A BASIC VIEW OF AFFILIATE MARKETING FOR BEGINNERS

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Even if you are running a thriving business, there is always more you can do to make it grow. One way of taking things to the next level is by finding an additional stream of income. That does not necessarily mean starting another business, but finding ways to complement and grow the business you currently have, by offering more value to your clients.

Affiliate marketing is one of the answers to this, and if you are not participating in any, perhaps it is time to consider taking advantage of this lucrative income stream.

However, to be successful with affiliate marketing, you need to understand what it is, how to get started, and how to earn money from it. Anyone who has an online presence and ability to drive traffic can earn with affiliate marketing by promoting other people's products.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

It is a marketing arrangement by which an online retailer pays commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals.

Simply put, Affiliate marketing is an advertising method where businesses pay a commission on conversions to an affiliate. It is a performance-based system and sales are tracked via affiliate links to enable commissions to be calculated.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

To get involved in an affiliate marketing program, you should know and do the following:

Find and join an affiliate program: Many businesses that have online presence offer affiliate programs that people can join. Mostly, free to join. Search online and many affiliate offers will pop up to your face. However, there are also online platforms that offer affiliate programs on diverse vendors’ products, as opposed to the product owner companies offering you the affiliate directly. Both options are okay! That is, some businesses manage their own affiliate programs while others use an affiliate network.

Choose which offers to promote: When you find and join any affiliate program, check up their diverse product offers. Depending on the niche area you may want to focus on, (this is not a must though), you can decide on specific product to promote and earn your commission. Read about the product; check the product review if possible, to see how marketable the product is. For example, you may want to pick on DIET related products.

Obtain a unique affiliate link for each offer: For this product you have selected, there is always a place to click to get or request an affiliate link. This link is often in form of a web address with extension, like https://vendorwebsite.com/c/Y7890/980887. This link connects the potential buyer straight to the product page, but informing the system that the connection is from you.

Share those links on your blog, social media platforms, or website: Now that you have the link to promote a product, how do you use the link? You have to find ways of sharing the links on any or all of your online platforms. Your high traffic website, your Facebook, your Instagram, your Twitter, your YouTube channel, your blog, your mobile APP, and all such others! How exactly do you share the links on them? It depends. You may put them in hyperlinks on specific and often-related words like “What do you know about Fiverr?”. Or you may place the link directly in between posts or articles or comments. I recommend shortening the link though if placing directly, something like https://rebrand.ly/what-is-fiverr.

Collect a commission anytime someone uses your links to make a purchase: Now your affiliate marketing is on and running. Your responsibility now is to ensure you find a way to direct more and more people to visit your platform and eventually see, click and buy the affiliate product. You may have to write articles sometimes on these products, you may have to write or make review videos. Then you begin to earn commissions!

What Are The Benefits Affiliate Marketing Model?

a. Affiliate marketing offers several benefits to you the affiliate, one of which is its ease of operation. Your responsibility simply involves handling the “promoting” aspect of selling the product by pitching it or bringing the customers awareness to the product or service. You don’t have to worry about the harder tasks, like developing, supporting, or fulfilling the offers.

b. Affiliate marketing is low risk. Since there’s no cost to join the affiliate programs, you can start making money with an established affiliate product or service without any upfront investment.

c. Affiliate marketing generates relatively passive income through commission for you. Initially you may have to invest your time creating traffic sources, your affiliate links can continue to deliver steady revenue afterwards.

d. Affiliate marketing offers you the avenue to significantly scale your earnings without hiring an extra hand. You can introduce new products to your current audience and build campaigns for additional products while your existing work continues to generate revenue in the background.

How Easy Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is not a get-rich-quick model of income, so it may not come that easy for the mere fact that you have work to do in building an audience. It is a logical sales model that creates multiple income streams. However, earning an income through affiliate marketing requires you to research the products, the web traffic patterns, and buyers’ interests.

Affiliates earnings varies based on the affiliate program, the percentage of commission, the acceptance of the product in question and the volume of interested traffic you have built from time to time. While some affiliates earn as little as $50/day, many earn up to $3,000/day and of course there are gurus of affiliate marketing, who make more than $10,000/day!

How Affiliates Promote Products and Services

In many cases, it's up to an affiliate to leverage their own network to promote products and services in a way that works for them.

Many marketers will scope out a niche and develop a full marketing strategy to earn traffic to promote a certain sector, and in this case, it is like starting a business from scratch, though based upon high earning potentials. On the other hand, bloggers and influencers can use affiliate marketing as a way to monetize a channel or audience that they've already built up.

Once signed up to an affiliate program or a number of affiliate programs, affiliates can use a number of different marketing strategies to drive traffic to an affiliate product and eventually drive sales.

The most popular marketing channels for affiliate programs includes:

Search Engine Optimization
Pay Per Click
Content Marketing
YouTube Channel
Other Social Media Platforms

Combining multiple channels to operate from is often a smart move.

How To Start Your Affiliate Marketing

Let us look at how you can start your path to becoming a successful affiliate. We have discussed a few of these already, but let us put down the flow of action steps.

Step 1 - Choose a Niche:

A niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focused. For example, a niche may be “Healthy Living” or better still streamlined to “Dieting” which is a subset of “Healthy Living”.

To decide on what niche area to pick, you may do all or some of the following:

Identify your interests and passions.
Identify problems you can solve. With your list of about 10 topics in hand, you're ready to start narrowing down your options.
Research your competition.
Determine the profitability of your niche.
Test your idea.

Step 2 - Find Affiliate Networks To Join:

An easy way to find affiliate programs is to visit an affiliate marketplace or platform. Browse your niche to find top performing affiliate platforms. Here are some of the popular ones:

Step 3 - Choosing Products to Promote:

Based on your chosen niche, you may pick a few products. First go to Google and do a little research about each product. Go to the product page and read about what it offers. If possible, personally use the product. At the end, decide on which product(s) you want to work with.

Step 4 - Plan a Strategy to Promote These Products:

Develop or decide on strategies you would want to use to promote your affiliate business. The strategies may include the tools to use and the way to go about things. Some hints about this are:

§ Use SEO

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a tool for promoting your products. It is basically an ongoing process you engage in that increases the visibility of your website on search engines through organic searches. Though it will not bring instant results, but a good SEO delivers long-term benefits that are invaluable to your affiliate marketing.

§ Use blogging

Even if your intended platform for promoting your affiliate products is not a blog, you may consider starting one.

One of the most effective ways to build brand awareness, while providing relevant and useful content to your target audience is through consistent blogging. Blogging is an inexpensive way for small businesses to drive traffic to their site, enhance inbound marketing efforts and attract more perspective customers. It may prove to be a good strategy to build an authority on your chosen niche, even if your affiliate offers changes in the future.

§ Build an email list

A new reader should be enticed to register to listen to or read specifically from you, with your e-mails landing in their inboxes. That enhances what you’ve written to a level of importance much higher than it would achieve on your blog ordinarily. Asking readers to subscribe to your newsletter often does this. This is how you build an email list.

§ Video marketing advantage

Video marketing is the strategy designed by marketing teams to create, curate, and utilize videos as a means of marketing their products or services to their target audience. The concept is to keep audience engaged with the brand in a way that is simple and easy to comprehend. It is researched that videos can retain people’s attention by 15% more than a live-narration or texts, so it is more engaging.

YouTube channel comes to mind quickly when we talk about video marketing. This is because it is one of the greatest media for video marketing concepts. You don’t necessarily need to be an expert at creating high quality and engaging videos to use for your marketing, there are lots of tools you can subscribe to at a token to do this for you. For example, YIVE is mind-blowing tool to use in achieving this.

§ Plan your content

Irrespective of the strategy you intend to use, planning your promotional content is a worthy practice. From planning the contents of your video marketing, to your blog articles, quality and deliberate contents is very important. There are many tools online, both free and paid for, that can help you achieve these seamlessly. Some of the things to plan includes but not limited to:

a. Write unique articles or scripts

b. Research you keywords and tags

§ Create A Product Tutorial And Reviews

Although your success as an affiliate can count on the size of your current following, another approach to drive higher-converting traffic is by simply offering a tutorial about the offer. Folks often search for “how to” stuffs on Google, such as “how to make money online” or “how to lose weight.” If an affiliate makes a tutorial that solves a searcher’s problem and evidently showcases the benefit of the product or service, your referrals may make more sense in context. In addition you’ll provide the customer with a stronger incentive to purchase the product you’re recommending.

§ Set your distribution strategy

Once you’ve written your promotional content, share it on your website or social media platforms. If you have an email list, you can create an email marketing campaign. And be sure to have an affiliate marketing hub on your website with a resource page where you share a quick list of all of the tools you use and love.

This may not be all there is to affiliate marketing, but it should be enough to get you started and going. I hope you enjoyed this.

Thank you for reading.

And don’t forget to check out our main YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm9eu05ETLgMcfd-BqEZBqg for more product reviews and online money making tips.

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Affiliate Disclosure:

Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I may earn a commission. Know that I only recommend products, tools, services and learning resources I have used personally and believe are genuinely helpful, not because of the small commissions I make if you decide to buy them.

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