’ve got to make sure to link back to them to correctly attribute for legal purposes. (See below) Linking, attributing, or tagging sources in social media makes them aware that you’re using their video, and if they like what you’re posting, they might either link back to you, or, ideally, contact you in the future for possible partnerships.

The more images I include in my book blog post, the wider variety of social media posts I can make, especially for Pinterest. Again, that’s a whole other post (sorry!).
Speaking of social media…

Tip #9: Share Your Content in the Relevant Hot Spots
Say you’ve done all of the above–written great blog posts frequently and consistently, become an affiliate with several programs, and done your research–but you’re still not getting the kind of organic traffic you want, the kind that the companies whose products you’re recommending want. You may not be sharing your content in the right places or in the right ways. Every time you publish a blog post, you need to tell people about it.

You can send out emails telling people about this great book you read, or, as mentioned previously, recommend books that you think people will like in social media conversations, in online forums, etc. Whatever you do, don’t forget to do it.

Tip #10: Work Hard and Be Patient
If there’s any complaint I had about either Affiliate Marketing: Learn How to Make $10,000 Each Month on Autopilot by Michael Ezeanaka, or The Power of Passive Income by Nightingale-Conant (besides the fact that we never get Nightingale-Conant’s first name, which I think is odd), it’s that neither of them capture the amount of work that blogging and influencing and affiliate marketing really is. I do recommend reading both of them because they have a lot of really good information, but I recommend Ezeanaka’s book over the other because it has more in-depth information through which you can better grasp the fact that affiliate marketing isn’t automatic or truly passive income. Nightingale and Conant even admit, within the pages of their book on passive income, that “there’s actually no such thing as purely passive income.”

That, if anything, is my main complaint about Nightingale-Conant’s Passive Income book. They write a whole book based on the concept that earning a good income doesn’t necessarily require a lot of work (talking about not just affiliate marketing, but also real estate and stock market investing, etc.), but really, all forms of income will require some work at some point.

So, you’ve got to do that work to get income from blogging and influencing; there are no two ways around it. But, returning back to tip two, if you’re doing it around something you’re passionate about–like books–it doesn’t seem so much work as a “different kind of fun.”

What’s the Deal, Then?
As you know, I find the best deals for you on the books I recommend, and I found a really good deal on one of these books! It is:

I didn’t really enjoy this book. It doesn’t really give any new ideas or solutions for debt- seems to reiterate what all other authors say about the same topic.

There are many books on passive income and why not? The thought of leaning back and having money coming in automatically, consistently, without much or any effort, is an enticing thought.
This book, however, tells us that much of this is a myth. Passive income doesn't come by without effort, or maintenance. In order to have passive income, you need to prepare well, set yourself up with systems that work, and focus on what you are doing well or understand. If you stray too far outside these parameters, you can easily end up getting burned or without money.
This book discusses areas which several topics which are not found in other books of this nature. One of them is MLM., Multi-Level-Marketing, franchises, real estate (covering items I haven't seen in other books), life insurance and several other things.
Some of the topics are covered in more depth than others but as a starter, it opens your curiosity to explore further into these topics.
Overall, it is a good book that covers the subject rather well, but it is probably not the final volume on this topic.

I really liked the setup and premise of this book. Very insightful. Probably common sense knowledge which could be obtained by a couple of google searches, but I liked the fact that it was all condensed into one book. The author seemed very knowledgeable and the steps/chapters were very well thought out. Now I just need to get started!

Thank you, NetGalley, for the ARC!

Very interesting read, and well loaded with information. A total of 13 chapters make the whole of this book, and although the main topic is that of passive income, just as the title would suggest, you can also find information on getting out of debt, managing your income, the power of interest, the stock market, and way more.

With so much information diversity, I feel that some examples will not apply to you, or might not interest you. For example, the section on investing in stocks wasn't really that interesting to me, yet I still read it to be able to learn something new, and at least give it a chance.

I found the section on real state interesting, and although I don't currently have the means to get into real state investing, I hope to be able in the future. And since I am not ready to start investigating this topic with full force, I appreciated the small section in this book. Enough to get acquainted with the topic, but not too long that will take my time away from other topics that are more useful in the present.

Another thing to note about this book is the brevity of each topic. As mentioned above, it can be a good thing, if, like me, you're only looking for an introduction or a place to start. But if you find yourself enticed by one of the sections, you could be left with the desire for more information.

Overall, I find this book very informative, even if brief. It makes for a great starting point for anyone looking for the various ways of earning passive income, but aren't sure how to get started.

Entertaining and easy to read book. It has many examples of life stories and gives income/passive income concepts for many types of different businesses starting from owning one to MLM. I think the learning outcome in any activity you undertake is to live what you do. There are a lot of ideas to start earning money even when you are far away from knowledge of ecommerce and technology based businesses. The opportunity is always there. I would recommend this book to those looking to start earning money as active (there are a lot of business ideas in general) or passive income. You can definitely get inspired and come up with the plan of your journal's start.

Very good overview on all types of passive income. The author makes it clear at the beginning that this is not a detailed list of all the ways you can earn passive income. It is very comprehensive, though and goes into many different areas. Overall, I thought it was informative and would be very helpful especially for someone new to the concepts.

I wasn't sure if htis was going to be another get rich book or do these things if you already have money to make money. But I found out pretty early on that the power of passive income comes from changing your life around a few simple areas and discplines. Getting these disciplines down will have you focused on how to identify ways to get out the "9 to 5 rat race" and build streams of passive incomes into rivers.

The Power of Passive Income has its stories doing the most work for the message. Vignettes of real people with their experiences of passive income make it easy for you to choose and ok or not ok what could be the way for you.
Until now I have only read franchising an existing business as an option but franshising out your own idea after having tested some of it is a lucrative option. With the horse riding academy, I am able to appreciate the effort needed to get one started.
I liked the summary of the essence of real estate as any other business is people.
The Staff of Entrepreneur Media have done a good job of packaging most known things in a more relatable way.

I’m a huge fan of passive income so was interested to check this book out. It doesn’t disappoint; easy to read and informative.

Great information! Very useful when considering what different options are available online to peruse passive income. Gives detailed avenues to consider. It isn't intended as the answer to a specific theory it is all the things to consider when you are looking for ways to earn passive income. It explains what ways are available to consider in easy to understand language, I learned a lot from reading this and can go back in reference anytime. Great way to do diligence when planning your own strategy. Read this before getting started. I received this ARC in exchange for my honest review. I repeat I learned useful information!

This book had a lot of great ideas. It also gives you many ideas on how to accomplish a variety of passive income projects. It doesn't go too in-depth, but gives lots of ideas that you can research deeper.

I have read many different books on each subject in this book. It was good to find all the info in one place.

This is a book about investing a little effort to reap a better life. The first part explains very well the difference between working an investing, and the possibility of starting small and no need to "quit your day job". Without much detail it shows several possibilities for passive income, like online, stocks, real estate and affiliate marketing. This is all very introductory, and those interested will need a whole lot of more info.