What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is where you promote another company's product or service in exchange for a commission on the sales you generate. The commission is usually a percentage of the sale price, but can sometimes be a certain amount.
First, find an affiliate program or network that interests you See an overview of the program, including the type of product or service, the method of payment, and the commissions they offer.
If it appeals to you, sign up and wait for your acceptance to be confirmed. Then, start creating content by adding custom links to the program provided. One of your users tracks those links when they make a purchase and you will earn a small commission.
Why do affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the best way to make money online for beginners. Because this is the easiest way to make money online.
Heres are two reasons:
Low risk & Low cost
Starting a business means incurring advance costs for products, employees, equipment, rent, etc. This makes it risky and expensive. All you need to know about affiliate marketing is a website. Even if it doesn't work, all you have to do is waste time and money.
Easy to scale
An ordinary salesman only sells products of one company. As an affiliate marketer, you can promote products of different companies and earn commissions from all of them.
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How does affiliate marketing work?
The merchant gives each affiliate a unique link so they can track who is responsible for the sale. The link will usually look something like this:
When someone clicks on that link, a small file called a cookie is stored on their device.
An authorized cookie does two things:
- This helps the merchant to return the sale to the right person;
- It (usually) contains an expiration date, so you will be paid even if the buyer delays their purchase.
Imagine that a reader saw your post about the best winter jackets. They click on one of your affiliate links, leading them to a product on Amazon.
But they realized they had to pick up their daughter from school. So they leave their home, take their daughter, have dinner and finally return to Amazon where they find the product again.
Since they are already shopping on Amazon, they have also decided to buy some ski gear.
The good news here. Earlier, they clicked on your affiliate link and a cookie was saved on their device. Since Amazon has a 24-hour cookie period, you get compensation for both winter jackets and ski gear even if you didn't promote the latter.
How much money affiliate marketers can make?
Now that you have a website and have joined an affiliate network, now is the time to start monetizing your site with affiliate marketing. But how much can you make via affiliate marketing?
The simple answer is that there is no limit. It depends on your niche and the amount of work you have done.
The most successful affiliate marketers create six or seven statistics a month.
For example, Pat Flynn earned over $ 100,000 in affiliate commissions from Smart Passive Income in December 2017.
Ryan Robinson, another affiliate marketer, reported more than $ 19,000 in affiliate revenue in October 2019. Another successful affiliate website, The Wirecutter, grossed an estimated 10 million in revenue and eventually sold to the New York Times for $ 30 million.
Remember that these people have done a great job in building their brand. It has taken them years and years of hard work to reach this level.
You need to manage your expectations. You can't make big money directly from the bat, but don't let that discourage you.
The success of others tells you that with hard work, time, and the right knowledge, you too can potentially reach those levels.
How to start affiliate marketing?
To start affiliate marketing you need to follow 7 steps:
Step #1: Choose a platform to create content
There are so many platforms on the internet to create content for free. Like:
Or you can start your own blog which is the best option but it requires some cost.
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Step #2: Select a niche for affiliate marketing
If you start a blog today, you are facing a lot of competition. Statista estimates that the number of bloggers in the United States will reach 31.7 million by 2020.
Stand the best chance of success, down the niche.
Choose a topic that focuses on a specific section. For example, the subject of "food" is a huge category. Instead of tackling it, try something more specific, such as grilled food.
Keeping your content tight can help you build a more focused audience and potentially help you rank higher in search engines.
This is what I did when I created my first site. Instead of talking about "technology" or "tech-news", I decided to limit myself to just tech-news. Despite not knowing anything about SEO at the time, I was able to rank for a few key positions and generate ~ 3,000 organic visits per month.
Next, as you cover most of this section and generate traffic to these pages, you can expand to other areas.
Now, if you are going to be the main content creator, choose something that interests you.
Many affiliate sites die due to a lack of continuity. So at least, if you are a fan of a subject, you will find it much easier to push when the task becomes difficult.
Don't worry if you are not an expert in the field. As Gary Vaynerchuk put it, "Documents, don't create." Documenting what you have learned can create great content and attract people who are interested in following your progress.
If you are outsourcing content, it is best to work with experts in the niche. Specialists can help you create high-quality, trustworthy work that can lead to more traffic, more visitors, and more authorized sales.
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Step #3: Find out the best affiliate network for your niche
- Low volume-high paying affiliate: For example, ConvertKit's affiliate program pays about $ 700 per month to about 80 subscribers. However, since they sell CRM software for small business owners, there is a limited pool of buyers. Programs with higher commissions tend to be more competitive. Since you are probably just starting out, it will be quite challenging to make a significant amount of money by competing against skilled marketers with deep pockets.
- High volume-high paying affiliate: These are approved programs for products with low pay but wide application The redeeming quality of such programs is that they usually offer a lot of products for sale. Take, for example, Amazon's approved programs. You can earn up to a 10% commission on almost everything Amazon sells. The other good thing is that you often get a commission on the full purchase price instead of your proposed product. To pay for such affiliate programs, you need a lot of traffic.
- High volume-high paying affiliate: These are approved programs for products with mass appeals, which also provide high commissions. An example is a credit card. Everyone needs a credit card. The downside of such products is that they attract affiliate marketers with lots of expertise and deep pockets. Some even use spammy tactics that you can't compete with. And since this is a tutorial for beginners, I will not go into depth. Just be aware that this program exists.
Step #4: Create good content
The content you create communicates your message, educates your readers, and persuades them to buy your products and services based on your competition. In fact, one of the most important things you can do to attract clients and build interest in your business is to provide high-quality content. Choose a high-volume keyword. you can use Mangools keyword research tool to find out the best keyword.
Step #5: Drive traffic to your content for affiliate marketing
Now you've created great content. Now you have to drive traffic to your website. There are three types of traffics:
1. Paid traffic
This is where you pay for the traffic to your site. You can do this using PPC advertising. The advantage of paid traffic is that the moment you start paying, you get traffic.
First, running ads will dig into your profits. It's normal for advertisers to lose money before they can do it … if they ever did.
You need to be realistic about how long it takes to optimize a given traffic campaign.
Second, once you stop paying for ads, your traffic will stop.
Generally speaking, advertising is a great traffic strategy if you are part of a high-paying affiliate program and can execute numbers.
But if you're new to paid marketing and don't have a marketing budget (or work with low-commission programs like Amazon Associates), this might not be a great idea.
2. SEO traffic
SEO means Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the practice of optimizing pages to rank higher in search engines like Google.
As long as you can rank high in search engines for your target keywords, you will get consistent and passive traffic.
At the most basic level, SEO is:
>Your goal is to understand what customers are looking for;
>Creating content around these topics (blog posts, product pages, etc.);
>Taking care of the "technical" things (including link building) to rank these pages in search engines.
3. Building an email list
Email lists allow you to communicate with your readers at any time.
Use them to let fans know about new content and keep them coming back to your site for more. This leads to more authorized clicks and sales. Choose the best email marketing tool. If you are a beginner you can use the free email marketing tool which I'm using.
I have a full tutorial on How to build an email list.
Success in email marketing is all about your skill If you do not have much knowledge in email marketing you couldn't be successful anymore. Learn email marketing fundamentals from top email marketing experts in 2022.
Step #6: Get clicks on affiliate links for affiliate marketing
The only way to increase your CTR is to improve your content. Your first goal is to write a sticky title because that's the first thing people see and you only have 5 seconds to inject curiosity. If you pass this first process, they will start reading your introduction. Again, you need to think of a great role. This time you will have 20 seconds so that people want to swallow the rest of your article.
So, your first purpose is to get people to read your headline and that headline will force them to read your introduction.
The second purpose is for people to read your first paragraph. Your first paragraph should push them to the next paragraph, and so on.
As you can see, this process does not require any money to invest, but you must invest your time.
The thing is, even if you have the money to invest in traffic, it won't save you time unless you want to invest a lot of money in professional ad copiers. Hiring professionals is not cheap.
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Step #7: Convert clicks into sell
In affiliate marketing, you need two conversions to make money.
The first conversion is to click on the product page.
You are 100% in control of this action. Use the strategies above to increase your chances of getting those clicks.
The second conversion is the product purchasing audience. In the case of affiliate marketing, the merchant controls the checkout and their conversion rate is out of your control.
The strategy is to play the game to your advantage and find merchants with programs that convert well.
There are three ways to find them:
Public income reports
How do you know if people are making money?
View public earnings reports where bloggers publicly disclose how much money they are making from their approved contracts.
You can find these reports on Google.
For example, if you search for "earnings report amazon affiliate", you will see a few blog posts showing how bloggers made money from Amazon Affiliates.
Asking questions
If you don't have much information about an affiliate program you want to join, sign up and ask questions.
For example, you might want to know their average conversion rate or a ballpark figure of their top earners' monthly commission.
This can help you determine if the affiliate program is promotional.
Using intuition
Sometimes, it’s best to take your gut feeling.
Do not promote the program or product you are testing if it seems "off" or if you do not personally recommend the product to a friend or family member.
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Conclusion
No affiliate marketing wheel has been invented here. These are the basics, and applying them will get you to the right foot. Just don’t expect a life-changing income or the freedom to give up your 9-5 overnight. Affiliate marketing takes time. Focus first on creating your first affiliate sales. Set new goals and keep testing as your site grows. This is how a site can be created that ultimately generates a decent income.
Have questions? Let me know in this comment.
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