Idea behind, it is a process of promote someone product and earn commission that is call affiliate marketing. Often people earn from affiliate network.
Thousands of people are earning millions of dollars through affiliate marketing, and it is passive.
That means they are earning even when they are in sleep.
Sounds fancy? Right?
Well, you can do that; trust me. It is a simple process. You need to promote someone’s product and earn a commission when any sales happen actually.
But how can you do that? What are the processes that you should follow? Well, I am going to show how exactly you can start an affiliate marketing business and make money with no time. So without any further due, let’s get started.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
As you already know that it is a kind of revenue sharing. Basically, you are the salesperson. For every sale, you will get a portion of the profit from the merchant company. It works like this.
You will get an affiliate link from the merchant company when you sign up for the affiliate program. You will promote that link through your channel. It can be a YouTube channel, blog, website, or any others. When anyone clicks the link and buys the product, you will get a commission.
In simple words, you help the company to sell its products, and they reward you for the sale.
The best thing about affiliate marketing is that you can sell as many products as you want and choose as many companies as you want. You do not have any limit, unlike any company that cannot sell products from another company. That means you have the freedom to choose a company and product.
It is surely fun.
How to Start Affiliate Marketing for Beginners?
To be very honest, affiliate marketing is not a cup of tea. It sounds easy for sure; however, it is not that easy at all. It is something technical. However, you do not have to know all these at first to start the marketing.
Once you start the business, you will slowly know everything if you are serious enough about it. At first, you need to follow these steps to successfully start an affiliate business and make money.
Choose A Niche You Love
The first step of this business is to choose a niche.
A lot of people make a common mistake and choose any niche they seem good. However, I will suggest you select a niche you love.
Why?
Well, there are many reasons for this. If you do not love the niche, you will not get motivated to take the niche further. At first, you may create some content and start marketing, but after a certain period, you will get demotivated.
On the other hand, if you love any niche, you can create content easily, and it will fun for you. When creating content, you need to know a lot about the content. If you are passionate about the niche, it will be easy for you to know more about that niche and create even better content at the beginning of affiliate marketing.
But how can you choose the perfect niche for your affiliate business?
Well, you can follow these steps and ask these questions to yourself.
What Is My Passion?
As I said, you should follow your passion. When you follow your passion, you can easily work for a long time with that niche. Also, since you are passionate about the niche, you will surely be knowledgeable about the niche as well.
Does That Passion Have Monetary Value?
Following your passion is good for sure. But if it does not have any monetary value, that means if you cannot make money with your passionate niche, it does not make any sense to choose that niche. So choose a niche through which you can make money.
How Many Topics Are There On That Niche?
Besides, think about how many topics are available on that topic. Your niche should have enough depth so that you can easily create tons of content. It will help you build an authoritative site.
How Is The Demand For The Niche?
Along with that, you need to know whether your niche has enough demand or not. Whether people want to know more about your niche or not. At the same time, whether people want to buy products on that niche or not. If people just want to know more about the niche but do not want to buy the products, you cannot make money at all.
Are There Enough Affiliate Programs Available?
Another important thing you should know is whether there are enough affiliate programs available or not. If you do not find any affiliate program for your niche, there is no way to make money with that niche, right?
Is It Too Competitive?
And finally, ask the most important question. Is your niche too competitive? If you find out that there are some big fishes in your niche, you should not choose that niche because you cannot compete with them easily.
Learn More: Keyword Research and Competitor Analysis
Choose A Niche From The Network.
Even you can select a niche from any affiliate network as well. Sometimes, you might not have enough idea about the product. In that case, you can go to an affiliate network and find out some products you are passionate about and do affiliate business.
By following these steps, you can easily choose the perfect niche for your marketing. Remember, choosing a niche is most important for an affiliate marketing business. If you make any mistake here, chances are really high that you will fail in the business. So spend more time here to choose your niche.
Build A Platform to Start
After choosing the niche, it is time to select and build a platform to start. There are several platforms you can use for affiliate marketing. You can use social media such as Facebook, Twitter, or even Instagram, to do this marketing.
Also, you can use blogs or websites or even YouTube to do this business too. Among all these methods, YouTube and blogging are the best way to do affiliate marketing.
Starting a YouTube channel is easier than ever. All you need to do is your smartphone, and you are done. You can create tons of content with your smartphone and upload those on YouTube for free. Simply review any product or tell your users about a product or benefits of the products and put your affiliate link in the description.
When people will see your review and click that affiliate link and buy your product, you will get a commission. However, make sure you optimize your video properly with proper title and description. You will find thousands of tutorials on YouTube to know how you can optimize the content.
Similarly,
Starting a blog is easier, too, and it is extremely popular as well. Simply buy a domain and hosting and start writing your content related to your niche with a readymade platform like WordPress. You need to write content in such a way that everyone gets their answer from your content.
Once you start writing your content, you have to optimize properly to get organic traffic from the search engine. Other than that, you may have to get paid traffic for your business, which is not possible for you, I guess. You can search online to know how you can optimize your content properly.
Find Out The Perfect Affiliate Program And Products.
You are done creating a platform and choosing a niche.
Now it is time to find out the perfect affiliate program and product. If you make a mistake choosing the right affiliate program, you cannot make enough money, and also, you may not get a good conversion rate at all. That is why it is really important to spend some time while choosing the program since it is the source of your income.
Here are the five tips for you to choose the right affiliate program for your niche.
Trustworthiness
A lot of marketers do not care about this fact that trustworthiness matters a lot.
How?
Well, if you choose an affiliate program that no one knows about, when people will visit that site to purchase products, they might not have enough trust to buy that product. This is simple. Think about yourself as a customer.
If you are redirected to a company site that you have never heard about, will you buy from that shop?
Of course, not. You cannot trust that site. Even if the site is less popular, you may not end up buying from the site because you do not know how the quality is of the product or how their service is.
That is why it is really important to find out a program that people know about and trust. In that case, the more popular program you will choose, the better result you will get. It will surely increase the conversion rate.
Commission Rate and Sales Volume
Another important feature to look for is the commission rate. There are thousands of affiliate programs available in the market. Not all the programs offer the same commission rate. Some pay high commission where some pay less.
As a beginner, you may think that you should go for the highest commission rate. However, you need to remember that all the giants are there already. Competing with them will not be that easy at all.
They have invested a lot of money to outrank you from the search result to get that higher commission. In addition to that, there might not be enough sales at all. We will discuss that within a minute.
On the contrary, if you choose a low commission program, that might be low competitive, but you cannot earn a good amount of money.
Additionally, sales volume is also important. You will see some programs for products that offer high sales volume but a low commission rate. Some programs offer low sales volume but a high commission rate, where some offer high sales volume and high commission rate.
So what program should you choose?
Low or high?
Well, it depends on other things as well like your niche and products.
If your main target is consumers, then you should go for higher sales and a low commission rate. On the contrary, if your main target is business people, you can go for low search volume and high commission rate. There are very few programs matching your niche that offer high sales volume and high commission.
So overall, you should research your competitors. You will find out easily what program suits best for you. Then choose a program wisely. Even if you are not happy with any affiliate program, you can contact directly to the product owners for affiliation. However, I afraid you will not get a better conversion than an affiliate program.
Relevancy
Another thing you need to consider is relevancy. That means you should not choose any program that does not match your niche; you should not select the program at all.
Why?
Well, you may choose a program with different products irrelevant to your niche; you will not know much about the product. As a result, you cannot provide enough value to your customers at all. When this happens, surely, you will rank your drop on search engine results pages, and your traffic will go down, and ultimately, you will not have enough sales at all.
So make sure you choose a relevant program with relevant products that can bring you a lot of benefits.
Support
Finally, check the support you will get from the affiliate program. When starting an affiliate program, you will surely have some problems regarding it. If the support is not good enough and friendly, you cannot enjoy doing the program at all. So make sure the program you are going to choose offers great client support.
Produce Valuable Content
After doing all the hard work you have put into building your platform and choosing the right affiliate program, it is time to publish content. When publishing content, you have to make sure you are producing valuable content that can add value to the customer.
You know, content is the king.
Learn More: Blog Length for SEO
There are basically three types of content you can create to provide value to your visitors.
Informative
Informative content is generated to solve common problems of the users in your niche or to let your visitors know something new or solve any issues. It is a great way to build trust with your audience. In that case, you need to do some research to find out what people search for most in your niche.
After finding those topics, you need to create content based on those topics so that your audience can satisfy their need and know what exactly they are looking for. You can check different forums, social media, and competitors to find out what exactly your audience is looking for.
Maybe you are thinking about what your profit is if you write these types of contents, how you can monetize this. Well, it will help you get more visitors to your site. Even you can simply add an affiliate link to those contents to send your audience to the product’s landing page.
Review Content
For obvious reasons, you need to review your products so that your audience can know more about the products and benefits. Without knowing the benefits, your audience will surely not buy your products, and if they do not buy your products, you cannot make any money at all.
When writing or making product review content, make sure you have written or made all the things anyone can expect from you. Focus on all the important features of the product and also the benefits a user can get from that feature. Remember, people will not buy the product for the feature. Instead, they will buy the product to get those benefits.
Besides, simply put your affiliate link under any section of the review content. Since most review readers are buyers here, you will get good sales for sure.
Evergreen Content
Along with the review content and informative content, you should write or make evergreen content. Evergreen content refers to the content that will be useful all the time, no matter what. It surely needs more research for sure, but if you can make evergreen content, it will benefit you a lot.
For example, if you choose a niche like traveling in your village, a content like “culture of your village” will be evergreen content for you. No matter what, this content will bring a good number of visitors to your site or channel for sure.
Build Your Audience
Here comes the main challenge.
Everything we have discussed above can do anyone. Yes, it is a little bit difficult for sure, but anyone can manage it. The main challenge remains in audience building. No matter how good all other things are, if you cannot bring a visitor to your site or channel, it is worthless.
Now the question comes how you can build your audience?
Well, you need to do these things.
Social Share
One of the easiest and simple way to get traffic and make a good connection with your audience is social media share. Nothing can be better to make a trusted audience than social media. You are in some popular social media for sure such as Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, Twitter, and others.
Use these media to build a relationship with the audience and make them your customer. You will find some popular social media profiles or pages with a large number of followers. Those are their potential buyers. So make a good relationship with your audience and build a good number of audiences on social media.
Paid Marketing
You can get paid traffic as well. All social media offer paid marketing. Also, you can use Google to get traffic too.
But this will cost you a lot to bring traffic. As a beginner, you have invested a lot of time and money already. Spending more money to bring visitors might not be possible for you.
However, you have to do it because, without traffic, you are nothing at all.
In that case, if you are doing low commission affiliate marketing, this is not an option for you. On the contrary, for high paying program, this strategy may work well.
But if you are new in this sector and have no idea about paid marketing, I afraid you cannot make a good result at all. So staying away from it will be a good decision.
SEO
Then what is the solution for you if you do not get paid traffic?
Well, here comes the SEO that means search engine optimization. You need to optimize your content in such a way that it will rank higher on search engines.
When people search for the keyword you have made content on, your content will show up on the search result, and people will click it.
You know the best part?
It is free, and you can get tons of traffic from this method.
But how can you do that?
Well, you need to make sure you are making better content than your competitors, and your content can fulfill all the queries any visitor can ask for. At the same time, create content related to your topic, and people search for it. And finally, do other technical stuff like on-page seo and off-page seo to rank higher on the search result.
Lean More: SEO
Build An Email List
Another good way to build an audience is by creating an email list. You need to collect the emails of your potential buyers and send them the link of your content so that they can read and buy the product from your affiliate links.
Get Clicks
Now people are coming to your website or channel.
But does that guarantee you that you will get enough clicks to generate sales? Of course, no.
So what can you do?
Well, you need to make sure you are placing the affiliate link in the exact right place. Remember, people do not have enough time to read or watch your entire content. So make sure just after arriving your content, the visitor can see the link.
One more thing.
Do not make a para with a link. Simply put, a small link with a small button or short link under any section. It will not make the para spammy, and people will surely not like it.
And finally, add an action button or word. You know, people tend to click more on the link where you tell them to click than where you do not.
So make sure you have added the call to action word or button before the link.
Convert Click Into Sales
By now, you have everything under control.
You can send visitors to the affiliate link for sure.
But that does not mean the visitor will buy the product. It is not in your hand.
However, you can do several things to increase the conversion rate for sure.
One common trick is to choose the best product with the most positive customer reviews. It will motivate the visitor to buy the product.
Another thing you can do is to write your content with all the necessary information and show your visitor all those benefits that he or she can get from this product. It will also help them to buy the product.
Repeat Steps #4–7 On A Continual Basis!
This is not the end, dear.
You want passive earning, right?
Actually, this is not like passive earning.
Yes, you will get sales even when you are in sleep for sure. But that does not mean you do not need to do anything at all.
You need to now repeat all the steps you have done in steps 4-7. That means you need to make content regularly, bring traffic to those contents, make people click on your affiliate links, and make them buy the products.
If you can do all of these, you can have a passive earning within a very short time.
Final Thoughts
No magic tricks were shared here. We have told you all the fundamentals you need to know to do affiliate marketing. After entering into the real affiliate world, you will invest different things differently. But you can overcome those easily if you are ready to.
Remember that it is not like a magic that you can be a millionaire in a year. You need patience and hard work to achieve that million-dollar goal. Focus first to do all those fundamentals, and as the site will grow up, you will get more traffic and thus more sales.
Happy marketing.
