HOW TO START AFFILIATE MARKETING IN 10 SIMPLE STEPS

HOW TO START AFFILIATE MARKETING IN 10 SIMPLE STEPS - 17 minutes read

Do you intend to learn how to start affiliate marketing but aren’t sure where to begin?
If your answer is yes, then relax and go get a pack of popcorn because this article is specially tailored for someone like you. In it, I will go over everything in great detail so you can start your journey into affiliate marketing without encountering many roadblocks.
Before I begin, I want to emphasize that affiliate marketing is not for everyone! You must be resilient, have a fighting spirit, and refuse to give up at the first setback.
So, if you enter this market expecting to make money quickly and easily, prepare to be disappointed!
Many people want to augment their regular income with an internet-based side hustle or even start an online business to completely replace their income.
While there are many methods to generate money on the Internet, launching an affiliate marketing business is one of the quickest and most straightforward.
Even if you already have a business or job, affiliate marketing become the easiest means of supplementing your current revenue.
It remains an excellent way to make money online either as a stand-alone business or as an addition to an existing business.
While it’s not as straightforward as getting money from ads on your website, it’s still doable and offers a higher profit potential than the placing of ads on your site.
Affiliate marketing allows you to earn money online without having your own blog, website, or merchandise. You can be up and running in hours and earn commissions right away by following a few simple steps.

Affiliate marketing is one of the quickest and simplest ways to make money online. It should be included in the portfolio of any online business owner.

Regardless of your market or niche, the affiliate marketing formula remains essentially the same. Your primary objective will always be to bring visitors to the merchant’s website via your unique “affiliate link”.
If you lack the funds, you can start by looking for free ways to drive traffic to your website, such as through social media, blogging, guest blogging, using Quora or Pinterest, and many other ways of redirecting people to your landing page.
If you’ve got a budget, paid advertising strategies such as Facebook ads, Pinterest ads, Instagram ads, banner ads on other websites, and Google AdWords can help you profit from affiliate marketing faster.
Another key ingredient for online marketers is the ability to write outstanding sales copies.
Free traffic is excellent since it’s free, but if you’ve saved up enough money, you can start using sponsored ads to fast-track your business.
When it comes to affiliate marketing. the good news is that numerous vendors will provide you with ads materials such as email swipe files, banners, and social media posts you can share on places like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
It’s a win-win situation since the more marketing tools merchants provide their affiliates, the easier it gets for an affiliate to promote their products for mutual gain.

HOW MUCH CAN YOU MAKE AS AN AFFILIATE MARKETER

The amount of money you can make as an affiliate marketer varies from seller to seller and platform to platform.
In the event of a sale, however, you are always told in advance the amount of commission you will get. The commission is set by the company in question. The amount of the commission varies based on the product you’re promoting.
In most cases, the commission is expressed as a percentage. Commissions ranging from 5% to 30% are rather frequent.
You can make much bigger commissions, especially when selling digital products with Clickbank. As a merchant, you will frequently receive 40 to 70% of the sales price.
Here, we’ll go over five crucial stages for rapidly and efficiently launching your own profitable affiliate marketing business.

CHOOSE THE RIGHT PLATFORM TO START AFFILIATE MARKETING WITH

Almost everyone nowadays uses the Internet to follow something (or someone). If you’re a big YouTube enthusiast, for example, you’ve undoubtedly subscribed to a few channels.
Maybe you’re an Instagram user who follows certain people.
This is based on the premise that each platform has the potential to succeed. Whichever one you choose; it’s likely to have a proven track record to act as a guide for you.
Consider the following strategies:
I. Create a website or blog to promote a product.
ii. Make a YouTube channel and use it to promote your products or services.
iii. Create a Facebook page, enrich it with valuable content and use it to drive traffic to your landing page.
iv. Choose one platform to start with and concentrate on it. Cross-platform works, but managing everything on your own at the same time will be stressful.

CHOOSE A GOOD AND PROFITABLE NICHE

Choose a niche that provides a lot of opportunities to market products or services while also leading to a lot of sales.
A smart place to start is with a large affiliate network like Clickbank or Digistore24. You can look through their various categories and get information to help you analyze the niche earnings potential.
Now that you’ve decided what you’ll use to advertise your content, you need to decide what you’ll promote.
It makes more sense if you choose a product niche that you’re passionate about or are interested in. This makes it easier for you to promote such a product.
Remember that today’s consumers aren’t stupid; if you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re not going to get many sales.
The niche you choose can have a major impact on your revenue model.

IF YOU’RE FINDING IT DIFFICULT TO FIND A NICHE, SEARCH ON GOOGLE

Google can assist you to figure out what niche areas that may interest you.
Let’s pretend you’re passionate about how to “make money online.” However, a make money online-related website will have a difficult time breaking into the market, as there is already a lot of established content available.
For instance, you can use Google’s autocomplete feature to come up with “make money online” related niche topics.
Simply type the long-tail keyword “make money online” into the Google search bar without pressing the search or enter buttons.
This will display the top ten terms used by Google users when searching for the same term.

IMPORTANT TERMS ASSOCIATED WITH AFFILIATE MARKETING

Affiliates: People like you and me who utilize affiliate program links to promote and make sales are known as affiliates.
The affiliate market: There are various affiliate markets, such as Shareasale, CJ, and Clickbank. Digistor24, etc. These serve as central databases for affiliate programs across a variety of sectors.
Affiliate URL: A unique tracking link provided by the affiliate program that allows you to track the development of your affiliate campaign.
payment method: Payment methods are numerous, they include Paypal, Payoneer, wire transfer, bitcoin, etc.
Affiliate manager: Many organizations employ dedicated affiliate managers to assist publishers in increasing their earnings by providing optimization advice.
Commission percentage: The amount or percentage of affiliate income you receive from each sale.
Landing pages: These are sales pages for a particular product or demo that are designed to increase sales. Most of the programs you’ll be promoting will have multiple landing pages, and you can use A/B testing to evaluate which ones convert the best.
Affiliate id: Many affiliate networks include a unique ID that you may add to any page on the product site, similar to the affiliate link.
Promotional materials: What resources or materials do they offer to help you promote their products or services?
Tracking link: Most affiliate tracking links are unattractive. You may turn ugly links into links that your readers can read and understand by employing link shorteners like bitly, thirsty Affiliates, and so on.
Affiliate software: It’s software that allows companies to set up affiliate programs for their products.
Recurring commissions: It’s the commission you earn from repeat customers.

WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO FIND AN AFFILIATE LINK FOR ANY PRODUCT?

Of course, not every company offers an affiliate program, but for those that do, you can look up more information at the bottom of their website. When conducting research, make sure to look at the company’s FAQ page, if one exists.
A simple Google search is another approach to get this information. For example, you can type “(product name) + affiliate program” into Google Search. For example, Bluehost affiliate program.
Affilitizer is a useful Chrome extension that simplifies the process. It’ll direct you to the right landing page. Many affiliate marketers use affiliate networks such as Digistore24, ShareASale, or Clickbank, JVzoo, Warrior Plus, etc. These are free, and you can sign up for one.

What Is The Best Way For Me To Locate New Products To Promote?

It’s time to figure out where to join an affiliate program once you’ve settled on which niche product to promote.

Brands run affiliate programs in two ways:

i. DIRECTLY FROM THE COMPANY WEBSITE

You can register for the affiliate program directly through the company website.
This strategy is a little more difficult because you’ll almost certainly have to handle many affiliate accounts separately on your own.
Direct programs, on the other hand, frequently pay higher commission rates.

ii. USING AN AFFILIATE NETWORK

Many services combine affiliate programs from a variety of brands. Clickbank, CJ Affiliates, ShareASale, JVzoo, Digistore24, and Warrior Plus are just a few examples.
These services make managing affiliate programs simple, but there’s no assurance that you’ll see all the products you’re looking for in any of them.
The ideal places to start your affiliate marketing research are affiliate networks like the ones mentioned above.
You can look up the top-performing affiliate programs in your niche.
Alternatively, keep an eye on the blogs in your niche to see what products they’re promoting and how they’re promoting them.

HOW TO START AFFILIATE MARKETING

Are you still willing to make money with affiliate marketing? Keep reading because I’m about to reveal the various ways you can kickstart your affiliate marketing business.

1. START WITH FREE/ORGANIC TRAFFIC

Organic traffic is a free method of attracting visitors to your website using SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques.
The best way to get this organic traffic is through Google and social media. Consider this: when you have a question, you go to Google, right? It happens to you and everyone else who wants to solve certain problems.
Google is the best search engine, and if you’re not using it, you’re missing out on a significant market share. That’s why there is so much discussion about SEO techniques to improve one’s ranking in Google.
You can also join others in promoting your affiliate products using social media channels.

2. YOU NEED TO BE PATIENT

You really need to be patient to succeed as an affiliate marketer
First and foremost, you must realize that this type of business will not bring you millions of dollars quickly. Yes, I know what I mean. I’m not here to raise your morale and leave you hanging after a few months of getting into it.
To make money as an affiliate marketer, you’ll need to know the fundamentals of how the entire process works. And you need to learn from renowned affiliate marketers who’ve helped others to make lots of money online.
If you’re ready, go ahead and try it, but keep in mind that mastering this knowledge in practice takes time.

3. START AFFILIATE MARKETING WITH A WEBSITE

You’ll need a fantastic website or blog to make a reasonable living with affiliate marketing.
Everything from developing an email list to marketing on social media will be built on this foundation. I suggest you host your website with a reputable hosting company like Bluehost starting from $2.95/month to avoid the challenges faced by those who host theirs with quack companies.
Avoid hosting your website with free hosting providers if you’re serious about making a good living through affiliate marketing.
If you host your website with free web hosting providers, like WordPress.com, Blogger, Wix, etc, any of them can remove your content any time for various reasons. This is why you should create, manage your website, and use it to build your content base.

4. DO AN EFFECTIVE SEO

You should use search engine optimization(SEO) to help your content reach its full potential. It’s more of an art than a science, and it covers nearly everything you do, from content structuring to site design components.
In the end, your goal is to polish things up to the point where the content you have ranked at the top of search results for as many relevant keywords as possible.
Anything below the first ten Google results will have a significantly negative impact on visitors volume.
The keyword difficulty is the first thing to look at. This indicates how fierce the competition for that keyword is and how difficult it will be for your content to rank on the first page of Google.
As a general rule, aim for a keyword difficulty of 1 to 25. It’s a range where you won’t have to work too hard for your writeup to appear on Google.
The volume of searches (competition) per month is shown next. The more popular the search term, the higher the number and the more difficult for your content to rank.
Try to find a keyword with a monthly search volume of 1k-10K. This is a good range where your keyword will be popular enough that people will look for it, but the competition for it isn’t too fierce.

5. NETWORKING ON SOCIAL MEDIA

In addition to your website, you should try to expand your reach on social media. Your product recommendation has a better chance of succeeding on social media platforms because your followers are usually more intense there.
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and now Pinterest are especially popular ways of promoting your affiliate links.
But what exactly are you posting on them? Using our “make money online” example again, it’s obviously useless to share pictures of people making money online.
It would be more appropriate to make a YouTube video or create a blog post about how to make money online.
Varied social networking platforms have different effects on your traffic. If you run an affiliate website and have a Facebook account, for example, search engines will evaluate social activity as a factor in your search rankings.
You may use a social media channel for content marketing as well, if you want to expand your reach beyond search engines.

6. USE PAID TRAFFIC TO START AFFILIATE MARKETING

It may be worthwhile to spend money on advertising in some instances. This of course is the easiest and fastest way to make money through affiliate marketing.
Treat using ads to do affiliate marketing with caution until you have more experience.
Only start spending on paid traffic after you’ve started making money with free traffic, and keep an eye on the return on investment (ROI).
If you don’t calculate your returns, paid traffic can soon turn into a bottomless hole into which you pour money.

7. START AFFILIATE MARKETING WITH THE SOCIAL MEDIA

You can promote your affiliate merchants directly on social media.
To begin, every post you make to promote your affiliate partners must have full disclosure.
I recommend you use social media to drive people to a landing page where you promote your affiliate products.
This plays three roles to your advantage:
1. Increases traffic to your site,
3. Allows you to convert more offers, and
2. Helps you to make more money in the process.
You can also add them to your email list or initiate a sales funnel with them.
This gives you greater control over the process. It also helps you get more engaged visitors you can turn into leads.
Using an easy to use tool to create your email list also removes the possibility of social media platforms banning your affiliate links. This scenario is peculiar with platforms that don’t welcome the direct posting of irrelevant affiliate links.
Don’t fall prey to the temptation to buy social media followers or utilize other short-cut methods.
You won’t get sales if your audience isn’t natural and engaged. For the best results, post compelling articles that aren’t too “commercial,” and adjust the message to each network as needed.

8. START AFFILIATE MARKETING BY HAVING AN EMAIL LIST

Creating an email list is a great way to grow your business. And this happens because you’ll get closer communication with your lead (potential customer).
However, to build your email list, you must give something in return (digital baits).
Offer an eBook, checklist, walkthrough in exchange for the person’s email.
Keep in mind that these digital baits must target the niche you’re seen as an expert in.
For example, if you’re promoting a beauty product, don’t offer your audience a healthy eating eBook. I guess you understand what I mean?
What is important in this strategy is capturing leads who are interested in your content and products. So, give them something valuable. I mean something that’ll help them learn.
Engaging in email marketing is another strategy to broaden your reach. You can collect visitor information and generate customized email marketing campaigns as your traffic grows.
Do so with caution, as spam will soon land you on the blacklist in no time.
To successfully start affiliate marketing, you must first create your own email list using Systeme.io which is a complete and very affordable alternative to Clickfunnels. It’s built with beginners and professional email marketers in mind.
Emails asking for product recommendations are frequently very effective. As you deliver the email straight to the subscriber’s inbox; whatever you recommend has an extremely good chance of them reading it.
Kindly avoid the mistake of sending too many referral emails. If you send out an email every day with a fresh product recommendation, your subscribers will eventually become annoyed and unsubscribe.
However, sending a targeted e-mail with an added value can make the difference.
This could be the case if a product you recommended is currently on sale or if you have a special discount code for your readers.
Of course, as stated earlier, an incentive (freebie) for the readers is required to build an email list.

9. USE A RELIABLE AND FAST WEB HOSTING COMPANY

You don’t have to use free hosting or Blogger-like platforms to successfully start affiliate marketing.
You should assess the web host in terms of the business before making your decision. Will your site receive consistent, high-quality service?
We’ve already discussed the disadvantages of free hosting in more detail. As a result, we advise you to avoid wasting time on such a selection and instead select a reputable web hosting company.

10. SELECT AN AFFILIATE PRODUCT THAT FITS WITH YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

You will eventually lose credibility if you recommend anything on your website or social media networks that’s not related to what you and your brand represent.
In that case, you should carefully consider whether certain products and services are appropriate for your target audience ahead of time. To do this, you must first identify your target audience. I know that this isn’t a simple task at first.
But, if your website is solely about Fitness, it’ll be out of place for you to recommend products related to finance, cooking recipes, travel, and so on. Be consistent!
Rather you can recommend certain effective fitness strategies in your blog or YouTube video and promote your related affiliate products in the process.

11. START AFFILIATE MARKETING BY CREATING VALUABLE CONTENT

You can’t do well with affiliate marketing without consistently creating great content. A couple of blog posts or videos will not make you an authority in your niche. You need volume, which is essential for both search engine optimization (SEO) and your audience’s perception of you as an expert.
Even though the topics you cover are limited, you still need to expand your audience. The larger your audience, the more money you’ll make when you start affiliate marketing.

TO WRAP IT ALL UP

If you’ve already decided to learn how to start affiliate marketing, either as an affiliate or as a vendor, you’ll need to know how to properly set up your entire structure so you can achieve your goals!
Everything you’ve read so far is just the basic tips to help you kickstart your journey in affiliate marketing.
There’re a lot of strategies and little tricks at work here, and it’d be difficult for me to explain everything in detail in a single blog post.
I believe I’ve gathered the most important information you need to start affiliate marketing so you won’t run into problems in the future.
Congratulations if you’ve read thus far!
It shows your interest in learning, and I believe that with your determination, you’ll succeed!
Feel free to give your thought on this.

ABDULLAHI BICHI

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Submitted almost 3 years ago