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Affiliate Marketing For Beginners: A Step-By-Step Guide

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Affiliate marketing is a great side hustle if you want to make a little extra money online. It’s one of the best ways to make money online for free.

 It does take a lot of time and effort to get set up properly, but once you get going, you can easily earn thousands of dollars with it every month.

Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to make money online. In this guide, you’ll discover exactly what affiliate marketing is, how to get started, and what tools to use for success.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

One of the best definitions of affiliate marketing says: Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s (or company’s) products. You find a product you like, promote it to others and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make, from Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income.

An Affiliate…

You are a salesperson for the corporation as an affiliate. When you assist in the closing of a sale, the company pays you.

Why Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing allows you to make money from anywhere. You can manage an affiliate business from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection and a computer. If you can make affiliate marketing a full-time income, you can also work your hours.

It’s a fantastic method to make money while you sleep. Even when you aren’t working, there is actual potential to generate sales and earn commissions.

Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income made over $100,000 in affiliate commissions in December 2017.

An affiliate connection does two tasks:

  • It assists the merchant in attributing the sale to the correct person;
  • And it (typically) contains an expiration date, ensuring that you are paid even if the buyer postpones their purchase.

Ahrefs says that to get started with Affiliate marketing you need the following;

  1. Choose a platform
  2. Choose your niche
  3. Find affiliate programs 
  4. Create relevant content
  5. Drive traffic to your affiliate site
  6. Get clicks on your affiliate links
  7. Convert clicks to sales

The first thing you should do is build relationships with the companies whose products you want to promote. If you want to work with a company, email them and introduce yourself. Tell them a little bit about what you’re trying to do and ask if they would be interested in working with you. 

And then…

Choose a platform

Affiliate marketing can theoretically be done on any platform. Even Instagram is functional. If you already have an audience that you want to monetize, your affiliate marketing campaign is off to a solid start. However, if you’re just getting started, you’ll need to choose a niche that can pay off as an affiliate partner. So this takes us to, Choose your niche.

Choose your niche

The most important step is to pick a niche for your business. Considering the amount of competition out there, however, it’s typically best to aim after something a little more specific.

 How can you find the best niche?

  • Examine a variety of niches.
  • You can use tools such as the SEMrush Keyword Overview tool to find the best/trending keywords 
  • Your hobbies might serve as a source of inspiration. It’s more enjoyable to write about something you enjoy.
  • Look for fields where there isn’t a lot of competition. Niches that are less well-known have smaller audiences, but they are simpler to rank for.

Find affiliate programs 

Affiliate programs are great for building your audience. Look for affiliate programs in your industry and find a program that lets you earn a commission when someone makes a purchase. For example, if you’re in the beauty industry, look for programs that pay you a commission when your followers purchase through your affiliate link.

However, choosing the best affiliate program means you have to know your target audience. For Example, if you’re targeting a business audience, you’ll almost certainly choose high-paying and low volume. 

Affiliate networks that are popular include:

Create relevant content

Now, this is important. 

If you want your affiliate site to be successful, you need to provide high-quality material that includes affiliate links.

The key thing to remember about affiliate marketing is that it’s all about creating great content that caters to your audience. It’s not so much about driving sales as it is about creating the best content that you can, and then directing your audience to that content to generate sales.

However, your content should include links, images, videos. 

Drive traffic to your affiliate site

The best way to drive traffic to your affiliate site is to build an email list and then drive traffic to it with a targeted email marketing campaign.

Neil Patel says,’ Even with less than 500 people on your list, you can create significant sales.

There are three key ways to drive people to your affiliate landing page: 

  1. Write an outstanding review of a product and promote it on social media  
  2. Write an outstanding blog post that promotes a product 
  3.  Write a guest blog post on someone else’s site that promotes your affiliate link.

Let’s take a look at the links.

Affiliate links

You should place your links in the middle of your content. Never place a link to an affiliate product at the beginning of your post, because it will be seen as shameless self-promotion. Similarly, don’t put your links at the end of your post, because readers will have already moved on by the time they get there.

Drive traffic to your affiliate site with good content. To drive traffic to your affiliate site you should be blogging consistently, and you should be finding ways to get in front of people who are interested in the topics you’re talking about.

However, linking to your affiliate site will automatically lead to;

Get clicks on your affiliate links

As an affiliate marketer, it’s important to get clicks on your affiliate links. This is a self-perpetuating process because if you get clicks on your affiliate links, you’ll have a higher conversion rate and you’ll make more money on that particular product.

If you want to generate more affiliate revenue, you need to get more clicks on your affiliate links. You can run Facebook ads to get more clicks, but keep in mind that Facebook’s algorithm is a lot more sophisticated now so it’s harder to get people to click on your ads

The key to getting clicks on affiliate links is to write amazing content that addresses the needs of your audience. If you are writing content that doesn’t speak to your audience, then you can be certain that they won’t click on your links.

Convert clicks to sales

The most important thing to remember about affiliate marketing is that it’s all about sales. You can have the best affiliate program in the world but if you’re not making sales then you’re not making money, which is why it’s important to have a funnel in place that converts click to sales.

To sum up

Affiliate marketing is a simple and easy way to start making money off your blog. Remember, however, that you’re in this for the long haul. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t make a lot of money right away. That’s pretty much a guarantee in any business.

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