There’s no doubt in my mind that a blog like this in a niche market can be a very powerful affiliate marketing tool — in fact this is already being done by many successful Internet marketers.

I believe if you start a blog, and do your best to make the content interesting and helpful, there’s a good chance it will become viral among your niche audience.

Here’s what will then happen.

Over time you’ll build a steady flow of interested readers and can then monetize your blog with affiliate marketing programs, Adsense, etc. assuming your content quality stays at a high level.

The reason I think blogging can be so effective for affiliate marketers is because of the whole social media craze. Blogging and social media sites fall under the same web 2.0 umbrella, but I feel like both feed off each other.

Blogging attracts a lot of hungry, avid readers that in turn will often relay their findings to sites like Digg, Technorati, Delicious, Reddit, etc — and this is where your traffic can really explode.

Introducing StumbleUpon.com.

I’m somewhat familiar with web 2.0, but I had never heard of StumbleUpon before. I was familiar with other social media sites, but not this one.

So imagine my surprise when I checked my blog traffic stats and saw the following:

The above graph is for the last 7 days — keep in mind this blog is new so the numbers are very low!

But what shocked me was that StumbleUpon sent me 288 visitors without me having to do a thing.

That’s why I think blogging can be such a powerful affiliate marketing tool. If you create great content, there’s a strong chance social media will take over and boost your traffic. This is why I take my time to write each post for this blog — because I want the content to be good and viral!

I researched StumbleUpon and evidently it’s a social media site that lets visitors rate your website as “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”.

There’s also a feature of StumbleUpon where you click a button and it automatically takes you to a website that is similar to other sites you’ve given a “thumbs up” to.

And if your site gets some “thumbs up”, you’ll naturally be shown more to the people that click this button, assuming your website is relevant of course. As I write this, I’ve gotten over a half dozen “thumbs up” which is probably what’s boosting my traffic.

If I’m missing something here, or if I’m wrong, call me out by commenting below!

So in light of all this, I added some social media buttons at the end of each post to encourage people to share my content.

I think over time this will naturally build traffic to this blog.

If you have a blog in a niche market that promotes affiliate programs, spend some time researching different social media tools and techniques — I think it’s time very well spent.

Talk to you soon,
Ryan

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Tags: Blogging, Social Media, StumbleUpon, Web 2.0