Do you feel alone in promoting your offers on the Internet? You need a sales team, but did you know it’s unrealistic? Affiliate Marketing is a solution you need to unite your business partners and increase your sales faster. However, people often neglect this marketing lever. With our concrete explanation, affiliate marketing will no longer be a secret to you!
It is a fundamental part of internet marketing. Affiliate marketing is used by some companies to promote goods and services and to achieve one percent of sales.
Affiliate marketing provides businesses with new ways to market and sell their products. Companies are responsible for paying them to help them promote their products. Such collaboration is beneficial for the company, who want to promote their products and those who contribute to the promotion.
The principle of affiliate marketing is the same as a business introduction network. Partners suggest your offer and receive a commission (percentage) when they bring you, customers.
Affiliate marketing is a performance-oriented system. Unless you have a series of sales or special rates, you do not owe anything to your partner.
So the Internet did not invent anything. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, first introduced the business model to the Internet in 1996.
Today, various big brands, such as Alibaba, eBay, Shopify, and digital products, use affiliate marketing to flourish.
Many marketers mistakenly believe that affiliate marketing is a marketing tool designed specifically for web companies or specific industries. It’s all wet. Any business person on the Internet can choose this lever. It allows them to drive customers and enhance your sales regardless of their business size.
According to Statista, business spending on affiliate marketing will reach $8.2 billion in the United States by 2022.
Start today, and you’ll be in a position to get benefit from it.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to get started an affiliate marketing business in seven steps:
- Choose a platform or marketing channel.
- Choose your niche
- Research affiliate programs to join.
- Build a website and create unique content
- Drive traffic to your affiliate site
- Get clicks on your affiliate links.
- Convert clicks into sales
But before explaining these steps, we’ll discuss how it works.
How does affiliate marketing work?
Affiliate marketing is one of the most grown digital marketing forms, where you refer anyone to any product.
This commission ranges from $1 to $10,000, depending on the product you are promoting.
Affiliate marketing works in 4 simple steps:
- Connect with an affiliate program
- You choose a product to promote (you will find a unique affiliate link). When someone clicks on this link, a small file called a cookie is saved on their device.
A stored cookie does two things:
- It helps sellers in sales.
- It has (usually) an expiration date, so you will get your payment even if the buyer delays your purchase.
- You share the link through social media, blogs, YouTube videos, Facebook ads, or any other format.
- When someone purchases your product, you earn a good affiliate commission.
Many online businesses that sell products such as shoes, web hosting, or any other service usually offer an affiliate program.
You can quickly sign up for the program and get your unique tracking link. You can now just use this special affiliate tracking link to recommend the company’s site whenever you write your products. If your readers/traffic buy something by clicking on your affiliate link, you will receive a commission.
Steps to start an affiliate marketing business
1. Choose a platform or marketing channel.
Ideally, you can do affiliate marketing on any platform, even on Instagram.
However, it’s easy to build an audience and enhance your affiliate marketing through one of two channels – a blog or a YouTube channel.
Starting a blog today is relatively simple and economical. There are many tutorials online that teach you how to get started. The best part? It will probably cost you a few bucks in just one month.
Once your site is ready, optimize it for search engines to have a greater chance of ranking. From there, you are free to attach affiliate links to your content. (There’s an art for doing this, which we’ll cover later in this guide.)
The other reliable platform is YouTube. Building and downloading content on YouTube is free, which makes it perfect for many people. Improve your own videos for SEO and include affiliate links in your description.
2. Choose your niche
Let’s be honest: if you’re starting a blog today, you have a ton of competition. Statistics estimates that the number of bloggers reaches 31.7 million by 2020 in the United States. Ask yourself the following questions when determining your niche.
- What topics am I already enthusiastic about?
- Can I earn enough money in this niche?
- On what topic can I easily find myself writing 25, 50, or 100 blog posts?
- Is there an opportunity in this niche for another affiliate marketer?
- Is there enough interest/demand for products in this niche?
- Are effective affiliate programs accessible in this niche?
For the best chance of success, choose the appropriate niche!
Choose a title that focuses on a specific category. For example, the main idea of “food” is a large category. Instead of trying to cope, try something special, like grilled food.
Keeping your titles strong helps you build a more targeted audience and potential benefits you rank higher in search engines.
That’s what I did when I created my first site. Instead of talking about “dance” or “hip hop,” I decided to limit myself to Irish dancing. Although I didn’t know much about SEO at the time, I managed to rank for some key terms and get 4000 organic visits a month.
Later, when you meet most of this category and drive traffic to these pages, you can spread to other areas.
Now, if you want to become a content creator, choose something that interests you.
Many affiliate sites go down the drain due to a lack of consistency. So at least if you are passionate about a topic, it will be easier for you to move forward when the task becomes difficult.
3. Research Affiliate Programs to join
Once you’ve selected a niche, it’s time to focus on improving programs and products. You may have already done brief research on your niche – now you need to research it deeply.
Choosing an affiliate program is a daunting task. You don’t need to be scared to spend a lot of time on it. Because it’s a reliable program where your income will really come from. Choosing the right affiliate program will make you a rising star!
Affiliate Programs have three types;
1. Low volume, high paying affiliate programs
These affiliate programs are for high paying niche products.
For example, if you only send 80 users, the Convert Kit affiliate program pays around $700 salaries per month. However, when it comes to selling CRM software to small business owners, the consumers’ pool is limited.
2. The low payout, high volume affiliate programs
These are affiliate programs for low paying but very good-looking products.
Take the example of PS4 games. Most people love to play the PS4. The average price for a game is only around $50. Through affiliate marketing, you will get a single-digit share from it. This means that if you are lucky, you will earn 2-3 per sale.
3. High volume and high payment programs
These are affiliate programs for demanding products, which also offer high commissions.
Credit cards are one of the best examples.
Everyone requires a credit card, and most folks stay with enterprises for years (sometimes even decades!).
The downside to this type of product is that it entices affiliate marketers with multiple skills and deep pockets. Some spammers also use spams strategies that you can’t match.
4. Choose the right affiliate programs to join.
It depends on your niche and your skill level.
If you are targeting consumers, you will find another model with lower commissions and higher sales.
If you are looking for a professional audience, you will probably go for the first model: high pay and low volume. The most popular programs here are for web hosting related software and products.
Build a website and create unique content
If you are new to site building, the easiest way to set up a site is to use WordPress. WordPress CMS is as easy as ABC to use, and coding skills are user-oriented. You won’t need any technical knowledge to set up your site by using WordPress in a nutshell.
Once your website is developed, it’s time to create user-friendly content. The content you will create for your site should be related to your niche. Also, it helps your audience to come back. Your content must be exciting, interesting, and engaging enough. You should also make sure that the content of the site is suitable for search engines.
5. Drive traffic to your affiliate site
Once you start creating great content, generating an audience for your site will, in some ways, follow naturally. An interested audience will not only bring you regular traffic but will result in regular sales for you.
- Social Media
The easiest and most common way to start building an audience for your website is through social media. Depending on your strengths and industry, you can choose from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and many other places and location-specific networks. Strengthening, engaging, and interested followers on social media is a great opportunity to promote relationships. Once you gain their trust, you can promote your products and services to them.
- SEO
Organic search is a great source of traffic for any website, so it is also important to optimize your search engines website. When creating your content, you should always do it with the reader in mind, but remember to follow some SEO basics.
- Email List
A mailing list is vital for any kind of Affiliate program. You can begin building your email list with an initial magnet (like the news product mentioned above) or simply by encouraging your audience to sign up for your updates. You can then forward your content via email to your audience and also direct them to your relevant offerings. Don’t be surprised about sales, but if you build enough trust with your email audience. When the time comes, they will not hesitate to buy from you.
- Paid Advertisement
Paid advertising on social media platforms is also used to drive traffic on affiliate websites. Google AdWords is also an ace option to bring paid traffic to your site.
6. Generate clicks on your affiliate links.
Just because you have amazing content doesn’t mean people click on your affiliate link.
There are a few things to consider.
A. Placement of links
If all of your affiliate links are at the bottom of a page where people rarely scroll, clicks will be rare.
On the other hand, link to all the other words in your intro, and your content will appear as spam.
So, it’s imperative to pay attention to balance link placement.
B. Context
Suppose you’re going to write an article on the best kitchen cutting tools under $100.
Your introduction may not look like this:
“Today, I’m going to review the best chef cutting tools.”
These links are out of context.
This would make more sense:
“Today, I’m reviewing three distinct chef cutting tools you can buy on Amazon for under $100. These are product name 1, product name 2, and product name 3.”
C. Call to action
Using captions such as buttons, tables, and boxes can help you grab your readers’ attention and make the post more useful.
7. Convert clicks into sales
In affiliate marketing, you must have two conversions to make money.
The first conversion is to click on the product page.
You are 100% in control of this process. Use these tips to improve your chances of getting this click.
The second conversion is the visitor who buys the product. In the case of affiliate marketing, the trader controls the cashier, and their conversion rates are out of your control.
Final Thought
No affiliate marketing wheels were repositioned here. These are the basics, and using them will get you on your right foot.
Don’t expect a life-changing income or freedom to quit overnight. Affiliate marketing takes time to make you succeed.
Focus on your first few affiliate sales. As your site grows, set new goals, and keep experimenting.