What Food Bloggers Need to Know about Affiliate Marketing

affiliate marketing food

Food blogging means more than just taking a few pictures of the food you're about to eat and posting it on social media. There are folks out there who take food blogging seriously and some who've even made it their career.

Sounds interesting, right? Eating good food while making money.

For those interested in making money while enjoying all sorts of food, affiliate marketing is just the ticket. So how does it work?

Affiliate Marketing and Food Bloggers

Food bloggers involved with affiliate marketing promote food-related products (such as cooking utensils) from a third party, and place affiliate links or ads in their blog.

The advertiser of the product provides you with the affiliate link. Affiliate cookies are then dropped on your visitor’s computer once they visit your site as well as the merchant’s site. Once a visitor completes a sale, you earn a commission.

Where to Sign Up as a Food Blogger Affiliate

As we mentioned earlier, food bloggers can promote all kinds of things, from different food products to cooking utensils and other kitchenware. Here are a few places you can find those products:

  1. Amazon Associates – This is one of the best affiliate programs around. It’s easy to work with, especially if you're new to affiliate marketing. With Amazon, each time someone clicks on the link you've provided and makes a purchase, Amazon provides a commission.
  2. Sovrn – This affiliate program can work great for food bloggers. It operates as an ad network and pays based on the CPM structure.
  3. Google AdSense – This affiliate program is also great for beginners, and it's easy to join. However, you may not find as many opportunities for affiliate marketing food as you will with some of the others on our list.
  4. Gourmet Ads – This ad network affiliate program works similarly to Sovrn. What's great about Gourmet Ads is that it only displays cooking and food related ads.
  5. ShareASale – This is one of the biggest affiliate networks out there and offers a wide variety of items to promote. Signing up is easy and you get a commission for every sale generated.
  6. Rakuten – This affiliate network features thousands of advertisers. Signing up is a breeze, and it has high click-through rates compared to many other merchant companies.

Tips for Affiliate Marketing Food and Related Products as a Blogger

Now that you know where you can sign up to start affiliate marketing food and related products, what do you do next? Start taking pictures of food and call yourself a food blogger? Nope!

If you're serious about making a living as a food blogger, there are a few things to keep in mind as you get started.

  • Pick the right niche. While food is a niche itself, you should have a specific sub-niche in mind. Maybe you want to promote kitchen items or tools? Maybe you're interested in gourmet cooking and want to promote gourmet products? Picking a specific niche you're interested in will help you discover your audience and keep you inspired to keep moving forward.
  • Create plenty of high quality content. Pictures are a big part of food blogging, but it involves much more than that. It's important to create content that will attract people to your site. Whether it's recipes or reviews, this content should be creative, useful, original, and produced regularly.
  • Don’t spam your blog. What we mean by that is, don't overload every piece of content with a ton of affiliate links. A few well-placed links that are highly visible will be effective and keep your content looking professional and appealing.

It Takes Patience

Although it is true that you can be an affiliate marketer without a blog or website, becoming a successful food blogger takes time and dedication. Your success depends on the affiliate marketing strategy you choose and your willingness to hang in there for the long haul.

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5 thoughts on “What Food Bloggers Need to Know about Affiliate Marketing

  1. Hey, nice, so informative. I was not aware of these fact you focused here. I really appreciate your knowledge. This will help new bloggers. The last part of your blog I liked most. We have to be patient. One can definitely go up by keeping these points in mind. Thank you so much for sharing your blog.

  2. This was very helpful, thank you! I do have a question. So if I were to sign up with amazon, do they give me products/ links that I would need to use. Or do I just post links of products that I currently use.

    1. Hi Tyra,

      They have a massive catalogue as you know. For anyone new to their program, I would focus on promoting the products you use the most first up.

      If you’re using ThirstyAffiliates Pro you can search for products within the Amazon Importer, otherwise you’ll need to login to the Amazon affiliate program, then visit the product page of the product you want to promote on the Amazon website and you’ll see a little stripe tool at the very top of the screen where you can retrieve your affiliate link for that particular page.

      You can then insert that into ThirstyAffiliates for use in your posts.

      If using ThirstyAffiliates with the Amazon program, Make sure you’re adding them to a category that is being uncloaked.

      To set a link category (or categories) to uncloak links look under ThirstyAffiliates->Settings, Link Appearance tab down near the bottom of the page.

      Hope this helps you get started!

  3. What precisely is the ThirstyAffiliates service, and how much does it cost please??

    (I am from the UK.)

    Oh. And do you recommend WordPress as the natural site for one’s proposed food blog; I suppose you might because you have a plugin; (there are certain things about the software I find annoying!); or is Blogger just as good; or…. ?

    Anyone recommend other free blog hosts?

    1. Hey Liz, thanks for the questions.

      ThirstyAffiliates is a WordPress plugin for affiliate marketers to organise their links and to insert them into posts. Take a look through the features page, there’s a lot more features to it than just that, but that’s the elevator pitch 😀

      WordPress is great for future proofing. Yes, you can start DIY with WordPress, but in the future, you might want to customise some stuff. There are literally hundreds of thousands of WordPress designers & developers out there and they’re easy to find unlike with other platforms.

      I recommend it over any other content management system, especially for food bloggers. There’s tons of great recipe plugins and tools for folks like yourself.

      See here for a bit of explanation about hosts.

      Hope this helps!

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