Making Money online nowadays is as complex as it used to be, but affiliate marketing is one of the most lucrative online business you can start with less income in 2023.
By the way what’s Affiliate Marketing to begin with?
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.
There are various types of affiliate marketing, but below are the most popular affiliate marketing strategies.
1: SEARCH AFFILIATE
2:BLOGGERS
3:EMAIL MARKETING
4:DROPPSHIPPING
5:LOGISTICS
6:COUPONS SITES.
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Table of Contents
Steps to start your Affiliate marketing business.
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Before you even begin building your first site, you’ll need to decide which niche you’re going to target.
Obviously, if you don’t know what your site is about or who you’re going to target with it, you can’t really build a site around it…can you?
If you’ve already figured this one out, way to go! This is undoubtedly one of the most difficult and overwhelming steps.
If you don’t quite know what your niche is yet, here’s some advice that you might find useful.
Some key questions to ask yourself when determining your niche are:
- What topics am I already passionate about?
It’s much easier to work on something if you’re passionate about it. Plus, when you have a passion, you’re usually quite knowledgeable about it too, so that definitely helps. For example if you have a passion about about makeup, your niche of choice might be makeup related, too.
- Is there money in this niche?
While following your passion is definitely the recommended option, sometimes the possibility of making money in a profitable niche trumps passion. So, you might not necessarily know much about your niche, but if it’s likely to make you money, you can always learn more about it.
That being said, what are the essential steps for affiliate marketing success? Here, we focus on five critical steps to launching your own profitable affiliate marketing business quickly and easily.
Choose the Right Affiliate Network
The fit must be right between you and the merchant who is going to benefit from your promotional efforts, or it simply won’t work. The easiest way to begin with affiliate marketing is to select an affiliate network. Many affiliate networks exist, some of which are tied to well-known companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple, while others specialize in specific types of products and services.
You may have heard of ClickBank, one of the oldest and most popular affiliate networks. A billion-dollar company, ClickBank specializes in digital products like e-books and software, as well as membership sites. If you haven’t considered selling digital information products, then you should seriously consider doing so considering all the benefits. Digital information products offer much higher commissions (anywhere from 10 to 75%+) than physical products which usually only offer commissions under 5%. Also digital information products and can be easier to sell in many cases because people can get instant access and immediate gratification when purchasing a digital information product.
Seriously consider selling digital information products as an affiliate, as they often offer much higher commissions than physical products.
Another network you should consider when it comes to promoting products as an affiliate is Amazon.com. As you may already know, just about any physical product can be sold on Amazon.com. Though products on Amazon generally offer lower commissions than their digital product counterparts, selling products on Amazon as an affiliate can be a much higher volume business and most people trust Amazon as a merchant, making it easier to sell products as an affiliate.
Finally, in some cases, you may work with a company or individual directly as an affiliate; rather than going through a network. Entrepreneurs or companies may run their own affiliate program and you can apply directly to them to promote their products and services. If you see a product that you would really like to promote as an affiliate and the company doesn’t offer a formal affiliate program, you can always reach out to them to work out a private deal as well.
Research and Select the Right Affiliate Products
A sound product strategy is a must for new affiliate marketers. Ideally, you should choose a niche that you can make money online with and has a lot of product vendors. This will give you a wide selection of products to offer your online community. However, when you’re just getting started you should limit yourself to two or three products at a time. This will allow you to really become an expert on the products you are promoting which can be helpful when it comes to marketing those products (such as writing products reviews
As you become comfortable with the affiliate marketing process, you can consider both specialized (e.g. fly fishing) and broad (e.g. weight loss) niches. Don’t forget to track your marketing metrics! They are usually provided by your merchant and/or affiliate network. Tracking your metrics will allow you to see what is working and generating sales and what is not working, causing you to waste time and/or money.
This way you’ll be able to know which products your audience is responding to and which ones aren’t generating any profits for your business. This is especially important if you are investing in paid advertising to drive traffic and promote products as an affiliate… you need to know which campaigns are profitable and which ones are losing money.
You’ll want to continually monitor the marketplace for new products, review and test promoting those products to your audience to see which ones resonate and convert.
Consider Buying the Product Before Promoting It
As a new affiliate marketer, you are not obligated to purchase every product you want to promote. However, it goes without saying that actually owning and using the products is huge for establishing credibility and trust. Intimate knowledge of the product can mean the difference between making the sale and having prospects move elsewhere.
Writing product reviews are an excellent way to enhance your credibility as an affiliate marketer. This is especially easy with information products like e-books which are relatively inexpensive. After establishing some steady income it may even be worth buying higher-end products, provided you get in touch with the product creator to work out a strategic marketing plan that takes you to the next level.
If you actually use the product and get results with it, then sharing a case study or your personal experience can be one of the most effective ways of selling those products to your audience. As you build a more responsive list of email subscribers and buyers and your reputation, merchants may offer you “free” samples of e-books or other products.
Note: in many cases, merchants will be happy to offer you a free copy/sample of the product even if you don’t have an established business — it never hurts to ask! If so, you’ll want to include full disclosure that you were provided complimentary access to the product in addition to having a disclaimer disclosing your affiliate relationship.
Utilize Social Media Marketing to Get More Traffic
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and other social media marketing methods are great vehicles for “word of mouth” or viral marketing. Video marketing, in particular, is a great way to demonstrate your expertise via commentary, screenshots, and live demonstrations if necessary.
Right now doing videos on Facebook and Facebook Live are extremely effective as well as utilizing YouTube for a more longer-term approach to video marketing.
While at first you may be focused on using social media as a free way to get traffic, keep in mind that there are powerful ways to use paid advertising on social media to reach your targeted audience and drive that traffic back to your site or your affiliate offers.
Consider Using Redirect / “Pretty” Links
Cloaking or using anchor links was a controversial issue in internet marketing circles, with some affiliate marketers swearing by it and others who feel it is unnecessary.
On one hand, long and ugly affiliate tracking links are a straight giveaway to people that you want to sell them a product (and people may be uncomfortable clicking on them). Therefore, making your link shorter and “nicer” looking will it give a more professional appearance. One of my favorite plugins for making links look “pretty” is the Pretty Links WordPress plugin.
This makes the link much shorter, more friendly, and easier to type in case they can’t click the link for some reason and want to type it into their browser.
CONCLUSION.
Whether you’re starting a new business from scratch or already have an existing business (offline or online), affiliate marketing is a great way to generate income online. All you have to do it recommend relevant products or services to your audience and the vendor of the product your are promoting handles everything including product creation, handling the sales process, customer service, refunds, etc.
