EARN MONEY WITH AFFILIATE MARKETING

This post is the continuation of our previous posts on how to earn money online. In the previous article, we have talked about making money online with content writing. Here you will learn everything you need to know about making money online with affiliate marketing – starting with its basics to the steps you should follow on to become an affiliate marketer.

If thousands of peoples all over the world are making a good amount of money with affiliate marketing, surely you can. This post is all about affiliate marketing and how to get started with it.

Affiliate marketing is the online marketing scheme when you promote the product of other people’s/services and earning a small commission based on each amount of sale made by your followers on their website. It’s the widely popular way of earning money online as almost all the popular blogs and websites are getting good revenue off of it. One great thing about affiliate marketing is that it makes a profit for both affiliate marketer as well as businesses making it long term and sustainable platform.

Although affiliate marketing requires significant effort on its initial phase, its highly passive and can provide multiplied revenue without much effort on the long run. As affiliate marketing has no such strict rules to get started with, almost anyone with any background can easily join it.

You must have recommended some products and services to your friends and families but what about getting money for that recommendation? Affiliate marketing has exactly same kind of business model. You pick up some product or service to market with and then you recommend various peoples for that particular product. If they liked a product you are promoting and used your links to purchase that service/product you get paid for that. Although the rate of pay and commission model varies from company to company, most of the brands pay good amount of return per sales.

Affiliate marketing commonly involves following 3 steps.

1. You recommend some product/service to your followers.
2. They purchase the service/product based on your recommendation.
3. You get paid for it.

Many websites on the internet are promoting affiliate marketing as a get rich quick scheme but I want to assure you that it’s not about getting rich quick. It’s about building a long term relationship and trust between you and your followers hence making them follow your recommendation in the long run. Just like other forms of marketing, affiliate marketing greatly involves a long term process – the strong relationship and communication with followers and is the vital thing you should always follow on.

Before starting with affiliate marketing please be clear on following things.

1. Affiliate marketing is not a get rich quick scheme, It requires significant time and effort to reach the level when you can earn a significant amount of money from your initial investment.
2. You need to have a good follower base in various social media/blogs/websites before getting started. More the followers you have more sales you can make and more successful you could become.
3. Your blog/website/video must contain an informative materials not just the promotional one.

It is clear that affiliate marketing is a great way to earn passive income online. Some great reasons to choose it as your major income source are,

• You don’t need to have your own products. You could sell the product or service provided by the 3rd party.
• You don’t need to write additional content for affiliate products. You could just link them to your existing articles.
• You could join multiple networks at the same time.
• One set up, it is basically a passive income for the long term.

Although the affiliate marketing seems really great it has following back sides.

• If commission per sale is low, you need to have huge number of visitors.
• Having low quality products might damage your reputation and trust.
• With inappropriate use, affiliate links might harm your SEO ranking.

There are different kinds of affiliate programs in the market.

Based on what you are going to sell we can categorize it into 2 groups.

1. Service based: In this model you promote the service of some other companies such as web hosting, web development, app development, content creation, Internet service providers etc.
2. Product based: In this model you promote the products sold by different online e-commerce websites. When someone purchases a product from the link you have given you get some commission for it.

Commonly we can see following kinds of businesses having different kinds of affiliate programs in the internet.

1. E-Commerce
2. Web hosting Companies
3. Domain Registration Companies
4. Internet Service Providers
5. Payment gateways
6. Games and Apps
7. Desktop/Web Applications
8. Get Paid to Websites
9. Online premium courses
10. Premium website templates etc.

To get started with affiliate marketing you must follow the following steps.

1.Choose your niche.

Although pronunciation of niche would be difficult for most of us it’s really all about choosing the topic to focus on. Focusing and targeting a particular category makes it easier for you to grow your business as well as a strong follower base. Although choosing a niche is a difficult process for many of us, you could make this process easier by finding out the topics you are really interested in and passionate about. Choosing the topic of your interest makes you motivated for your work, in the long run.

Another thing to consider while choosing a niche is about the volume of peoples who are interested in that topic. If the volume is too high and competition is low that could be the perfect choice for you. Topics with huge volume and huge competition is better to avoid as it would be difficult to do SEO to get good ranking on search engine and compete with long time runners. Topic you choose must have huge numbers of sub topics to write on. Otherwise your growth could get stagnated later on.

It’s also better to check for possibility of making money from such topic. You can look into sites like click bank and amazon associates to check whether your idea is worth trying or not. In the affiliate marketplace of click bank you can choose the category and sort the results based on gravity matrix to find the products with good gravity score, good income per sale and topic you are looking for. If there are lots of products based on topic of your choice you are ready to go with that. You can also look at amazon affiliates to find out different options.

 

2.Create a blog/website and social media profiles.

After finding a profitable niche you could start building a blog/website and different social media profiles to start creating and promoting the contents of the topics of your choice. It’s more preferable to make the blog beside website for affiliate marketing because of interactivity and dynamins it provides. You should create the pages such as about us, contact us, privacy policy, terms and services and advertise with us to build up policies to help avoid confusion and build up trust with your followers. You could choose WordPress as the blogging platform because of its simplicity, huge community and number of plugins and tools available for it. It’s better to purchase a custom domain related to your niche for making it professional and more trustable.
There are various websites on which you could find great content about making your first blog online. After making a website please make the necessary social profiles on Facebook, twitter and Instagram to reach more followers.

3. Create articles with good quality content.

After setting up a website, creating content is the next thing you must do. Having great content is the key to determine your future in affiliate marketing. Having good amount of contents with good traffic and social reach is key to get accepted from most of the affiliate networks. Some has strict guideline on how much traffic and contents are on your blog before getting approved. You should create at least 10 good article with up to 2000 words on topic of your choice before joining affiliate networks. Your articles should focus more on informative content rather than making a sale.

4. Make a strong follower base

Having a strong follower base is the key to rock the affiliate marketing world. Even if you have great contents on your website not having significant traffic and followers to read them makes it pretty useless. You could try to grow your genuine followers with different social media as well as mailing lists. You could add a popup in your site asking for an email for the newsletter. You could automate your email marketing with different tools available on the internet. You should never forget to share your contents on social media. Always create engaging content so that it would be easier for you to get more click through rate.

5.Join the affiliate marketing networks

There are tons of affiliate marketing websites which list different kinds of products to be sold by affiliate marketers. They act as a middleman between the customer and the original product/service vendor. Almost all affiliate networks are free to join. Some of the popular product based networks are ShareASale, Clickbank, Amazon affiliates and CJ affiliate. Different other websites and services also have attractive affiliate schemes.

6. Choose the affiliate products to promote

After choosing a niche, creating a website and writing some quality contents and getting approved from affiliate networks – it’s time to choose the correct product to market with. You must choose the product relevant to your niche. Promoting the products which you could actually use makes your content more trustable and genuine. Promoting the low quality product might make your followers to distrust your reviews making it impossible to make noticeable sales.

Initially make a list of all the products you are going to promote and write good reviews of them. Your reviews must contain informative contents and you must present it in the way that you are not trying to directly sell it. You shouldn’t miss both the good and bad parts of such a product. You could look at googles for other blog/websites featuring the same kind of products and their reviews too as a reference.

Always promote a product that the viewers of your blog might be interested in. Focus on things which your readers are having a problem with and try to give solutions to them. They might be ready to pay for the solution. You should always look for promotions of other marketers to learn different approaches and tactics.

7. Analyze your results

Analyzing the result of your work is a vital process for improving and tracking the performance of your work. You can use various plugins available in WordPress such as monster insights, google analytics etc. to track your click-through rate. Tracking affiliate links help you to find out what product is more liked by customers and optimize your content increasing trust and sales rate.

These are the seven steps you should follow on before starting in affiliate marketing. As this article has already become so long, I would continue this post in the next article. In next post, we’ll talk about various kinds of affiliate networks and their details. I hope that after reading it you know various things you need to know about affiliate marketing.
Thanks for reading this post. Please do ‘not forgot to like/comment/bookmark this post. Thank you.