Sponsored Post vs. Affiliate Marketing: Which Earns Publishers More Money?

Affiliate marketing through content is a highly effective strategy for bloggers and influencers. In fact, our content site the Money Manual successfully used content marketing to generate $80k from just one advertiser.

However, publishing content is just one piece of the puzzle.

Did you know that the most successful content marketers spend only 20% of their time on content creation? The other 80% of their efforts are spent on distributing their content to the right audience through paid and non-paid channels.

As a blogger, what’s the best way to monetize your audience? Should you charge advertisers for each sponsored post to get quick wins or invest in an affiliate marketing strategy?

Below we’ll go over some of the pros and cons of each.

The Pros And Cons Of Sponsored Posts

Pros

• It’s easy; earn a quick payday relative to the audience on your website just for putting up a single blog. Sponsored posts can start at $300.
• It can pay well if you have the right audience and domain authority. Some publishers earn upwards of $20,000 for a single article.

Cons

• A lot of advertisers will share the sponsored post to their followers, or even devote paid ad spend directly to it. This allows them to leverage your reputation for huge profits.
• You earn one fee, one time.
• Advertisers will typically request a certain amount of impressions before agreeing to a sponsored post. If you don’t hit that total you may owe them a partial refund.

 The Pros And Cons Of Affiliate Marketing

Pros

• Get paid for each conversion you deliver to an advertiser.
• You’re in the driver’s seat for your own revenue generation; if you can get more traffic to your site, you can keep making money for the conversions you deliver to an advertiser for the lifetime of the deal.
• You can add the affiliate link to several articles, increasing the opportunities to make money of your participation in that affiliate program.
• Having a profitable paid-media strategy can lead to significant ROI
• It attracts higher-quality leads from organic searches. These visitors are interested in your content so you’ll have better conversion rates.
• Once you have gained traction and start seeing ROI, the result often snowballs and you can experience a high growth rate.
• The efforts you put into creating highly valuable content will keep on giving. For example, it’s estimated that old blog posts on evergreen topics account for 38 percent of total web traffic.
• After you have invested in creating high-quality evergreen content and start driving traffic, they’ll continue to climb in SEO ranking – earning clicks and generating leads without you paying another dollar.

Cons

• It takes time to build the “SEO juice” of your website so you should be prepared to commit to the upfront cost in producing and sharing content before you see results.
• It takes efforts to create high-quality content and it’s often challenging to find qualified writers (if you decide to outsource.)
• You need to be consistent in your efforts in order to build trust and relationships with your audience.

Content Marketing: Key To Sustainable And Long-Term Profits

While you can get some quick wins with PPC advertising, it’s costly and doesn’t “keep on giving.”

On the other hand, content marketing helps you build trust and loyalty with a targeted audience. It’s a sustainable strategy that’ll yield a higher conversion rate and long-term results.

To optimize content marketing ROI, select advertisers and offers that are most relevant to your target audience to leverage the trust and relationships you have built with your readers.

It’s not always easy to find advertisers that are the best fit for your content and audience but thankfully you don’t have to do it alone.

Aragon Premium is an affiliate network that connects publishers with advertisers so you can maximize the ROI of your content marketing efforts. See how you can get exposure to premium brands and advertisers here. 

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