Everyone wants to be successful and gain some money with just a click.
Have you ever read or heard the phrase: “Make money while you sleep”? Turns out, it is not just a motto. You can do that right after you read this.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is just one of the forms of digital marketing. It is also one of the oldest forms.
In affiliate marketing schemes, you receive a commission when someone buys a product through your recommendation.
Affiliate marketing is extremely popular, even the big companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, and many others have affiliate programs which you can freely join.
Normally, there are four parties involved in an affiliate marketing scheme:
- The affiliate: The person who promotes the service or product.
- The merchant: The company who provides, sells, or create the service or product.
- The consumer: The people who get a recommendation about the service or product and end up buying the product from the merchant.
- Affiliate Networks (Optional): Sites that help affiliates find merchants.
Why Get Involved with Affiliate Marketing?
If you are not familiar with affiliate marketing, you might be wondering whether you should start or not.
Before you know it, there are a lot of benefits when you become an affiliate marketer. Here are some:
1. Cheap & Easy Process
Affiliate marketing is a straightforward process because you do not need to be an expert in the products you sell or promote. Affiliate marketing is adaptable to the ever-changing market.
The process to become an affiliate marketer is also cheap. It often costs you nothing! The companies who create the programme usually open it for free, so you can join the program with no worries at all.
2. Work from Anywhere & Anytime
As an affiliate marketer, you can perform the “job” from pretty much anywhere at any time. Whether at home or sat on the beach sipping a cocktail. Take your time.
3. Scalable
Affiliate marketing needs creative, helpful, and high-quality content. You can use several different methods to approach your potential consumers.
The audience who wants to find the answer about something will search through the web and if they find your blog is helpful to their questions, they’ll come more and it will increase your blog traffic and hopefully result in sales.
4. Impactful
The Internet has become a leading resource in the world. Unfortunately, there are lots of scams. When you become an affiliate marketer, you can help top-notch or good companies to achieve their goals.
5. Lucrative
Affiliate marketing can make you a lot of money if you do it right. Earnings depend on how much effort you put in. You could earn $5 if you do not put any effort in, but if you really work hard it is not unheard of to earn thousands of dollars per month.
How to Create Your Own Path in Affiliate Marketing?
1. Make A Plan
Before you start an affiliate marketing business, make sure to plan the best strategy to be successful. It is a good idea to learn the process in depth. There are many training programs available, so why not explore one of the leading training programs today.
2. Decide Upon Your Platform
Affiliate marketing can work on any platform. Blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. However, blogs and YouTube are much easier to build and attract the audience to increase your affiliate income.
3. Build & Set Up the Platform
Start building your platform. If you choose a blog as your platform, start by defining the niche and domain name.
Remember, you are one of a million. Choose a topic that interests you and focus on it. Develop your brand and people will know about your platform.
Optimize the page for search engine results to get a better ranking, once your site is ready. Determine your KPIs and implement the analytics. These two steps can help you to measure and improve your site performance.
If you choose YouTube as your platform you can start by creating your content and uploading it. You should also optimise for search engines and do not forget to attach your affiliate links in the description box, so people will easily go direct to the leads.
4. Choose Affiliate Programmes
Choose the affiliate programmes you like to work with. Do not forget to choose the most trustworthy company.
There are affiliate programs that offer high payments but are quite challenging to make a high commission.
The first moments after you begin affiliate marketing, it will be tough, but in the meantime, you can follow the flows and get used to it.
5. Create Contents:
Create content that is relatable with the products/services you are signed up with. The high-quality content must fit naturally.
Do not go blind when you are about to review the products. Make sure the content solves your visitor’s problem.
Before writing reviews, you should buy and test the products yourself. But, if you do not have money to buy the products, you can always start with things you already have at home.
6. Drive Traffic
The great content you have created will be useless if you do not have the strategy to generate traffic.
You can consider using paid traffic strategies, search engine optimization (SEO), or build an email list.
- Paid traffic strategies help you to gain more clicks by paying for it. Usually, paid traffic is using PPC ads.
- Search Engine Optimizations is the practice of getting a rank high in search engines like Google by optimizing your pages.
- Email lists helps you to stay communicate with your audience anytime. You can use email lists to tell about your latest content, so they will keep coming back to you.
You need to persuade the readers to sign up when they are on your site to build email lists.
7. Get Clicks
After your site is successfully driving the traffic. You need the audience to click your affiliate links. But, how? Here are a few ideas:
- Context
The links you put on the content must put right of context. Do not look pushy and spammy.
- Placement
People rarely scroll to the bottom of the page, so do not put the affiliate links there!
Balance the link placement so it will not look like spam.
- Callouts
Grab readers attention by using callouts like boxes, tables, or buttons. Make it out-standing and eye-catching and include the product links.
8. Convert Sales
There are two kinds of conversions in affiliate marketing.
- Click the Product Page
In this conversion, you have full control of the action. You can use the tactics we suggested earlier to improve the chances of getting clicks.
- Visitor Purchase the Product
Unlike the one point above, you do not have any control of this second conversion. Otherwise, the merchant is in the controls.
Final Thoughts
Affiliate Marketing is one form of digital marketing which you really can earn cash from even while you are asleep.
There are four parties included in affiliate marketing such as The Affiliate, The Merchant, The Consumer, and The Affiliate Networks.
Affiliate Marketing is great if you would like to gain money with a cheap and effortless process. But for real success you must take it further and invest more time in high quality content.
The basics of affiliate marketing are easy for anyone to pick up. But to really be successful you must learn how to perform a wide range of tasks associated with creating a successful affiliate marketing site. Formal training is a great way to learn all the inside tricks.
