Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money online and there are many things that anyone can do to take advantage of it. But since affiliate marketing is one of the well-known ways to earn money, it is also misunderstood. More often than not, those who don’t understand it usually fail to generate any income. It simply isn’t as easy as slapping on some products from other companies on your website, and hope the sales will flood in.
This article is meant to show you some of the possibilities of generating an income without creating your own products. I’m talking about finding products to promote and making commissions from them. I also want to emphasize the power of traffic and also show you how you can get floods of people to your page. In the end, it’s all about you and how honest you are with your marketing.This guide will help you get a head start on affiliate marketing and show you the proper way to promote products without making the common mistakes marketers make.
What you will learn: What is affiliate marketing; What it isn’t; How to get started; Where to find affiliate products and successful companies; Write useful content and honest reviews ; Know your target audience; Traffic; Be patient ; Keep trying different things.
What is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is simply a way to make money online by promoting a service, product or a site that isn’t yours. As an affiliate, you are rewarded on a performance-based structure that allows you to earn money based on your advertising efforts. For example: If you promote a product from Amazon and someone makes the purchase by clicking on your link, you earn a percentage off the total sale. They have an affiliate program called Amazon Associates, and you can promote any product. You basically get a link that has your specific affiliate code on the end of it.
What affiliate marketing isn’t: It isn’t a way to get rich overnight. You can’t simply slap on a few products onto your website, and wait for some magic to happen. Anything that has rewards takes work, and affiliate marketing is no different. You may not see sales for weeks, months, or maybe even years. Okay if you don’t get a sale after a year, then you know you’re doing something wrong. But it simply requires patience and skills. It isn’t simple as you should be unique in the way you promote any product. You have to be honest, or you may break your visitors trust.
Is affiliate marketing easy money? While it is one of the most lucrative ways to earn an income online, it is important to understand that it isn’t easy money. Most people who try it usually fail and give up because they are missing one of these key factors: Targeted traffic (not just random traffic that has no interest in what you’re promoting); Understanding the products you promote ; Finding products that actually work ; Building relationship and trust with visitors ; Good sales copy writing skills ; Of course there is always the chance that if you push too hard with your affiliate marketing efforts, or promote low quality products, you’ll have issues with trust and your reputation. You can’t expect to burn your visitors with something that is low quality or plain doesn’t work, and have a happy ending. That’s never going to benefit anyone, especially you!
How can you get started with affiliate marketing? While you may just have a social media page where you can promote products or service, it is highly recommended that you have your own website. If you’re not sure how you can start your own website or you think it’s difficult, there are tons of YouTube videos that show you how to do so within an hour.
After you know where you’ll be promoting services or products, you should choose a niche. It may seem easy to promote random products, but if you’re going to sell baby products to young mothers, you probably won’t want to promote hunting gear.
See where I’m going with this? Choose your niche, preferably one with lots of products. Health, wealth and relationships are the 3 biggest ones, so narrow it down to something where you can just solve one problem rather than dozens.
Where to find affiliate products? As I mentioned earlier, Amazon has an associates program that you can use to promote their products. Amazon is one of most successful online retailers and they have been around for MANY years! So you can’t really go wrong with them.
Some other ones include: ClickBank.com; CJ.com ; Linkshare.com ; ShareAsale.com ; Neverblue.com; iPAS 2 ; Empower Network
These are regarded as being some of the best affiliate programs out there. You really can’t go wrong with any of them, it all comes down to what you want to promote and what niche you choose to go with. I personally leverage iPAS 2 and the Empower Network. This is because they offer: Best in class Sales Funnels, with pre-built capture pages that convert; Video Training and tutorials – shot and filmed by a Hollywood Production Crew ; Easy scalability ; Top tier commission structure – up to $3000 per sale ; LEVERAGE – more time freedom by way of automation
Write useful content and reviews. Okay so you’ve got your affiliate products in mind, and your website is hopefully ready, now you’ll want to have some content. Now there used to be a time where you could just write a few paragraphs, make a bazillion bucks and be ranked on Google for the number one spot for that particular product. But Google is smart, and they are always adapting.
Keywords matter, people will want to find your site according to their search, but you will have to write for those people, not just for Google. So write useful content. Solve their problem and tell them what they can do to solve it. Make the product as the centerpiece, throw in your link a few times in the post, don’t be shy. You’re going through the effort of writing a nice, in-depth post of something useful for them. Hopefully you know the product or service well, so well that you may have tried it or seen it in action. You’ll want to write reviews as people are always looking for reviews.
You won’t get far without writing an HONEST review. “Hey yea this product is perfect, no drawbacks, buy it now” won’t work. You’ll want to write the good AND the bad of the product. If you don’t, they’ll notice it and they won’t trust you as much. Oh yeah, keep your target audience in mind. If you’re going to write for dentists who are looking for dental equipment, you won’t want to write as if you were talking to a toddler. You’ll want to place banners and links where you think people will see it. Obviously at the bottom of everything is probably not optimal, but keep trying different places without being too spammy.
Get traffic. You can have the best content, the best recommended products/services, but if it’s a ghost town, what good does it do for anyone? You have tap into the internet’s flood of traffic.You won’t magically grow into the millions overnight, (let me know if you do!), but you will have to try. One of the best ways to get traffic with minimal effort is by guest posting. Guest posting is a way to connect with other established websites as you write content for them. Usually they’ll plug in your website so people can check out what you’ve got. Take advantage of influencers and well established websites because they already have audiences!
Try different things. You won’t want to try one thing, and hope that it would be the answer to it all, and just let it be. You’ll want to try different things. Maybe your sales copy isn’t convincing them, or maybe your reviews aren’t honest enough. Whatever it is, you’re bound to fail but that’s when you can take the advantage of succeeding. Position yourself right from the beginning so you’re on the right track. People are smart, they want honest affiliates, not robots. So be a human! Be patient Patience is a virtue; you’ve got to have it. Any affiliate will tell you that this takes time. Nothing happens overnight and that you’ll want to be patient or you won’t give yourself a chance to see success. Like I said, it may take months before you see your first sale. Until then, you’ve got lots of work and testing to do!
Wrapping it up. So now you know all about affiliate marketing, you’ll want to get started right away. Action is the first step to anything. You’ll want to have an email marketing plan as well because email is one of the best ways to stay in touch with your visitors. It’s also great for building rapport and trust. You won’t want to advertise and bug them about that one product you want them to buy, but you’ll want to solve their problem by showing them that you understand what they are looking for.
Treat every visitor like a friend, get to know them and learn what you can do to improve their experience. Most affiliate marketers fail because they don’t care about their visitors. Care about them, and show them the way to a more awesome life!
