If you’re reading this, you’ve probably heard about affiliate marketing but don’t know what it is. In this post, I’m going to explain what affiliate marketing is and how to start affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing entails promoting someone else’s product or service in order to earn a certain percentage of the sale. When approached in the right manner, this is an opportunity that can make you a great deal of money.
Some merchants will only pay when the affiliate brings them a sale (Cost per Sale-CPS) whereas others will pay when the affiliate gets the customers to perform a particular action (Cost per Action-CPA), such as entering an email address filling up a form or signing up for a free trial.
Each affiliate is given a unique affiliate link. When the affiliate gets visitors to click on their link to purchase something/take an action, a sale/lead signal will be triggered on the merchant’s end and the affiliate will be paid a percentage of the sale.
Even if the visitor leaves your website, a cookie would have been placed in his/her browser during their visit and the sale/lead signal will be triggered if they buy/perform the action on subsequent visits.
To sum up, now is the best time to get into affiliate marketing due to the abundance of learning material available on the Internet. Affiliate marketing is a great way for aspiring Internet marketers to get their feet wet because the skills associated with becoming an affiliate marketer such as copywriting, website building, list building, and networking can be invaluable when he or she decides to own their own product.
There are certain steps you need to take to start affiliate marketing on the right foot they are:
1. Join an affiliate program
2. Pick a niche
3. Choosing a product to promote in your niche
4. Getting traffic to your link
5. What to do with your traffic, (Direct link vs Landing page)
Let’s go over each of the steps above in more detail.
Joining an affiliate program
An affiliate program is basically a website which contains products posted by many vendors which you can promote. All you need to do is signup for these programs and you can start promoting the products. Some great examples of affiliate programs are Clickbank, WarriorPlus, Jvzoo, Amazon Associates, ShareASale and so on.
There are also private affiliate programs i.e. companies with services you can promote to earn a commission. Eg: Blue host is a hosting platform for websites. They have an affiliate program that you can join. Get your affiliate link and find those who need hosting and tell them about Blue host and share your affiliate link with them. They click it, buy hosting and you get a commission.
Picking A Niche
Picking a niche is one of the most important topics under the question of how to start affiliate marketing. A niche is basically a category of products. For example: Under the weight loss niche, there are many weight loss products you can choose to promote.
The top 4 niches in affiliate marketing are The Health and Fitness niche, The E-business & Marketing niche, The Relationship niche and finally, the Law of attraction/manifestation niche. These are the most popular niches in affiliate marketing and you should probably choose any of these if you are just starting affiliate marketing.
Choosing a product to promote in your niche
I know you’re excited to start but don’t just signup for an affiliate program, pick a niche and start promoting any affiliate product. There are certain questions you should ask yourself before choosing a product to promote. Is this product in demand right now? Are people in need of this product? Does this product solve the problems people have? These are certain questions you should ask yourself before choosing a product to promote. Once you’ve answered these questions sincerely, you can choose a product to promote.
This is where all new affiliate marketers struggle. They’ve picked their niche, gotten their products but don’t know how to get people to click those links. There are basically two ways you can get traffic. For free and paying for it using ads (Google ads, Bing ads, PPV Ads, Solo ads etc.)
Free Traffic
Free traffic sources includes Facebook, youtube, twitter, Blogging, Quora, Instagram and so on. I’ll be talking about 4 important ones. Facebook, Youtube, Blogging & Quora
Facebook:- If you’re using Facebook, what you want to do is you can join groups related to your products. When you’re in those groups, don’t just spam your link in those groups. Address a problem or provide value first, then add your affiliate link as a solution to that matter. This method increases your chances of actually getting clicks and making money.
YouTube:- You could start a YouTube channel and create related content to the products you’re promoting. You can post your affiliate links in the description of your videos ( After shortening them) and once you start getting views, people click on your links and you can potentially make a sale.
Blogging: This is one of the best ways to get traffic to your affiliate link. To start blogging, first, you need to join a site where you can start your blog like Wordpress & Blogger. Second, you need hosting and a domain and a great hosting and domain provider is Bluehost and you can signup for an account at Bluehost
After hosting, you will be ready to post your first blog post after your setup. You can learn more about blogging on YouTube. I can’t go over all the details here but you get my point.
Quora: quora.com is another great source of traffic. It is a question and answers site people ask a question related to a problem they have and you provide a great and valuable answer and add your affiliate link in the bottom as an answer to their problem.
Direct Linking
Direct linking basically means sending the traffic directly to your affiliate offer page. This method isn’t bad but if you want to maximize your traffic and make a business out of affiliate marketing rather than making a quick buck, I wouldn’t recommend direct linking.
Landing Page
Building a landing page is what all the pros do. What they basically do is they use a Landing page creator service like LeadsLeap(Recommended, Link in signature), Getresponse, etc. to create pages to capture people’s emails.
When you send traffic to this page, people signup with their emails and then get redirected to your affiliate page. Even if they don’t buy the product at first, since you have their emails, you can keep sending them follow up emails with great value so that you can earn their trust and the feel comfortable buying what you recommend.
This is called email marketing. You will preferably need hosting & a domain name for your landing pages. Recommended hosting provider is Blue host.
P.S. This is the basic outline of what you need to understand about affiliate marketing. There are so many other ways to approach it which you can learn from videos, courses etc. But the tools I link in the post are tools that I can personally vouch for.
Thanks for your time