Affiliate marketing is a wonderful way to earn some passive income for bloggers. And many bloggers are using it to make good money for themselves.
However, to make the best out of affiliate marketing, selecting the right affiliate program and the right products is very important. Many beginners don’t know how to do that. And as such, they fail to get the result that they expect.
If you are one of them and are looking for a mini-guide on affiliate marketing, this post is for you. In the following section, we’ll have a quick look at what affiliate marketing is and how to get started with it.
So let’s begin.
What is Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a way of promoting other people’s products and making a small commission every time you make a sale.
Basically, a retailer will reward you with a commission for referring his/her product through various promotional activities on your website. However, to get the reward, it’s important for your promotional activities to turn into a transaction.
The website that promotes the product is called the affiliate. The creator of the product is known as the merchant. And the medium that connects the affiliates and their merchants is known as the affiliate network.
Affiliate networks are not always needed. Some companies prefer to work with these networks to add a layer of trust by bringing down the fraud rate. Working with an affiliate network makes it easier for the merchants to track, manage and make payments to the affiliates.
Popular affiliate networks include ClickBank and ShareASale.
How to Start Affiliate Marketing
Getting started with affiliate marketing is super easy. But to make it work for you, you first need to lay the groundwork. This includes several steps. Let’s check out what they are.
1. Create a Website
The first thing you need to do is to create a website. Your website is the main platform where you’ll start selling your affiliate products. So having a well-designed and optimized website is the first step to getting started.
You don’t need to be a web designer for that. There are several CMS like WordPress that help you build a professional website without writing a single line of code. Just make sure to pick the right web hosting to make things smoother.
To make your website stand out, add testimonials or customer reviews of your products or services. This helps build credibility for your business. You should also add a contact form to allow your users to contact you.
It’s also important for you to optimize it for mobile devices. This will help you improve your SEO and also improve user experience on your site.
2. Build an Audience
The next step is to build an audience for your website. Unless you have a good user base, it’s difficult for you to make money from affiliate marketing.
So how do you build your audience? The first thing to consider in this step is your content. People will visit your blog only when they find your content helpful and interesting. So make sure you create content that adds value to your users.
But it’s not enough to publish a few posts and then disappear for some time altogether. You need to maintain consistency in your publishing schedule. Another point to consider about your content is to optimize it for search engines. Doing that will help you rank in search engines and attract more organic traffic to your blog.
Once you publish your post, make sure to promote them on your social channels with the right hashtags. Using relevant hashtags is important because it helps increase your visibility and boost brand awareness.
3. Signup for a Program
Once you have cultivated a loyal audience for your blog, you can move ahead to sign up for an affiliate program like Amazon Associates. When you sign up for the program, you’ll get an affiliate link. This link will also have a unique ID.
Just use this link in your content.
4. Select Products to Promote
The next step is to select the products you want to promote. One thing to consider at this point is to stick to your niche. If you are blogging about web design, there’s no point in selling beauty products on your website. Doing so would confuse your audience because it wouldn’t resonate with what you’re blogging about.
Also, never tell anyone to buy the products directly. Instead, talk about your experience and justify your reason why you want them to buy it. So, unless you are familiar with the product, never try to sell them.
Pick only those products that you know can be useful for your audience. This will help you sell your products more easily.
5. Track Your Sale
Once you start selling your products, you can start tracking your sales. But how do you do that? If a visitor clicks on your unique affiliate link, a cookie is inserted in their browser to track actions.
When they buy the product, it is considered to be a qualified action. When that happens, the merchant is able to record the action and attribute it to you as an affiliate so they can make a payout.
6. Get Paid
Based on your affiliate program, the terms of payment may vary. Sometimes they might pay you on a monthly basis, and sometimes it can be on a weekly basis. So look at the terms before choosing your products.
Depending on your goals, you might also want to choose a program that pays out per sale or per lead generation. Do your research well.
So that’s a little about affiliate marketing. If you’re willing to make some money, now is the best time to get started.
